More Questions Than Answers

Big news for Britain, if you weren’t paying attention: a general election has been called for May 6th.  But it’s not news in the sense of real news, of course, because the press pack had already moved into London over the Easter weekend, waiting to hear the worst-kept secret in Britain.  Our polling cards arrived in the post this morning which means they must have been printed last week at the earliest.  Rumour has it that ITV, SKY and the BBC have been trawling for audience members for the big debates, so they must have had an idea when the election was to be called.  The phony war is over: let the campaigning begin.

If you are eligible, will you vote?  It depresses me, the apathy for politics in this country.  Was it Lenin who said politics affects everything?  I’m not sure that it was, but when I Googled it I did discover that he said, ‘The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation.’  Labour & Conservative could both use that as a campaign slogan: Labour to keep the militants on side and the Conservatives to attract the rest of the country, who should be scared witless by now that Labour could conceivably win a <shudder> fourth term.

It’s no secret which way I swing but I was prepared to give Labour a fair hearing for all of five minutes, until I heard Mr Brown tell us just how ‘middle class’ he is.  If we live in a country where race, gender, inclination, nationality, etc. are irrelevant, then why is class permitted as an issue?  Why is it wrong to judge a person on the foreign accent with which they speak but okay to judge a person for having a posh accent?  That smacks of double standards to me.  If we shouldn’t blame the former for an accident of birth, why should we blame the latter?  I don’t accuse Mr Brown for being Scots so why should he be allowed to accuse Mr Cameron for being upper class?  Is Mr Brown saying that he is better than Mr Cameron simply because he is middle class?  And if so, and we are obviously working the system backwards these days, does that mean we shouldn’t vote for Mr Brown because he is not working class, which, by his logic, is the best class of all?  It also begs the question, why no working class leader of the party that is championing the cause of the working wo/man? Is this how the election is going to be run?  On class lines?  Is that because Labour have no viable policies with which to tempt us?

Let me state for the record that, while I dislike Mr Brown, I am not enamoured of Mr Cameron: he’s a little too much of a Blue Blair for my liking.  However, I have been watching him over the last couple of years and he’s growing on me.  I won’t be voting for him, but for the party which he leads because they are in my ideological corner.  At least I’ll be voting; will you?  Have you even bothered to register?  If you are a woman, remember it was less than a hundred years ago that we were given the vote at all.  I stood in line alongside thousands of newly enfranchised men and women in South Africa in 1994 and felt privileged to be a tiny part of history.  Wars are fought (were you invited to the Boston Tea Party?) and people die for the right to vote, even today, and you can’t be bothered to turn out?  Shame on you. 

I am not saying you should vote my way, but that you should vote.  You should stand up and be counted or this blog may descend into an orgy of  clichés and I will drown in a pile of platitudes.  You wouldn’t want that to happen, now would you?  They say the people get the government they deserve: if Labour get in again, I know who to blame.

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Yesterday’s prompt was to give your poetry a name and write about it.   I am not satisfied with my effort and I will probably re-write it at some point.

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My Name Is Discovery

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Shuttling from pen to page to pc,

my endeavour is the sonnet, the pun,

the couplet – heroic or otherwise –

the clever epigram: an odyssey

that begins in an empty head.

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Each rhetorical enterprise

leaves me spent; until the next time:

blank space becomes word

becomes poem becomes a thing

that it did not set out to be. 

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I am challenger, agitator, explorer.

Erupting from mind and heart and hand,

discarding, destroying, discovering. 

I was not, once; and now I am.

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