I always write a blog about my ward’s elections just before voting day. I really thought I wouldn’t this year, local politics being as it’s been lately but – look, I’m doing it!
This has been a very strange election campaign period for me – a few years ago, I would have been right in the thick of it, beating the drums for a Corbyn-style Labour candidate everywhere I went. Last time around, I voted Communist (at least you can trust them to be socialist, and they know what a woman is). In the 2017 elections, our local Labour Party was all for the Progressive Alliance, something that we had to play down in our dealings with party HQ. I was amazed how the other end of the Labour Party, and all the other parties, were so abominably tribal about it, bending their views and policies (and the truth) whichever way they thought could gain them an advantage and – well, maybe we did, a bit. I think even then, I didn’t like what party politics did to people.
Now I’m not a party member, the sniping shows up worse. I rather think tribalism is invisible to tribal drummers. The most interesting thing that happened to me during this campaigning period was that Andrew Feinstein evening I keep bashing on about. We discussed political corruption, how utterly sold out and dangerous our mainstream political world had become (and make no mistake, that includes the smaller Westminster parties) but where does that leave me, here in Braybrooke, Hastings, with an X to dispense on Thursday?
We have all three kinds of independents in town at the moment – left, right and er… an Independent Party. Um. But no indies are standing in my ward, and we don’t even have a Communist this time so all we had to think about was blue, red or green. Well, no need to think about blue. I never even found out the name of the candidate so they clearly don’t want Braybrooke any more than Braybrooke wants them. Red is out for me just now because – well, Labour ain’t red any more and their teams have made quite clear that they’re not up to answering either the woman question or the genocide question. As for the NHS question – good grief, “let’s bring in more profiteers to make the NHS work better.” No thank you, Wes Streeting.
So I was left with Green, whose prospective parliamentary candidate in our town is rather naïve on the genocide question and – well, I wouldn’t even ask her the woman question. I got all depressed and thought I wouldn’t vote at all. Then I got depressed about that, and then we kept getting Green campaign stuff, and a letter from British Airways – oh pardon me no, that was Labour – I forgot they’d gone all racist and nationalist and flag-wavy.
As a last resort, I wrote an email to the Green candidate in our ward, a missive of the kind one generally writes to agony aunts.
Well, turns out he lives just round the corner – a genuinely local candidate for the local council elections! He came round, and answered the genocide question well and the woman question, as well as chatting about Braybrooke issues in a way that only a truly engaged local resident would. So, whilst I wouldn’t vote for someone so far away from my end of the political spectrum in the nationals, against all the odds, and after much debate, this household is voting Green on Thursday. Talking to the folks around here I think that in Mark Etherington, we might just win ourselves a very useful and capable borough councillor.
If you’re not in Braybrooke — well I’m really not in the business of telling people how to vote just now. Most of my friends in other parts of Hastings are weighing up the odds between Greens and Indies — but then most of my friends either got kicked out of the Labour Party or left it in solidarity with those who did.
If you actually read this despite not being in Hastings – thank you for your interest in my life! I wonder if you’ll give the indies a try where you are. The mainstream parties are so utterly regressive I think most people probably should – but do be wary, there are some stonking far-right indies in some towns.
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Cheers,
Kay
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Kay Green 