The Tory Majority and My Breaking Heart
Today the Tories have won the 2019 General Election. Boris Johnson secured more votes of confidence than any other candidate. Despite being caught on live TV hiding in a fridge to avoid questioning, just two days ago.
I am livid.
Worse still, the exit polls predicted the 'landslide'. Waking up to the news that the Conservatives had secured 159 more seats that labour seemed to confirm it. 364 seats turned blue compared to 203 that turned red.
Looking at seats alone, it's a clear cut story of binary division. An undisputed victor and unequivocal loser. But, if you look at the percentage differential it stands at 11.4%. Not a landslide.
It's not a negligible difference either.
It doesn't allow a flicker of hope for a margin of error in the counting.
It doesn't make it a close call.
A little bit of quick maths makes it apparent that an extra 1 in 10 people (and then some) voted for the Tories.
But... What fuckery makes an extra 11.4% of the vote convert into an extra 161 seats? A basic guesstimation of what 11.4% more seats than a party that wins 203 seats would look like, throws up 225 seats. Which doesn't look like a landslide at all (because it isn't!)
And now I'm really lost in the proportional representation rabbit hole...
Lib Dem's took 11.5% of the vote and were rewarded with 11 seats, essentially 1 seat per percentage point won.
For each percentage point the Tories won they took over 8 seats. Labour took 6.
The SNP swung 3.9% of the vote but won 48 seats, meaning their percentage points were worth 12 seats each.
The Green Party took a 2.7% share and were rewarded with 1 seat. Each percent won by them was worth 0.4 of a seat.
At 35, I may be pretty late to the outrage party. But, here I am anyway. I know the arguments that I haven't been woke enough to this will inevitably include how my privilege has allowed me to be only superficially invested in politics, and this is true. I am not going to be directly impacted by policies in the same way as other vulnerable and marginalised people will.
I saw that Greta Thunberg posted a caption on Instagram yesterday that explained how she didn't advocate for any political parties because all had failed to act on the climate crisis. She argued her stance was one in support of science not party politics. I read the comments closely, saw outpourings of both support and derision for her stance. I found it interesting. Unlike many people who didn't bother to vote yesterday, Greta Thunberg isn't even eligible to do so yet. It's a bit of a moot point really.
But it got me thinking about what advocacy is. It got me thinking about how quick we are to expect public figures to be all things to all people. It got me thinking about how this expectation is crippling to the conscientious but our new PM's arrogance meant he felt no cause for pause about expounding his own abilities to run the country despite hiding in a fridge to avoid awkward questions.
I feel like it is time for more of us to admit that we might not have all the information yet and might not be as savvy as we could be, but that we want to play a part in upholding values we believe in anyway. I don't believe it's better to leave it to the government.
I say this, thinking directly of the NHS. I don't believe it's inflammatory to say that if the NHS disappears the most vulnerable in our society will be gravely impacted.
I say this when I don't work in the health service, don't live with a chronic condition that requires me to spend time in hospital, or have to hand any research findings about how to improve services.
I'd rather be a blundering idiot with good intentions, than live in comfort in my own bubble to avoid risking having my shortcomings revealed. I want to encourage you to mobilise your hopelessness for good. Collective action brings change, huddled conversations with friends where we lick our wounds doesn't. I honestly do believe we can act in the interest of the many rather than the few even if our ruling party doesn't.
We can lobby and fundraise. We can keep talking. We can keep listening. We can volunteer our time and skills. The moral deficit can be redressed by our input. I know this to be true.
Last year, at the end of January, I tried to donate a collection of warm clothing to homeless shelters and charities in Cardiff. None needed them. They still had a surplus of donations from the Christmas period. No political party made that happen, it was us, the people.
So, I implore you. Get your thinking caps on, use your sadness and anger as fuel. Let's create our own working parties for progress. Let's share information and initiatives and build new ones together to protect our NHS. Let's bounce mad ideas around until we can bring them to fruition.
I firmly believe a huge number of people in our society would willingly pay a tax that was ring-fenced for the NHS. So, let's find a way of collecting that money. It sounds insane, but it's not really. I don't have the logistical understanding of how to make it happen or how you'd distribute it. But many many clever people out there, that feel like us, do. Let's find them.
Humour me, just for a second. Surely hospitals have individual budgets and information available that could make it clear where additional funding would be best spent? Surely, mental health charities that provide free access to counselling but have big wait lists could see their problem solved if we could raise money to cover venue hire and an extra practitioner?
It sounds naive. And it is. But I'm not sorry. Because some things are simple... If the average starting salary of a counsellor is between £20,000 and £26,000 (according to Prospects) and Cardiff can raise £130,000 we could offer 5 year-long contracts to counsellors and reduce the wait people in crisis face.
It's only a temporary fix, but it's a start. Plus, wouldn't temporary empowerment and progress and kinship feel better than this?
Tory policies I take issue with (the abridged version)
Since April 2017, job seekers aged 18 to 21 have been prevented from getting help with their rent to stop them sliding into a "life on benefits".
Record numbers of medics are leaving the NHS after initial training under this government because of their protracted refusal to negotiate properly on junior doctor contracts and cutting of funds to services.
I believe the hype about austerity killing. In the 2000s, death rates were falling while in the first three years of the 2010s, they increased. There were nearly 45,000 more deaths in the years 2012 to 2014 than would have been predicted by earlier mortality trends. (These facts come from the British Medical Journal report: Effects of health and social care spending constraints on mortality in England: a time trend analysis)
The huge hike in tuition fees for university students.
In their legal aid 'reforms' (otherwise known as budget cuts) they added a rule that forced domestic violence victims to show evidence before getting a lawyer. It was disputed right up to the Court of Appeal who damned the move as being obviously "flawed".
The Tory plan to scrap the Human Rights Act and replace it with a so-called British Bill of Rights has been in Tory manifestos since 2010. There's no need unless you want to erode rights.
As the Syrian refugee crisis was peaking, Theresa May refused to accept any stranded children who had already made it into Europe. It took a Labour peer, Alf Dubs, who fled the Nazis as a child, calling on her to show humanity especially towards children in the squalid Jungle Camp in Calais. Eventually the government accepted the 'Dubs amendment' but rejected his call to take 3,000 refugees and said they should set the number instead. That number was only 480 children.
Putting these down in black and white just confirms my conviction that we can't wait for our government to do the decent thing. We have to do it.
We shall too. I believe in us.
