It’s pitch black, and I am using a white cane to tap out the ground in front of me. I feel scared, but I have a guide who says: “Walk towards me. I am here. Follow my voice. What can you hear?” There is birdsong, traffic and the sound of children. The ground feels first gravelly and then soft. Is it grass? “Am I in a park?” I ask my guide.
I am at an exhibition called Dialogue in the Dark, which has toured more than 45 countries and has employed more than 7,000 visually impaired people as guides. This is a project about social inclusion. Diversity may be a buzzword, but what does it mean when designers continue to make no-go spaces for people with disabilities?
This immersive experience takes sighted people out of their comfort zones. In the dark, I talked to the two guides, had coffee and biscuits with them and learned practical stuff about how to cross a road. What I liked most was the chatting, the dialogue. How do you choose your clothes, my daughter asked our guide. What about phones? A new world was revealed to me. One of the guides showed me an Instagram post of her paintings.
In these dark times I left with respect. Martin Buber’s philosophy is at play here: “The only way to learn is through encounter.”
This experience – learning, listening, being taken completely out of my comfort zone – is the opposite of how the world feels now. This election is not about dialogue. It feels like people screaming their moral certainties into a void. The idea that division can be settled by this is clearly wrong. No healing can happen until we properly acknowledge how broken we are. The first-past-the-post system is not fit for purpose; most votes are wasted unless you live in a marginal constituency. Saying: “I am not going to vote, or I may spoil my paper,” brings down righteous wrath. If I say I cannot bring myself to vote Labour because of antisemitism – essentially a conspiratorial worldview that flows out a particular set of hard-left politics – then people abuse me for not caring about homeless people. There is no conversation, simply condemnation. How that works on the doorstep, I don’t know.
If all Labour people are inherently good and everyone else inherently bad, we end in the ludicrous position where Corbyn has to be held up as the personification of virtue. He reiterates that he is anti-racist in a “l’état, c’est moi” way when the bigger question is over systemic refusal to act on cases of antisemitism.
I can’t go along with this, despite seeing some excellent things in the manifesto and having written about Borisconi’s venality for years.
Neither as funny nor as clever as he is made out to be, Boris Johnson is now just some posh automaton who blurts: “Get Brexit done,” at regular intervals. The thought of working-class voters buying this is lamentable – but it’s happening to the extent that Labour can no longer claim to be a working-class party. The fallout from Brexit has fractured the parties.
What is striking is the total failure of imagination that characterises today’s divisiveness. If the best thing that Labour created is a vision of a different world, then surely its supporters can imagine another world where you feel distrustful and taken for granted. When the MP Tracy Brabin, who took Jo Cox’s seat, tells us that many of her constituents felt that with the referendum they were on the winning side for the first time in their lives, we might do well to listen.
Dismissal is always a damn sight easier than dialogue, that’s for sure. Why are all these vox pops with old white northern leavers, I hear people ask. Why do we not acknowledge that the working class is young, urban and multi-ethnic? Fine – so what can glue together a coalition between such groups?
I am voting tactically, which feels the only sensible thing to do. It is not only an admission of the failure of our system, but an acknowledgment that Labour on its own can’t get the Tories out. People remain unconvinced that a more centralised state can deliver all that Labour promises. The left continues to underestimate the aspirational power of independence in every cultural narrative – personal independence from the state and nationalist independence for the countries of this disunited kingdom. Freedom is a precious thing. Let us decide our own destinies. Let us decide who we are and how we live.
This is why identity and not pure economics governs the discourse, even though we are told this is irrational. Insecurity has produced this fragmentation, as well as Brexit. Economic austerity is not the only driver of the impoverishment of the imagination. Remain has so often outdone leave in nostalgia for a mythical time of harmony.
In such an atmosphere of distrust, not just of politicians but of anyone who may vote differently, we have to ask on Friday: how do we go on? I ask this of Labour because the Tories have so little capacity for self-reflection. They are a machine to win power, by whatever ideology necessary. But how to edge forwards?
As I passed through Dialogue in the Dark, I trusted someone to lead the way. I emerged not with fake sympathy, but with respect. Trust and respect: the groundwork for dialogue.
There has been a lot of talk lately of Antonio Gramsci’s insight about the new world struggling to be born; I think it has already been born, and we just didn’t notice. He also once told us what culture means: “I believe it means thinking well, whatever one thinks, and therefore acting well, whatever one does.”
As the moral high ground now seems a place to huddle or hide, I like such prosaic advice. Vote as best you can. And the next day act as well as you can. Dialogue in the cold light of day would be a start.
• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist.
