This morning’s Telegraph View column is entitled “Most Britons don’t share Ken Loach’s dystopian vision of his country“. I agree. In fact, of all the failings of the British Left over the last decade, perhaps the largest is a consistent over-egging of how bad certain problems are, resulting in a “cry wolf” factor when a crisis really does come along. But the Telegraph piece shows a great lack of self-awareness in one key respect: the Right engages in dystopian porn, by that I mean a sort of fetishisation of how bad everything supposedly is, as much as the Left does.
Anyone remember “Broken Britain”? Prior to the 2010 general election, this is what Cameron had to say on this topic:
“This election will not just be about the economy. Britain’s broken society will be on the ballot too. People doubt whether change can really happen. They see drug and alcohol abuse, but feel there’s not much we can do about it. They see the deep poverty in some of our communities, but feel it’s here to stay. They experience the crime, the abuse, the incivility on our streets, but feel it’s just the way we are going. They see families falling apart, but expect that it’s an irreversible fact of modern life.”
If that isn’t a dystopian picture of life in the UK, I’m not sure what would qualify. Want a more recent example of this type of behaviour on the Right? Thank you, Donald Trump:
“….for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.
“This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
Dystopian barely covers that – it’s more akin to horror movie dialogue. Ah, but that’s the American Right, some of you might say, what about the New Right in Britain these days? If the campaign to leave the EU wasn’t dystopian, again, I don’t know what definition you’re using. “Breaking Point” is about as dystopian as it gets.
I would really like it if both the Left and the Right would stop exaggerating how bad everything is and start discussing pragmatic ways to solve the real problems we face instead. However, I’m not holding my breath. Worst of all, we’re about to go through a period of real turbulence socially, politically and economically, one in which really bad things could possibly happen to certain segments of society. Yet with all of the hysteria of the last decade ringing in everyone’s ears, one wonders who will be able to still hear about it all when the actual problems descend.
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