A joke about Reform claiming credit for the swallows leaving made me laugh at them, and then I remembered who used to deliver my leaflets
Monday, the Garden, Swallows Gone
The swallows left the barn across the lane a fortnight ago. I always notice the day. One morning the wires are crowded and the next they are bare, and autumn has begun whatever the calendar says.
My neighbour’s boy, who is at university and thinks I need educating, sent me something this morning. A headline from NewsThump, which I gather is a comic website, in its political pages: “Reform UK claims victory after ‘mass exodus of undocumented immigrants’ as migratory birds depart for the autumn.”
I laughed aloud. The dog looked at me.
It is a good joke. A party so keen to claim success that it takes credit for the swallows. I enjoyed it rather more than I should, because of who it was aimed at.
And then, as usual, I thought a bit longer.
Where I Stand
I had better remind anyone reading. I was a Conservative councillor for twelve years. I stood down when Gerald became ill. I am sixty-seven and I have voted the same way since 1979.
Reform is not my party. I think it offers simple answers to hard questions. I think some of the people at the top of it are more interested in being on television than in running anything. I would not vote for it.
So a joke at its expense should be pure pleasure.
The trouble is the last election for the council here. My party, which had run the place for as long as anyone could remember, was very nearly wiped out. The Liberal Democrats took control. And Reform, which had not existed here in any serious way, came second.
Those Reform votes were not conjured from the air. They were ours.
Mr and Mrs Pugh
I shall give them a name that is not theirs.
They farm about two hundred acres, sheep and some arable, on the edge of my old ward. For every election I fought, Mr Pugh put my poster on his gate and Mrs Pugh delivered my leaflets down four miles of lanes that the party could not get anyone else to do. She did it on a bicycle. She is seventy-four.
I met her in the Co-op in the spring, after the count. She would not quite look at me. Then she said, “I’m sorry. We couldn’t do it again.”
They had voted Reform. Both of them. People who had been Conservatives since before I was.
I asked why. I did not argue. I wanted to know.
What She Said
It was not, mostly, about immigration. I had expected that. It came into it. But it was not the heart.
She said: fourteen years. You had fourteen years. And what is better?
The surgery in the village has closed. They drive eleven miles now. The bus went in 2016. The bank went. The police house was sold. Their son cannot afford to live in the parish he was born in. The road to their farm has a pothole that she has reported, she told me, nine times.
And all the while, she said, people from my party stood up in London and said how well things were going.
She said, “We kept voting for you because we always had. And then we thought, well, what for?”
I had no answer. I had sat on that council. I had voted for some of those cuts, because the grant from the government had been halved and there was nothing else to do. I had explained that on doorsteps. She was not interested in the explanation. Why should she be?
So About the Joke
The joke says Reform claims victories it has not won. That is fair. A new party that has never governed can promise anything.
But I do not think that is why the Pughs voted for it. They are not fools. They did not believe a man on a platform was going to fix the pothole.
They voted for it because it was the only way they could see of saying to my party: you took us for granted.
That is not a vote for something. It is a vote against. And you cannot laugh a person out of that. If anything, laughing makes it worse. They already think the sort of people who write for comic websites look down on them.
What My Party Got Wrong
I can say this now that I am out of it.
We promised to bring immigration down, election after election, and it went up. Whatever one thinks of the numbers, to promise a thing four times and do the opposite is to teach people that you do not mean what you say.
We spoke for the countryside and let its services go. We were the party of law and order and closed the police stations. We were the party of sound money and changed Prime Minister three times in a few months.
A voter can forgive a government for failing. I do not think they forgive being told it is succeeding.
What Reform Gets Wrong
And yet I cannot follow the Pughs.
The answers on offer are too easy. Stop the boats, cut the waste, and all shall be well. I have sat through enough budget meetings to know that there is no drawer marked “waste” with the money in it. Every pound is somebody’s bus or somebody’s carer.
And there is a tone I do not like. A sourness. A sense that the country has been stolen by someone and must be taken back. I am a conservative. I do not think the country has been stolen. I think it has been neglected, by people like me, and needs looking after.
That is a duller message. It does not fill a hall.
The Split
What worries me, as someone who has counted votes, is the arithmetic.
In a ward like mine there might be a thousand people who are, broadly, of the right. If six hundred vote one way and four hundred the other, neither gets in. Somebody else does, on thirty-five per cent.
That is what happened here. I do not complain of it. The Liberal Democrats won fairly, and their councillor for my old ward is a perfectly nice woman who has already had the pothole looked at, which I never managed.
But it means that the people who think as I do, and as the Pughs do, have no voice in the chamber at all. We have divided ourselves out of it.
My old colleagues talk about “uniting the right” as though it were a matter of leaders shaking hands. It is not. It is a matter of Mrs Pugh, and whether anyone can give her a reason.
Fairness All Round
I should be fair to the young man who sent the joke. He meant no harm. He thinks Reform is absurd and that I shall be pleased. I am, a little.
And I should be fair to Reform’s voters, which is harder. They are my neighbours. They were my friends. They are not what the newspapers say. They are people who waited fourteen years for a bus.
And fair to my own lot. We did some good. I could list it. Nobody wants to hear the list.
Tuesday
I went to see Mrs Pugh. I took a cake. I did not talk politics. We talked about her hip and my roof. On the doorstep she said, “You’re not cross?” I said I was cross with myself. She said, “You were all right. It was them up there.”
That is what everyone says about their own councillor. It is not a compliment to the party.
The young man also directed me to the London Prat, which I now look at. Its British satirical news on the right falling out with itself has two men arguing over which of them lost, and its London satirical news about canvassing brought back every wet Saturday of my political life.
The swallows will be back in April. I am less sure about the voters.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
