Local Elections - When the Memory Hole is You

British political television and radio coverage is obsessed with the vox pop. This has been going on for decades, of course, but has become much worse in the last fifteen years. Every political story must be assessed by the person in the street as a matter of course, often as a replacement for journalistic analysis or an expert contribution. The most ill-informed voice is treated with equal reverence to the slightly more informed. I think journalists must sometimes happen upon very well-informed passers-by but decide that they cannot be 'representative', or worse, that they somehow represent 'special interests' - you know, like public servants.

The BBC will tell you that this is about understanding 'cut through' with voters. Are political messages and arguments reaching the street discourse of the pub and chippy? Let's face it, this is what Real Britain is imagined to be in the minds of the political class. But vox pops can also be a useful measure of our collective memory: how much do people - voters - actually remember about what has gone before? And did they really know what was happening at the time?

The other week, I heard a woman on BBC Radio 4 discussing her voting plans for the May by-election in Runcorn: 'We've voted Labour forever but I don't think we will this time. There's never any money for Runcorn'. Like many people, Runcorn Woman had neglected to notice that the party she's always voted for hadn't, up until July last year, been in national government since 2010. She planned to punish Labour for a decade and a half of defunding and neglect inflicted on her local area - and her local council - by the party she has, presumably, never voted for. The result? A six-vote majority for Reform and another seat in Parliament.

Reform was also declared the winner of the local elections, having taken seats, and control in some cases, from both Tory and Labour councils. The upstart Farage vehicle, it should be noted, still has the lowest total council seats of all the parties, but that didn't stop the national news media from throwing Farage a party and entertaining ideas of him as a future prime minister. So, how did we get here? Do we even know where we've been? And why do some of us clearly think it's not the slightest bit important?

Let's look back in time.

In 2010, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government took the reins in Whitehall after a tight general election delivered a hung parliament with no clear majority for any party. Despite Gordon Brown's extensive action to resist the very worst effects of the 2007-8 global financial crash, not enough of the country was willing to give him his own majority and Labour another four or five years in power. I wrote about those few days of horse-trading at the time and watched as a clear narrative emerged in the following weeks: the impact of the global crash on the British economy was to be landed squarely at the foot of the previous government. 'The Mess That Labour Left Us' was the phrase most readily found in the mouth of every Conservative MP, secretary of state and cabinet minister in front of a microphone for the next decade. It was an effective line and it kept Labour out of power for fourteen long years. Liam Byrne's jocular note to his Treasury successor, 'I'm afraid there is no money', was the stiletto to Labour's electoral ribcage.

But 'The Mess...' wasn't just a powerful phrase for attaching blame. It was cover for a set of policies designed to gut local government funding and entirely reshape local public service provision and its democratic oversight. Austerity was the financial tool; the 'localism' agenda, Cameron's Big Society and Gove's education reforms did the rest. The impact was quick and deep - intentional. It is also still with us: people sitting in temporary accommodation; parents wondering why their child is waiting for months for SEND support, or even an assessment; the lack of foster carers and care placements and the spiralling cost of children's social care from paying independent and private providers; young families looking for local help with a newborn baby; the removal of libraries, the disappearance of local arts and cultural funding. Somehow, all of this is not evidence of poor policy, to be planted at the feet of a particular party and its former leaders. It is simply 'the way it is' and everyone would rather talk about how awful immigrants are.

Orwell's 'memory hole' was for disposing of dangerous information. But what if the memory hole is us - our lack of attention and our willing collaboration in the dissolution of reliable information? It's the news media that fails to hold the past for us alongside the ceaseless present; that revels in the breathless drama and leaves the long view and analysis for the podcast-listening nerds. It's covid, Brexit and the unfathomable procession of Tory prime ministers. Forgetting is permissible, ignoring it is understandable, and mentioning austerity is boring and Corbynist. The public discourse refuses to look back.

A few weeks ago my partner and I had dinner with an old colleague of hers and his wife. All four of us had been working in the public and third sectors when the Coalition came to power in 2010 and we all lived through those devastating early impacts of austerity. We were all affected by them personally: lost jobs, less funding to support our work, closing services for vulnerable people, losing colleagues to redundancy, and watching valuable progress reversed. We all have scars. Sitting around the table, I was struck by our collective memory and why, looking at the state of local and national politics now, all of us felt some despair.

We haven't forgotten. We can see the long view and understand how we got here. I'm sure we're not alone but God, it feels like it when the public narrative is so narrow, blinkered and obsessed with the other, crossing the sea towards us, threatening the very little that we now have.