It’s
starting to get embarrassing, this agreeing with Russell Brand business.
(Viewers in the colonies,
catch up via the vidclip below of his 'Newsnight'
interview and something he wrote in the Guardian afterwards.)
His
comments are so blindingly obvious that any idiot could have come up
with them. Which is in fact precisely what has happened, and he has
said so himself in pretty much those words. It was cringeworthy, the
way his debate with Paxman so closely mirrored those earnest
political debates I’d have with my mates when I was nineteen. Yet
simultaneously hilarious for being conducted by two grown adults on a
current affairs programme, and getting the commentators aflutter like
this was all bold new stuff which had never been said before.
Of
course it’s concerning the way we’re so entrenched in celebrity
culture that it takes a celebrity to say these things before anyone
notices. Perhaps next we’ll have a weatherman commenting that
freedom of choice can only come through the market system, then a Zoo
model countering that capitalism inherently relies on the extraction
of labour power from the productive classes.
But
I’m almost tempted to argue “if that’s what it takes…” It
exposes the game where, if Brand says it, he’s dismissed as a
“champagne anarchist” who is inherently out of touch with the
everyday world he’s describing. Whereas when some ordinary working
person looked up from their red bills to say the same thing, they
simply wouldn’t show up on ‘Newsnight’ in
the first place. Your face is wrong or non-existent. Okay, given the
choice, let’s pick ‘wrong’.
It
veers, like it always seems to, onto the vote. What’s notable is
that voting is so much like that other great totem, the free market,
in both the way it’s supposed to work and the way it really does.
Look
at the current furore over rising energy bills. Opening up the energy
market to competition was supposed to ‘liberalise’ it, to create
all these lean, client-hungry companies who’d compete against one
another until the consumer got the best possible deal. But of course
in reality it quickly fell to six large suppliers, who formed a de
facto cartel to push up prices as much as they could - and
rack up their profits to levels previously unimagined. Which has
pushed an ever-increasing number of people into fuel poverty. While
they have money to burn, their embezzling has caused levels of
hardship up to and including death. Not surprisingly, people are not
entirely happy.
In
which case, a political party is supposed to reflect that strength of
opinion. The demand is out there, so of course a provider will come
along to fill it. Except of course none of that has happened. It’s
the same stacked choice between the same small cartel of providers.
While polls show most people want energy re-nationalised, the choice
we actually get is between Labour’s “Marxist” option of a
temporary price freeze (after which they can presumably just rack
prices up again). Or the Tories’ master plan of making it easier
for people to switch. (Between the same six suppliers who have the
whole thing already sewn up and raise their prices in virtual unison.
Like, duh!)
This
doesn’t happen because politicians are inherently grasping little
grubbers (even though many of them are), but because the power
actually lies with… and I expect you can see the pun coming… the
power companies. Power lies in ownership of money and property. It
belongs to a class. It does not lie in any particular building,
however charming a view of the Thames it might offer.
Yet,
all of that said, I simply don’t get this fixation over voting.
Ultimately, it seems a distraction. I don’t vote as a means to
achieve social change, for the same reason I don’t dress up as a
pirate when my bathroom needs cleaning. It’s got nothing to do with
‘pirate apathy’, I just don’t see any meaningful way where the
one thing will lead to the other.
Which
means it’s flat-out mistaken to replace a fixation for voting with
a fixation for not voting. I don’t vote. There’s people I know,
who I feel politically affiliated to, who do. But they don’t have
any of those illusions about the process genuinely representing their
interests. They just figure out they might as well, in case it
somehow does some good. Or, perhaps more likely, mitigates some evil.
The difference between me and them seems minor, and not particularly
worth going into.
And
not voting, in and of itself, is merely passive. It’s not an act of
defiance, because it’s not an act of any kind. When voting levels
fall (as they have done, pretty much consistently in recent decades),
it may put the wind up politicians a little. But anyone who thinks it
disrupts the embezzling antics of the power companies really needs to
get out more. We don’t prop the system up by voting for it, nor
even by buying its products, but by working for
it. I am, to put it mildly, less convinced than Brand that “the
revolution” is imminent, “totally going to happen” or whatever
else he said. But the whole racket is over as soon as we recognise
that, underneath the Orwellian rhetoric of “wealth creators”,
these are people who need us while we don’t need them.
Then
we won’t need popular entertainers to speak up for us any more.
No comments:
Post a Comment