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I used to be somewhere between new Labour and old Labour right in the 90s-naughties. Tepid on constitutional reform, immigration-sceptical, tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime (with a winning grin). Just wanted to fund the schools n' hospitals really. Give the little nippers a chance. Use the power of the state for "good".
I haven't really changed that much in these instincts (although very much in other ways) other than concluding that we're living in an inflationary ponzi scheme with an unsustainable debt burden whilst permitting civilisation-wrecking levels of migration - two horrible force multipliers of each other that are destroying us.
But we can't give them up. The drugs don't work, but we need that sweet sweet hit. An entire civilisation screaming heroin chic. Suits you, sir. So, these days I'm a hateful extremist gammon knuckle-dragger then. Glad we bottomed that out.
Back then, you could say I was a pretty straight kinda guy. But there was a memo sometime in the noughties I didn't get. A software upload/download/shake-it-all-about-load from the egregore/collective unconscious, that I missed out on. I was naive in my 20s, but much less so than much of the rest of the left it seemed.
Cool Britannia shaded into Destroy Britannia. Party members waving plastic union jacks and the Gallagher brothers scarfing canapés at Downing Street became a Polski sklep in every deadbeat town, the Equality Act created venerated classes apart from us, outsiders reflected back to us on every screen, seen on every street corner, and increasingly in positions of power over us, everywhere naturally preferring their own over our increasingly troubled and ailing young men.
The intergenerational transmission of power, wealth and opportunity - the lifeblood of our laboured sweat, betrayed by those who should have known better, siphoned away for newcomers to feast on at the expense of our next generation.
I knew I was meant to celebrate this societal asphyxiation-by-rainbow-flag, to worship, even, the replacement of those connected to me by flesh and blood by those unconnected, but I couldn't find the enthusiasm, unlike so many others, for the new sacred cows.
Brown said British jobs for British workers out of one side of his mouth whilst slagging off Mrs Duffy out of the other. The former was cynical, yes, but obviously genuflecting correctly in the right direction? But I was unprepared for the outrage amongst virtually all party friends and colleagues, who thought this unconscionably racist, utterly beyond the pail. I felt like I was in the twilight zone.
So, by fits and starts, I became a stranger in a strange land. First in my party, and latterly, more darkly, in my own nation. I went from watching Labour administer immigration detention centres in 2000 to 25 years later welcoming impossibly foreign young men on rubber dinghies, sullen resentment coming off them in waves, into our town centres and our hotels. Simply the most symbolic representation of the displacement and decline of our native tribes, but richly so nonetheless.
I finally left Labour in 2013. It was ugly. Late. I feel bad about it now. And thick. I contributed fairly directly to the national traumatisation we're living through. But then, we all did by needing to seem nice, unprejudiced. The time for such social niceties is passing. Scary.
Becoming a stranger is traumatic and bewildering. Minority stress is real. It's a good reason not to want to become a minority in your own society. I've felt like an outsider for a long time. In my erstwhile party. In my profession (a "right wing" psychotherapist?!). In London, the city of my adult life till last year.
Personal pathology or reaction to real circumstance? No doubt both, as it always is for all of us. The thing that gets me about it, more than being the butt of inevitable hatreds, is how confusing and gaslighting it is. I don't know how I ended up here. And I don't know how we ended up here. And so, I think, and I feel. And very occasionally, I write. We need to help each other.
Yes, in all the practical ways that will be necessary, but we also need the companionship and witness of each others' minds to weave our story. Without that, we can't act on reality.
We need to rebuild our own egregore from the ruins. To regenerate the ties that bind. This is unwanted yet sacred work. There is no worse and no better time to be alive than during decline. And so it goes. And so we go.
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