UK politics: bah humbug!

02/04/2015

An entertaining day out to meet Boiling Frog and White Wednesday leaves me not a little bit tired, and not remotely keen on writing a blogpost. But it was a very useful day, even if much of our time was spent in expressing our wonderment at why so many eurosceptics don't seem interested in winning any referendum that might come our way.

Unused to polite company, one gets a bit animated at such times. Thus, the highlight of the day had to be a rather agitated gentleman on the next table leaning over to tell me to "stop f*****g swearing". Needless to say, I f*****g well did.

Most of all, a day out reminds me how much I loathe party politics – and especially at election time. So it is some comfort to read Andrew Cooper in the Guardian telling us how, beyond the London bubble, most people are of like mind, and are particularly uninterested in the staged political TV debates.

Cooper, however, also reminds us of how distorted the vision is inside the bubble, where they get wrapped up in "small picture politics", where things like TV debates assume an importance far beyond their actual merit. The media thus gorge 24 hours a day on stories about process, which fascinate journalists (and party tribalists) but bore normal voters, Cooper says.

And this might explain the indifference of so many supposed eurosceptics to winning the coming referendum (if it comes). Divorced from reality (how many think-tank wonks have actually been in a container depot?), they gorge on stories about process and the like, their rewards delivered in term of peer approval, prestige and status. Real results don't matter.

So it is that we have to suffer interminable discussions on why we should leave the EU, with only a fraction of the thought now turning to how we get out. This leaves the "bubble-dwellers" focusing on the unreal and the arcane, with no thought as to how their posturing might play with the rest of the country.

At least, though – unlike Boiling Frog - I can return to a land where the [immigrant] children actually do play in the streets, mainly because they don't have gardens. The local kids don't play in the streets any more. They're down the park, getting kaline on cheap cider and sniffing glue.

Mind you, if Farage's kids played in the streets, they would be run down in an instant. He lives on a main road. If he really wants his girls playing football out the front, he needs to move. If he's so minded, we've got plenty of back-to-backs up here, where they could practice to their heart's content.