How Will Scottee Vote?

          In the film Monos a group of rebel guerrilla fighters holds a hostage captive somewhere in the hills of an unspecified South American country. It could be Columbia, but we don’t need to know that. For us, habitués of western liberal democracies, this is standard political conflict all over South America.

          In the film, Joker, a fictitious character becomes overwhelmed by society’s unpitying animosity towards his personal predicament and turns against it with a vengeance. As a parable for the effects of society’s failure to take care of its own, Joker is OTT but within it lies the seed of authenticity: and the power of a parable lies in simplistic message-delivery.

          In the film Official Secrets we are told a (true) story of why governments lie and how they employ the institutions and agencies of the state to facilitate and disguise their perfidy. Nor are we considering some notoriously corrupt foreign regime: the government in question is our very own.

          Yes, I’ve had a bit of a film-fest over the last week and the theme has been socio-political. And, in addition to three cinema visits, I made a rare trip to the theatre, where a character called Scottee performed a one-hander, Class, which is about his experience of being a “working class” person. Scottee’s piece is witty and heartfelt but it is somewhat limited by his simplistic definitions of the “middle” and “working” classes and his refusal to accept any gradation (“it doesn’t count if your parents were working class, if you went to university you are middle-class”).

          But it is surely time to ditch class-terminology that was appropriate in the manufacturing-based economies of yesteryear: blue or white-collar job demarcations are not as overwhelmingly present as they were. Something more than ‘job’ now determines where we sit in our social strata: it is possible to be highly educated yet unemployed. It is possible to have several jobs but still be in poverty. It is more possible than ever before to be self-employed, i.e. to make an income independently of any employer, and not just as a rentier: there is eBay, YouTube, gaming and all those internet-enabled opportunities that are open to everyone.

          These societal changes will be an important factor in the coming General Election. Talk of “traditional” Labour, Tory or Liberal heartlands has become a discussion about how loyalties to the main political parties have been affected by change and, more topically, the issue of Brexit. Will Scottee vote Labour because he is from a working-class family, or will he choose Tory because he wants the UK to leave the EU? The choices are more complex than simply voting for one’s perceived class. And, for those who might be inclined to give up out of frustration and abstain from voting altogether, consider this: “There is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some diehard's vote”.*

          Assuming people are persuaded to vote, what set of social policies will they vote for? Well, for some at least, it is more a question of who they will vote for. The elevation of personality over principles has always impeded the ideal of democracy and, as politicians well know, it would be naïve of them not to play that card. Nevertheless, my heart sank when I heard a vox-pop piece in which a woman said she would vote for Boris Johnson because “He’s a bit of a naughty boy but I like his energy.” I dread to think what damage to society would ensue from having an energetic naughty boy in charge. Maybe the time is at hand when we should be considering taking hostages and heading for the hills.

*David Foster Wallace, novelist, essayist, and short-story writer (21 Feb 1962-2008)