My dilemma is in reconciling my philosophy with my local realpolitik

Letters from a Swing Voter

This week I took myself at my own word – I went out, I met people of various political persuasions, I listened, I queried, I debated and I considered.

One evening, my friend pointed out that it would be more accurate to describe myself as a Swing Liberal, rather than a Swing Voter, although he acknowledged that there remains a spectrum of liberal outlets for which I could cast my vote. He’s right, of course, that’s why I’m writing this for LabourList, but it revealed something else about the system, and ultimately about me. I believe there are fundamental wrongs in the world, and no one party has a monopoly on the ability to change them. Human rights are universal and they are indivisible – this means they are to be enforced by us all, for us all. It was with great sadness, then, that this week confirmed my worst suspicions: equality is still a progressive battle.

I can say nothing of your lives, readers, but I know I am lucky to live in the UK in the 21st Century, where I can make choices about the way I choose to live my life without fear. In the global context, I’ve got it all – free health care, compulsory education, the right to work, the right to wear what I want, fraternise with whom I wish, report violence, discrimination and manipulation, have children, have no children, buy a home, buy a car, buy food. By rights, I have nothing to complain about.

So forgive my melancholy, but I struggle to raise a high-five when equality has turned into a farce.

I take it as an unequivocal fact that the equality gap is widening, and quite frankly there are people more learned and more articulate than I who have spent years compiling data and theory to prove this, so I am certainly not going to try here. I also take is as an unequivocal fact that it is singly the most important issue we face. I’m not alone; any straw poll of the general public will reveal that overwhelmingly we want fewer exaggerated pay scales and a greater balance between all the good stuff in between. You know, the things that make us happy and fulfilled which, genuinely, money can’t buy.

But maybe that’s our problem. We haven’t assigned financial costs to things like the environment or community spirit. You can’t blame the market for destroying something it hasn’t put a value on, and we’re so blinkered by everything else the markets have ruined that we can’t see beyond it into a world where we assign new indicators for wealth beyond GDP. I thought that this was something we all wanted ultimately, something we all believed underpinned everything else we bother waking up in the morning for. I also thought it was something all parties took as read that their voting electorate saw as a priority. So why are only the progressives talking about it?

I met Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party this week. She talked fluently about equality and our most pressing political concerns simultaneously, and she painted a clear picture of what could be done if we muster the imagination. Caroline is relatively unhampered by virtue of the fact that the Greens are a party of the future; she can afford to be aspirational without being whittled away by the drudgery of day-to-day politicking. And I thought she was fantastic. Does that mean I vote for the Greens? Unlikely, given my constituency. But she remains one of the few politicians to have addressed equality as a universal issue and not some niche agenda for feminists, hippies and socialists.

So yes, I am a Swing Liberal, but I am a voter nonetheless. Someone commented on one of my previous pieces that my answer was simple: either vote Labour or don’t vote at all. Sorry to disappoint, but in my books not voting is the worse thing you can do. Caroline Lucas doesn’t have all the answers, and Richard Reeves summed it up perfectly when he reminded her that “it is impossible to disagree with you philosophically; but impossible to agree with you politically.”

To be progressive is to be equal, and to be equal is to be human. You can’t divide it any further than that. Anyone who can move equality from the philosophical to the political mainstream may gladly have my vote.