A sad day

The UK’s general election is over and the Tory party have won a majority. Here’s what that means:

• Continued suffocation of the NHS and the auctioning off of its defiled corpse to US interests.
• Degradation of worker’s rights, food standards, animal welfare and environmental protections.
• The attempted murder of democratic mechanisms designed to promote scrutiny and challenge.
• Further increases in equality: the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.
• More funding cuts for state educatiom, social care, the police force and the judicial system.
• The rupture of the Union.
• Brexit and the end of the ability to live, work, retire and easily travel in the EU.
• Hostility towards “foreigners” and those not a part of our culture or at odds with elements of it.

The outlook is grim. The Great British public has elected a party of shameless liars who have proven to be corrupt and demonstrated an overt contempt for anyone not a part of their supposedly elite order. It is a sad day.

Individually, I’m searching for ways to deal with this. What I’m thinking is that speech and action have never been more important, nor has one’s ability to focus. It is tempting to surrender to anger, to vent, to curse, to heap hate upon the elected party. But that is what they rely upon. They want us to forego coordinated action and further amplify the divisions they have so effectively weaponised.

So resist. Their worst nightmare is that we show our best selves. They don’t want us to meet their hatred with love, to meet their contempt with compassion, to meet their fear-mongering with patience and kindness. They want us distracted, fighting among ourselves while they carve up and consume the UK.

This is not melodrama. It’s recognition of the fact that what is happening in the UK, while not unique in historical terms, is dangerous. It’s the first step on a road that drips with blood. So I will rail against further steps along it and I will do my best to defy the impression that we have just issued to the wider world: that we’re an arrogant, contemptuous, hostile people.