A Few Notes on the Election, seen from an English Town

We recoil from the responsibility of deciding the future of the country. We pretend to be interested, but we run from any real decisions. Perhaps twelve times in a lifetime, some of us in marginal seats can alter the destiny of the nation with a pencilled cross. But will we?

 

No. We will pretend to choose, but actually shrink back into our tribal shells, like so many million frightened tortoises. This is why, at general elections, independents and small parties do so much worse than they do in by-elections and Euro polls. Rather than think, we will rally to whatever flag we think is ours.

 

 

That is why there are few things more dispiriting than talking to voters during a general election. Not that this is easy in Swindon, which currently contains two marginal seats, so making its citizens some of the most powerful in Britain on 7th May.

 

It’s an enjoyably dour and workful town, which I know a bit because it’s where I spent three formative years in the forgotten era of Ted Heath, Harold Wilson, wild inflation and the Common Market referendum.

 

I don’t know quite why, but something in the air seems to make people enjoy clamming up. In many years of canvassing opinion, I’ve never known so many people flatly refuse to speak to me. And don’t think, all you silent ones, that I didn’t notice the Swindonian glint of pleasure in your eyes as you said ‘no’. 

 

Well do I remember, as a cub reporter on the evening paper, rushing to the scene of an explosion in a bacon-packing factory, there to be confronted by a large crowd of workers admiring the plume of smoke heading towards the sky and sniffing the sizzling fumes. ‘What happened?’, I asked the first one I met.

 

A slow smile spread across his face as he studied my eager expression and saw how much I wanted to know. Then he said ‘no comment’ (he pronounced ‘comment’ to rhyme with ‘lament’). One by one, all his colleagues, seeing how annoying this was, did exactly the same. 

 

So thank you to those who did answer my questions. But, oh dear, what a struggle it was to restrain my natural impulse to argue with you. People actually repeated to me, over and over again, the propaganda of the parties.

 

They were worried about the NHS or Tory cuts. Or they genuinely thought the SNP were about to take over the country. Or they actually believed that George Osborne had saved the economy.

 

In the hope of a bit of eccentricity, I approached a rather wild-looking man with a long silver ponytail, only to be met with the answer (delivered in portentous tones and with lowered eyebrows, as if it were hugely profound) ‘Better the Devil You Know’. Then he strode away.

 

Very occasionally I found a UKIP rebel, or a disillusioned person who really couldn’t be bothered to vote, a position with which I strongly sympathise. I don’t buy stuff I don’t want. Why vote for people you don’t like or trust?

 

But one man said, without any sense of embarrassment, that he had always voted Tory, and always would, just as he had always shopped at Tesco, and always would. He wasn’t going to be influenced out of either by better quality, lower prices or more attractive policies elsewhere. Tory was what he was, and Tesco’s too. From what he told me of his life, he didn’t seem to me to have any reason to be contented with either of them.

 

By contrast another rather conservative voter spoke of his sorrow at the spread of zero-hours contracts, and the way insecurity, low wages and unaffordable housing were blighting his son’s life.  He himself had recently spent £150,000 on a new house. ‘It might as well be made of cardboard’, he said. ‘I can hear my neighbours breathing’.  He had wanted privacy, and this was what he had to settle for instead.

 

How he’ll vote, I have no idea. No government on offer will make much difference to these things. But for him, as for many, if this is prosperity he isn’t that pleased with it.

 

A sad man in sunglasses who had spent much of his life in Africa, mourned the death of Christianity among us. I knew what he meant. Another of my Swindon memories was of my search for lodgings, and viewing a small room with a lino floor and an iron bedstead, as the landlady said encouragingly ‘You’ll be safe from the Devil in here’.

 

 

I was, as it happens, so young and foolish that I did not then especially want to be safe from the Devil (who seems to come up quite a lot in Swindon conversations).  A fat lot I knew. But even then, in the early 1970s, Christianity was still a force in the lives of many, many people, far more than now.

 

Swindon’s changed as much as Britain has. Even 40 years ago there were still traces of the old Victorian hierarchy of the company town it had been for a century. Where you lived, where you went to church, where your children went to school, had depended on your place in the vast railway workshops where you would probably toil for your whole life.

 

Now, behold the new Britain, a miniature Milton Keynes astride the M4, where the old Great Western Railway wagon works has been turned into an outlet store. There, beneath the old cranes and pulleys, shiny shops sell fashionable clothes on credit. In the midst of this strange place - metrosexual modern glamour in a building redolent of masculine austerity - a gigantic high-heeled shoe, made out of Lego, revolves slowly on a plinth like an object of pagan worship.

 

Actually, unlike many former industrial towns, Swindon still makes things. Out to the North-East, in a gritty zone of grinding traffic and palisade fencing, is the enormous plant that presses the steel panels for the BMW Mini. Beyond that lies the huge Honda car factory (I seem to remember the site once belonged to Vickers).

 

Is it only me that still finds it odd that, in an age when British politicians still like to use World War Two images to promote themselves, and recall our finest hour, so many of our people depend for their daily bread on factories owned by our defeated foes, whereas the shipyards and factories that built our warships and aircraft in 1940 closed forever, long ago, and their names are forgotten?

 

But what much of Swindon most reminds me of is the USA, the raw, unfinished landscape of outer Detroit or Gary, Indiana, the brutal scrapyards next to the factories, the railway spurs amid the long grass, the bars, supermarkets and drive-in burger joints in the middle of nowhere.

 

There’s even the strange contrast between the sparkling malls with their high-end chains, and the nearby rim of  tattoo parlours, slot-machine arcades and convenience stores selling floppy, faded vegetables. And out beyond all that, the plonked, pop-up suburbs and multiplexes, planned like mazes to discourage through traffic and so give some sense of privacy where there isn’t really any such thing.

 

This may well be the Britain millions want. No more nonsense about class or hierarchy, plenty of fun and fast food for sale, and wide uncluttered highways to drive about on. On top of that, not too much security, in work or at home, but not too many ties to hold us down either. 

 

What can politics say or do about this?  It just is, as the waves of global fortune and misfortune wash over us. I suspect that Swindon’s clever borough council has (whoever ran it) concentrated for half a century on persuading new business, and new people, to come here. Its very willingness to be anything and try anything has made it prosperous, with more private sector jobs than almost anywhere.

 

From having been a Wiltshire town where you had to live there 30 years to count, and the word ‘gas’ was pronounced to rhyme with ‘farce’, it’s now an Everywhereville of newcomers, from all over England and Wales, and indeed from Goa, the Punjab  and Warsaw as well.

 

I have to say Swindon is not excited by the election, though one of its two Tory MPs, Robert Buckland, is in serious danger of losing his seat to Labour. There’s hardly a billboard, loudspeaker or poster to be seen- and those you can see are all Labour.

 

I spoke to two of the candidates (another said she’d meet me but then lost her voice) and attended a lifeless hustings where the Green candidate said she was so nervous she was in danger of vomiting (her rivals shifted away from her in their seats) , and repeatedly told her student audience that she was ‘p***ed off’ about lots of things.

 

Has it come to this?  In packed, dusty halls not far from here, I listened not all that long ago to literate, educated, genuinely passionate speeches from all sides in the 1975 Common Market referendum campaign.

 

The more I look back on those rather thrilling few weeks, the more I think they were the last time politics was properly alive in this country. But that referendum, of course, was the moment when we really ran from responsibility, opting to let our country be run by a committee of bureaucrats somewhere in the Low Countries. Something tells me we don’t really care enough to take it back again. That’s the only prediction I’m making.