General election 2024: cults and apathy

‘Politicians are all the same.’ That was by far the most common response I got when out canvassing in previous general election, as far back as 2005 and 2010. Political apathy is certainly nothing new. However I feel that something has recently shifted again in the cosmos of popular attitudes to politics and politicians. It’s a shift that also encompasses views on the news media and ‘the establishment’ in general. For many people the upheaval around whether the Brexit vote would be honoured and then the pandemic didn’t just shake trust in those running the country it severed it completely. Nearly all politicians of all parties seemed to merge into a tyrannical pro lockdown and pro vaccine ‘uni party.’ Moreover they promoted supposed ‘facts’, such as everyone is at lethal risk from Covid and that the vaccines stopped transmission, that were provably false. There were times when we all heard politicians across the political spectrum spouting Covid propaganda much of which could be called fear porn and most of which was based on twisted half truths or outright lies. Yet it was those who dared to question any of it who were labelled as spreaders of ‘disinformation.’ As a result of putting in a freedom of information request to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport I found out that a few of my tweets had featured in their interdepartmental reports that illustrated trends in ‘potential Covid mis/disinformation narratives.’ It also appears that they monitored my Twitter account somewhat. Anyone who dared to publicly challenge the accepted narrative on lockdown and the Covid vaccine, or even just questioned whether sitting on a park bench would really kill someone, was liable to be censored or smeared. It certainly has increasingly felt like the world has become a place in which one can’t trust anyone in positions of power. It seems like anything and everything we once accepted without much thought is now open to question.

   However, much as I am still part of this new movement of scepticism, I have become increasingly wary of the dangers of overwhelming cynicism. Questioning everything can, if taken too far, lead down the proverbial dark rabbit hole. I hate to bring up the phrase ‘conspiracy theories’ because during the pandemic literally any alternative view to the state sanctioned narrative had the ‘conspiracy theory’ label slapped on it. However just because words have been misused doesn’t mean they have no meaning at all. Just because politicians and the media too often conceal or misrepresent the truth doesn’t mean everything they report is a lie. In the same way, just because in recent years terms like ‘racism’, ‘sexism’ and various other ‘isms/phobias’ have been misused doesn’t mean those prejudices don’t exist and don’t harm our society. We’ve also never been so swamped with information as we are in the world today. Just switching on your phone can lead to a bombardment of input from various news and social media Apps. Indeed never has the phrase ‘I can’t see the wood for the trees’ seemed so appropriate as for the world in 2024. Perhaps apathy and near universal distrust is the safest option?

   However there are two possible consequences of distrusting almost everything: A) You get seduced by an attractive but misleading insurgent source of ‘alternative facts’ and B) You retreat into blissful disengagement from the world outside your intimate bubble. Now I find myself bringing up something else that I usually resist at all costs. It’s not just words like ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘far right’ which have been harmfully misused, it’s also historical comparisons. Top amongst those is that of ‘1930s Germany’ and the rise of arguably the most notorious racist, far right movement in history. However during the last days of this exhaustingly uninspiring election campaign I found myself reflecting on one of my favourite books about the rise of Nazism, ‘Geschichte eines Deutschen’ by Sebastian Haffner. The English translation of this work has been given the title ‘Defying Hitler’, which in my opinion misrepresents how the book offers a windows into general German experience at the time. As the German title says it’s ‘the story of A German’, not limited to one unique German individual or family but aiming for insight into the shared psychology and life of all Germans. In this Haffner identifies two deeply and somewhat opposite embedded German traits: being swept away by a strong leader’s ‘patriotic’ cult offering simplistic solutions founded on scapegoating and burying themselves away from politics in ‘das Alltägliche’, (‘the everyday’). It was Haffner’s opinion that the former, the ‘true Nazis’, were significantly outnumbered by the latter, the people who rejected politics in favour of narrowing their world to a comforting bubble of family, friends and daily routine.

Whilst we fortunately are not at risk from as malign a force as Hitler’s Nazis, both categories of people can still be observed in the U.K. as we head into the general election 2024. An extremist ideology doesn’t have to be fascist to contain more than whiffs of nasty prejudices and oversimplification of complex issues designed to scapegoat certain groups. Likewise, although it’s harder to cut oneself off from ‘the news’ and politics in our digital age than it was in the 1930s many are still resorting to apathy, or at least a weary lethargy. Both of these are totally understandable and logical. After what we’ve been through in the last years with our politics and politicians who doesn’t want some easy sounding answers shouted to the beat of a patriotic drum? Or who doesn’t feel like giving up on the lot of them?! But as Haffner reminded me again, neither is a solution and both can lead down a dark path. Moreover we mustn’t be lulled into a false sense of security because any idea we could end up under an evil tyranny seems too fantastical. If someone had told you in December 2020, perhaps as you hugged loved ones with Christmas cheer, that only a few months later that hug could have you arrested you would have thought it pretty unlikely. One of the many benefits of growing up German as well as British is that I’ve always been aware that evil, especially that which exploits division and the ‘othering’ of fellow humans, can take hold of any society under any flag. There was nothing especially rotten in the hearts of the German people in the 1930s. However we can look back and see, as Haffner did, where they went wrong.

It may feel like an empty cliché these days to say that every vote matters but that doesn’t make it less true. That truth is that the very act of voting shapes us as individuals. My vote says I’m standing up for what I believe to be right and I have a stake in the future of my country. That then embeds itself into my psyche and actions. It’s not ‘woke’ to say that as a woman with mixed race heritage I am especially conscious that I must never take for granted that I have that stake. As the late great Martin Luther King Jr said,  "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” The future path politics takes here in our green and pleasant land matters greatly, not just for politicians and political hacks but for all of us as individuals, families, communities and as a nation that calls itself ‘United’ Kingdom.