Dear My Children
(I’ve promised never to write about you so no names here)
It’s the day after the election results. Britain is at exactly that point in time and space where Wile E Coyote has run off the cliff but has not yet looked down. He still has that look of greedy hope on his face. He’s still up in the air. When you were little, one of you used to shout: “Don’t look down! Don’t look down!”, as if it was the act of looking down that made gravity happen.
So I won’t look down. I won’t think about the fact that Theresa May has just announced that she’s perfectly happy to destabilise the delicate peace in Northern Ireland – where your cousins live – in order to prop up her government. I’m not going to think about the fact that Labour actually lost. Or that there were ugly and stupid things said and done on both sides in this campaign.
I want to record how it all feels, in this family, this afternoon. Because the bigger picture is only so big, whereas sometimes a particular moment, in a particular place, is a chink in time through which you can see the future. Also you make me laugh and I want to record the best lines.
For instance, when the 17-year-old saw the results and said: “Looks like I’m going to be too young to vote in the next election too.” One of you said: “OMG Ukip are going to lose their safe seat on Question Time.” Another of you said: “I want to yawn now but I’m too tired to look for my mouth.” The one of you who is a teacher said: “Today’s lesson plan, children, will be… DVDs.”
You’re all knackered because you all threw yourself into this election. The student one came home and went out first thing next morning to Wirral West – our nearest marginal – to campaign. The family WhatsApp group looked like memos from the War Room, if Churchill used bitmojis. The London ones were telling each other where to go and what to do. Is door-knocking more use than a rally? Do they have enough volunteers in Kilburn?
Your energy and commitment woke me and your mum from our habit of superior commentary, got me out giving lifts, put your mum on the rail replacement bus to the Wirral and on to doorsteps. You are the wheels beneath my Acme store, rocket-powered rollerskates. Yes, I know there is no way those skates could ever make a coyote fly, but I’m not looking down just yet.
When this started, you were all so loudly and furiously divided – Corbynite versus “realist”. Brexit versus Remain. But when the starting pistol fired you all got out there. The Corbynite helped to increase a Blairite’s majority. The “realist” had to work alongside a badge-bedecked Canary reader.
We are slumped in front of the telly now, listening to pundits try to describe it all in terms of swings and demographics but the vocabulary is all wrong. It’s as though they’re trying to analyse a cake by taking its pH. The pH of a cake is measurable but it’s also irrelevant. Oldest says: “It was the human connection – nurses and teachers turning up on the doorsteps, saying, ‘Forget the smears. Forget the fear. I teach your kids and this is how austerity feels in our school. Thanks for listening.’” Where that happened incredible things followed.
On the TV, they are talking about “the young” as though that was a demographic. They seem unaware that a lot of the young are nurses, carers on zero hours, TAs, teachers – the people who make this country work. The people who have been stitched up by our weird addiction to rising property prices. While we’re sprawled here in front of the rolling news, we learn that Kensington might go Labour. Kensington. In the belly of the beast, fearmongering and smear were no match for people turning up on the doorsteps and asking for help.
Some very rich and successful people said to themselves: “You know what, maybe I am my brother’s keeper after all.” As long as austerity is just a word you can almost believe in it. When it stands on your doorstep, in the form of a newly sacked TA or a zero-hours care worker, then you have to admit, it’s a scam. The one of you who is a TA says: “People are starting to realise maybe tax isn’t a ‘burden’. Maybe it’s the price of a decent society.”
The Tory campaign played to the worst in us. And the worst in us simply is not, and never will be, a match for the best in us. As long as Labour remembers that, the whole idea of a Tory safe seat is meaningless. Kensington.
Human interaction crushed the fake news, the YouTube attack ads and the rightwing press. That in itself is a legacy. Never again will a politician – right or left – believe that the Daily Mail’s slime trail is the path to power.
This weekend, the Mail is running the Diana Tapes, which is to say, it has locked itself in the bunker. Political discourse in this country for your whole lifetime has been distorted by politicians believing they have to second-guess a ghoulish, predatory press. Today, it feels like that is over. With terrorist attacks fresh in our minds, the press screamed “terrorist sympathiser” and millions of people said: “Nah, don’t think so.”
Maybe this is the most important legacy – not what it means for Brexit or for Northern Ireland or Theresa May – but what it will mean for years to come that tens of thousands of people have had the experience of getting out on the street, having had real, uncomfortable, infuriating political conversations and won them.
You stepped into the space that the press vacated – the space called decency. The demagogue’s cry of “they’re all the same” has been answered with “there is no they. We are the politics.” Last word – as so often – goes to oldest son. “Hope,” he says, “is going viral.”
