Insult added to right-wing injury. The BNP have gained their first ever seat on the London Assembly.
Funny how reaction for its own sake engenders reactionaries. The idea that, if you’re unhappy with the way things are, you pick the polar opposite. That there are other alternatives doesn’t seem thinkable. ‘But the Greens won’t get in…’ Not if you don’t vote for them they won’t.
Whenever you start thinking of candidates ‘having a chance’, you’re trying to second-guess the herd instinct of others, and that just won’t do. The whole point of voting is getting away from the crowd, empowering the individual. You vote for the one you want, not with one eye on what everyone else might want. I think that goes some way to explain today’s results.
This failure of the imagination, this fear of difference, of individuality, of standing out from the crowd, forces people to go for misplaced conformity over sense. From a full range of choices, they narrow it down to what they think everyone else is doing. I know it’s my personal crusade, but there’s a link between this way of thinking and prejudice against otherness of any kind. There is danger in numbers.
The media can barely count beyond two, either. The idea of a ‘third way’ has been devalued, being too often enshrined by those already in the top two choices who just want to get the edge over their rival.
London voters have fallen in step with this binary swing. ‘It’s about time we went right-wing again’, they’ve thought to themselves. Why? Because they want something different and can’t break out of the either/or way of thinking. And in a city famed internationally for encouraging so much choice, so much diversity, so many ways to live, so many ways to be, it seems all the more sad that when it comes to the ballot box, diversity is the last thing on Londoners’ minds.
So Tory it is, and the same spirit mutates into voting BNP on the other form, reaction against Labour and Mr Livingstone equated with voting for actual reactionaries. In for a right-wing penny, in a for narrow-minded pound.
The saying goes ‘may you live in interesting times’, and some Londoners think having Boris and the Conservatives in charge is going to make life in the capital more interesting. But like ‘brave’, the word may be a euphemism about to backfire. ‘Interesting’ can also be a polite way of saying ‘ill-advised’.
