a summing up of this country after the election result.

Election
2015: the horror

I didn’t stay up to watch the nightmare unfold last night.
The exit polls filled me with such shock, outrage, and disgust that I knew my
blood pressure wouldn’t be able to cope with it. After eleven o’clock there was
no way I was going to spend any more time in the company of Michael Gove and
Andrew Neil and the endlessly cheery and upbeat BBC journalists with their
gimmicky nausea-inducing BBC graphics showing the House of Commons filled with
virtual reality politicians.

I have never been impressed by Miliband either
before the campaign or during it, but the things that this government has done –
and which it promises to do – have been so brutal, so dishonest and so
horrendous, that I believed that even an electorate that too often seems all too
willing to believe anything and accept anything could not give the Tories a
mandate. Regardless of the coming Labour meltdown in Scotland, I thought there
would be a close result overall, possibly a narrow Labour victory and most
likely a hung parliament that would have stymied the Tories and forced Miliband
into some kind of progressive, anti-austerity coalition.

After all, you don’t
need to be particularly radical to think that proposals like abolishing non-dom
status or imposing an energy freeze might appeal even to people whose political
passions are as lukewarm as the Labour Party leadership’s, especially when
compared with the prospect of five more years of a government poised to
introduce the most savage cuts to social welfare since the 1930s. But nope, even
those little social democratic sweeties couldn’t bring the electorate round.
Instead British – I mean English – voters chose to reward one of the most
vicious rightwing governments in British history with a near majority.

It’s a
result that was made possible by a sheeplike, frightened and rancorous
population that appears increasingly disposed to believe all the lies that it is
told by its vile newspapers. It is an irrational, stupid and fearful vote by an
electorate that doesn’t even recognize its own self-interest, let alone the
interests of others, that has abandoned any commitment to even the most
elementary principles of social justice; that didn’t couldn’t even see that
Miliband’s tepid, focus-group-manufactured One Nation ‘fairness’ was still
preferable to the dismal social cruelty that the government has already
inflicted and which is certain to intensify in the next five years.

In doing
so the English have demonstrated extraordinary political cowardice. Lacking the
gumption to challenge the powerful, they have preferred to elect a government
that victimizes the powerless. This is a population that prefers to doff the cap
than bite the hand that it thinks feeds; that expresses its digusts with
politicians by voting in the worst of them; that drapes itself in the Union Jack
and doffs its collective hat to its masters in the hope that it can be like
them; that would rather blame the Scots who want to fight austerity than fight
it themselves.

I know that this vote doesn’t represent majority opinion
either in England or in the UK as a whole; the British voting system ensures
that few votes ever do. But the Tories have so far picked up some 30 percent of
the vote share. Equally alarmingly, UKip have gained more than 3 million votes
even though they have so far only won one seat, and they even managed to
increase their vote share in Wales by ten percent.

So we are witnessing an
extraordinary disaster for the majority of the population that is not and never
will be Conservative, and a catastrophe for the Labour Party in particular. Now
as Ed Miliband prepares to depart, the Blairites are sharpening their knives,
and there are rumours that David Miliband is flying back to the country. So
Miliband will be replaced by Miliband, and they wonder why so few people were
convinced by Labour.

Miliband has said that his party was ‘overwhelmed’ by a
‘surge of nationalism’ in Scotland. This is rubbish. Labour could still have won
even without the seats it lost to the SNP. Miliband’s pseudo-explanation doesn’t
explain why that ‘surge’ took place, or what it was in the SNP’s ‘nationalism’
that led so many former Labour voters in Scotland to regard Labour as ‘Red
Tories.’

Even in Gordon Brown’s constituency, the SNP won with with a 10,000
swing. So much for the big clunking fist who ‘saved the union.’ Labour’s fate
was clearly sealed in Scotland long before the election, through years of taking
its electorate for granted and through its alliance with the Tories over the
referendum campaign. But even during this campaign Nicola Sturgeon continually
put forward the idea of a ‘progressive anti-austerity alliance’ on both sides of
the border, which Miliband continually rejected.

What a coward and what a
fool. Instead he tried to convince the electorate that Labour was the party of
social justice, even as he remained committed to an austerity programme of
unspecified cuts that was essentially a ‘softer’ version of what the Tories were
already planning. He tried to please all the people and ended up pleasing very
few of them. He didn’t convince left-leaning voters that he would ‘change the
way the country is run’ and he didn’t convince those who already believe in Tory
economic ‘competence’ that he could run it more effeciently.

In the end the
head boy failed to become PM. He failed to offer a convincing, compelling and
inspiring vision of the future to counter the Tories’ crude but effective choice
between ‘stability’ and ‘chaos’ or the notion that Labour would damage the
fledgling ‘recovery’ that is already faltering. This message was rammed
relentlessly home by the rightwing press and even by the Independent, which
declared itself in favour of Tory/Lib Dem ‘stability.

The Cameron/Crosby team
didn’t just convince a timid electorate that the status quo was better than the
future that Labour was offering; they also appealed directly to English
nationalism, with a ‘Vote Labour – Get Sturgeon/Salmond’ mantra that will
inevitably have traction in a country that always believes it is being unfairly
treated and taken advantage of by foreigners of some kind or another, even if
those ‘foreigners’ are Scots.

Whatever you think of the SNP’s ability to
deliver on its social democratic credentials, its appeal to the Scots electorate
is clearly based on very different premises than the beligerent, rancorous,
flagwaving, royal baby worshipping, foreigner-hating nativism that is driving
English nationalism in its current manifestation.

In Scotland, ‘nationalism’
produced a movement in which a 20-year-old student can overturn a Labour
majority of 16,000 in Paisley and Renfrewshire South. In her victory speech
Mhairi Black promised that she would fight to end austerity cuts that are
hurting communities ‘ both north and south of the border.’

God only knows
what might have happened if we had had more people of her age and with her
passion and commitment down here in darkest England. Black, and the voters who
elected her, have been inspired by a new and postive vision of Scotland’s
collective future to take a gigantic leap into the political unknown. Here we
have only the rancid pseudo-rebellion of Ukip, and a population that is too
terrified of its own shadow to abandon a spurious ‘stability’ which promises
nothing but the demise of many of the things that it claims to hold
dear.

Ironically, voters who may have seen a Tory mandate as a vote for the
Union may have helped to bring its fragmentation closer, since it is difficult
to imagine how a government like this can keep the Scots on board, when Cameron
and his gang of millionaires set about imposing the next swathe of cuts in a
country where they no longer hold any mandate at all.

There were some
consolations in this debacle; the well-deserved humiliation of the Lib Dems,
whose opportunism and ambition for power did so much to make this outcome
possible, by keeping in place a government that should never have made it out of
2010. There will hopefully, be the defeat of Nigel Farage in South
Thanet.

But these are small crumbs of schadenfreude that cannot compensate
for the monumental disaster for progressive politics that took place yesterday.
Maybe something positive will come from it. But right now I can’t think what it
can be. And I feel ashamed of my country and disgusted with it.