Welcome to the Friday 13th horror show. It’s done, we’ve lost.
Weeds are already growing thickly among the hope we’ve sown these past weeks and months.
Sitting in Waltham Forest watching the good people of Chingford quietly going about the business of counting votes, we are still waiting for the result here.
But we know deep down what the exit poll, and some hard early losses have already told us.
That those careless people who smash up things and then retreat back into their money are once more in charge of our country. That the scrubbed boy in the blue rosette whose aftershave I am drowning in is in charge.
In my mind, the only voice I can hear is Neil Kinnock’s. “I warn you,” he is saying, “do not be ordinary, young, poor or old.” Or, 36 years after his speech, do not be on zero hours, or on Universal Credit, or a woman who wears a hijab.
That exit poll means Trump’s coming for our NHS. That Boris is emboldened.
That Cummings’ hate won. It means Brexit for Christmas. A hard-right cabinet full of horrific new year’s resolutions. And a 2020 vision of hell.
We’re broken-hearted not because we’ve lost a game, but because we know in our hearts what this means for so many people in this country.
It means the foodbank queues will get longer. The tented cities will grow. It means more kids going to school hungry and schools falling apart and our dreams of rebuilding our precious social security system lie in tatters.
It’s a bitter, bitter blow to everyone who cares about our planet. And it reveals hard truths it will take time to come to terms with.
But let others recriminate. We’ve got work to do. There are people who will need us more in the next five years than they have ever needed us. It’s time to put our arms around each other.
For nine long years, communities have been propping each other up. Running soup kitchens for homeless people and gathering clothes for refugees, and keeping foodbanks stocked.
Our task now is even bigger than this. We need to quietly look out for our neighbours, notice the kids with holes in their shoes and the elderly people who have stopped going out.
We will have to defend our communities, street by street and house by house.
Solidarity will always be the strength of our movement, and we stand on the shoulders of those who came before.
The people who ran the soup kitchens during the miners’ strike, and stood in the pouring rain campaigning for the release of Nelson Mandela for decades in Trafalgar Square.
Those who fought for universal suffrage, and for the end of slavery and for gay marriage.
Those who took in the refugees of the kindertransport and marched from Jarrow with broken shoes.
Hope, as Emily Dickenson wrote, is the thing with feathers, that perches in our soul. We keep that little bird alive by caring for others.
If we narrow our ambitions or harden our hearts, we lose something much bigger than an election.
Our task right now is not just to rebuild our movement, but to take care of each other until we can drive these people out of power.
