IT’S always deeply personal, isn’t it? Politics dig down to the core of the heart/soul; probably from listening to the adults when you were meant to be playing or quietly reading in a corner.
It seeps into you like mist rolling over the hills to your door that you don’t really feel until you open that door and breathe.
It infiltrates the opinions you arrogantly believe you’ve discovered all by yourself as you grow in age and awareness.
Like religion in a way, one is trapped in a skein of family, school, even friendship; born of all of them and often doomed never to quite escape.
For example, living in La France Profonde, I have no conception, beyond a curious intellectual one, of how my neighbours really think in political terms.
I’ve read my, or rather, their, histories – modern and ancient – of how this country came into being and all the giants (and pygmies) who’ve led them.
I know my area has flipped, in modern times, between collaboration, resistance, communism, socialism and National Front. Flips impossible for immigrants like me with which to really identify. Most of the villages and towns around me are still Far Right, although my neighbours and acquaintances are at pains to say they – personally – are not.
In the main I believe them, while inwardly wincing at their casual derogatory dismissal of ‘les noirs,’ ‘les arabes,’ 'les gitanes.’
Occasionally I pull them up on their words and they’re hurt – ‘I’m not racist,’ they protest and they truly believe they aren’t. And, bizarrely, in their own way, the best of them aren’t.
It’s how it is.
Now, growing up in the south of Ireland I was always going to be a republican. I didn’t know I was, for it came with my mother’s milk, until I understood much later; and agreed.
Then, as surely all decent people are at some point, I was a socialist – in the sense that I believed that all people were equal and deserved equal opportunities, equal rights, regardless of creed or colour.
Oh, of course in between I was an existentialist, a communist, briefly a Maoist and possibly for a second or two an anarchist. Well, actually, in a romantic way, mainly an anarchist.
I was never though, a Conservative, even as I acquired a mortgage, credit cards and loans at vast interest and came from a public-school background and continued the tradition with my son.
They were only temporary self-imposed labels anyway, for I never join parties or clubs. I always reserve my right to shape change. And have no defined politics.
Therefore, watching this week in Parliament I had no draw to any tribe in their benches.
Any socialism left and placed in the Labour Party was lost with New Labour and Blair; any thoughts of the suspect virtues of capitalism couldn’t survive the rout of Thatcherism.
I had, have, though, a visceral draw to the EU and all it stands for and a loathing for those who have sought to sever that bond. I have made my feelings plain in my columns and I don’t need to repeat them. For the moment.
But until this week I don’t think I’ve ever felt actual disgust at both the calibre and mendacity of the Honourable Members in the UK parliament.
Watching the recumbent form of the preening self-creation that is Rees-Mogg – a parody of a parody – was to witness the embodiment of a decaying establishment; a sneer, smear, on the body politic.
To see the pain in the eyes of Dominic Grieve as he demolished his life’s beliefs for the greater good of Parliament itself was to understand the true cost of Johnson’s unfettered ambition and Cummings’ machinations.
Good men and women were going down with this ship of state captained and crewed by a parcel of rogues.
But they were not going quietly. Hour after hour, watching the live feed from the House, one saw the ‘rebels’ undoubted, but never wavering, discomfort in what they were doing.
More gripping than an American soap with a ridiculously high body count, to follow it was to see true democracy fighting for its survival, not the pastiche Land of Hope and Glory version spouted by the minnows grasping their moment in the spotlight.
It was the day, I believe, that for many any lingering respect to the institution itself withered and died as outside an angry crowd jeered amidst urging their representatives to protect their rights.
There was madness abroad on the green benches and God knows what stage it will have reached by the time you read this.
David Cameron truly let slip the dogs of, if not war, then insurrection; fool that he was.
Once all this was done behind closed doors and the public was merely informed what was to be done in its name.
No longer. All is exposed in technology’s cold stare. And even in a field in La France Profonde the action can be followed.
Yes, politics is deeply personal and never have I felt it more so.
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