Three weeks of party faithfuls applauding while their self-satisfied stars strut around like two-bit actors, playing at being outraged/visionary/humane/compassionate/tough/uplifting/businesslike/inspiring/no-nonsense/statesmanlike (delete as necessary), all of them emboldened by media attention and over-blown ego to think that the country is hanging on their every word, is truly excruciating.
Since the MPs’ expenses scandal, public cynicism with conventional politics and the pocket-lining shenanigans of our elected representatives has risen to dizzying new heights. Is it any surprise that we can barely drag ourselves out of bed to vote?
Then who should hove into view but our very own reluctant have-a-go hero John Smeaton. As if tackling suicide bombers wasn’t challenging enough, Smeaton has set himself an even tougher new mission of reclaiming politics for the common people by announcing that he will stand as a prospective MP for Glasgow North East, erstwhile seat of House of Commons speaker, Michael Martin.
When I first heard this news I winced, if only because the near beatification of this once-unknown baggage handler has threatened to get out of hand, leaving one with the distinct feeling that the only way left for him to go was down.
But then I clicked on Smeaton’s electoral message (www.juryteam.org/index.php) and found myself warming to the idea of Smeato for parliament. His pitch is that the constituency in question has suffered from decades of neglect from subsequent Labour administrations, that its elected representatives have totally flunked the mandate given to them by the electors to get its problems sorted out. As someone born in the constituency, in Springburn, I can only reinforce this perspective. For all that “inward investment” and “social inclusion” patter, Springburn is an infinitely worse place to live now than it was in the early 1960s, its heart ripped out by a motorway, municipal vandalism, sub-standard council housing and unemployment, all brought to you by the dead hand of Labour.
Significantly, for all his anti-Labour sentiment, Smeaton isn’t throwing in his hat with the Scottish National Party but standing as an independent, supported by the recently formed Jury Team which says that it “champions democracy, accountability and transparency” and aims to “change politics by getting a group of independently minded people into parliament”. It is a maverick, ragbag alliance of those who are alienated from conventional party politics. Some of its policies are worrying. It wants Britain to leave the EU and to empower courts to sentence violent criminals to “army-style” punishment, whatever that might be; Abu Ghraib perhaps?
Still, what with the SNP being seen in hard-bitten urban areas as an overwhelmingly rural crew from Planet Shortbread, finding an obvious political home for those who are actively, as opposed to passively, disillusioned with “the system” isn’t easy, and the scale of the mess to be tackled is monumental. Smeaton may have focused on Glasgow North East, but as Jonathan Meades so cleverly demonstrated recently in his brilliant BBC4 series, Jonathan Meades: Off Kilter, there is a long list of other depressed places in Scotland, most of them Labour fiefdoms, that give the entrenched deprivation and spirit-crushing environmental brutality of Glasgow North East a run for its money.
Inspired by the football pools of his youth that featured the evocative names of minor league football teams, Meades made a tour of their home towns, places like Methil and Alloa, which seem to have more in common with the decay and social fragmentation of post-industrial cities like Baltimore, so graphically portrayed in The Wire, than they do with Stirling Castle or the Road to the Isles.
Meades approached his subject like a wry social anthropologist trying to figure out what defines the local culture, offering a bracing antidote to what he calls the “Walter Scottishness” of the Year of Homecoming, replete with its romantic victims and heroes, bales of tartan and rich white folks searching for noble ancestors.
The Scottish landscape surveyed by Meades is an altogether more dystopian terrain that might resonate with Smeaton, one filled with miserabilist, mean housing schemes, industrial rust and creeping damp, grey municipal pebbledash, off-sales stocked wall-to-wall with Buckfast, and queues outside the post office as an unprecedentedly large percentage of the population collects its disability benefit while a handful of rich people, living in baronial piles behind breathtakingly long walls, still own most of the country’s wealth.
Though Meades’s gaze is invariably penetrating, it is never misanthropic. On the contrary, he raises an eyebrow regularly in apparent awe at the patience and resilience of the people who populate such bleak environments.
Smeaton wants to do something for people like these who have been let down so dismally by their politicians. His chances of getting results are, of course, vanishingly slim, but it will be entertaining to watch him try.
