Politics is not for you. Politics is not for me either. Politics is for the rich now.
Some of us tried hard to be team players. In the post-2016 period after the disastrous Brexit vote, I spent three years of my life organizing online and marching on the streets of London with millions of others, to try and focus people on the mistake that had been made and help people understand how the charlatans like Johnson and Farage had purchased a fake result with dodgy money, in the biggest political corruption scandal in British history.
The details are all there and continue to emerge day-by-day, as the prime architects of Brexit now collapse in sleaze, scandal and incompetence. Disgraced ex-PM Johnson is now little more than a dog turd in the Downing Street gutter, and the Number 10 cat on the doorstep is the only continuity with an earlier age of ‘fair play’ and ‘Conservative values’. The Moron trashed the whole project, and now the whole game starts again. A whole range of Conservative Ghouls line up, wailing like Brexit banshees, ready to trash the UK even further. But this is not a political blog post. That may surprise you. I would actually prefer to talk about sport.
On its 9th Stage, the 2022 Tour de France reached Switzerland yesterday. It returns to France on Tuesday. I am following it avidly. It is so wonderful to simply slouch on the sofa and watch the Tour de France. Each day last week – at the height of the political crisis gripping Westminster – I switched off Sky News, Radio 4, LBC News etc., and watched the Tour de France. I presume other people did the same with tennis at Wimbledon – or women’s football (I shall refrain from asking what is the point of women’s football?) to help keep their sanity.
Years ago, when I was more committed to the ways of the world, I would have judged as ‘irresponsible’ people who switched off a political crisis in favour of spending several hours on the sofa watching sport. “Get engaged!” I would have said. But who could now doubt that ordinary citizens’ voices count for nothing in the big money world where most Tory candidates seeking power right now are millionaires? Keep watching the sport, guys: for political questions are not for you. Unless you have at least 50 million in an offshore tax haven, in which can you can play your part, bung a few million to a candidate, and have your interests looked after. Decades ago, if anyone had said that to me, I would have simply said it was cynical and dangerous. Now I would prefer to believe the Tour de France has succeeded in removing drugs and corruption but the process has not even begun in the corridors of political power.
We are on our own now. As individuals, political parties no longer speak for us. We are like the lone riders in the Tour de France. We go out into the landscape unsupported by social and political groups. We have to fight for our own indvidual interests and hope we can battle it out to the finishing line. There is no team game: it’s every man for himself now. Tell me if I’m wrong.
Equus Asinus 