When a Tory ‘friend’ posted on Facebook about her relief at the General Election result on Friday, I wanted to grab her by the hair and pull her through a Ghost-of-Christmas-Present ride through the city and watch her eyes widen in horror at what she’d done. The trouble is – aside from the violence behind the impulse – if you force someone’s eyes open, they’ll shut tighter than ever when you let go.
Cameron, Gove and friends don’t understand difference. They have a deficit of public kindness. They have no imagination. If they did, they couldn’t legislate the way they do. They can’t read across ideas and situations. If they could, the hideous inflexibility of Benefit Sanctions would be mirrored in a blanket criminalisation of high-end tax avoiders. (Maybe they don’t read. A local teacher told me on Friday that ‘Hard Times’ feels like contemporary comment).
This is what I mean by ‘no imagination’: they grab the unconfident, depressed or barely functioning person who missed his appointment at the Job Centre and shake the last pound coin from his pocket, shouting, “Be better! Be different! Be born in a different family! Don’t be abused! Have more opportunities! Have money! Be cleverer!” Ultimately, they’re shouting, “Be more like me!”, which is precisely what I wanted to shout at the Tory voter. Which makes me like this government. Which is eye-opening.
I want to resist, to be part of a ground-up, lasting change that spreads from person to person. Marching and spray-painting aren’t my thing, but between us, we have a big, juicy surplus of imagination and expertise. Grass-roots campaigners, anti-poverty lobbyists, writers, counsellors, trainers, expert listeners, makers and thinkers and doers…
How might we learn from each other? What beautifully subversive, unrelentingly compassionate action can we take?
Ultimately, the Tory voter is just as much a victim of this regime that prizes individual net worth above the intrinsic value of any human life.
So how do we engage kindly and imaginatively with the comfortably-off true-blue voter, and not in the manner of the evangelist or the Victorian White Man going into the “Dark” Continent?
I have some ideas. I bet you do, too. Imagination never felt so subversive.
Five by Three 