I had no intention on writing about the results of the election, but I find it hard not to after waking up this morning only to discover my David in front of the tele in his robe, coffee cup in hand. Having been awake since 2 am and finding his brain buzzing with exit poll results, he decided to exorcise the cerebral demons by watching the true results unfurl. Since 6 am my earworms have been repeating results and analyses. To shake these strings of words out of my head, I’m writing.
You, dear reader, know by now that this was a landslide victory for the Labour party with excellent results for some of the smaller, less funded parties, like the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and dare I admit it Reform UK (Nigel Farage’s party). Rather than revisit these themes, I’ll share with you what I am left thinking about, the real winners and losers.
Winners:
The Remainers, those of us who wanted to stay in the EU. Our new PM is a Remainer, and I recall having the pleasure of hearing him speak at one of the many anti-Brexit rallies I attended. Of course, he won’t put us back in the EU as that would involve another referendum, and the country is still dabbing the wounds from participating in the last one. But Starmer has already spoken about closer trade ties to the EU, and that is a key first step, economically and spiritually.
Women are also winners. The number of women MPs has gone up from 226 to 263, which is 40%. Ideally, it ought to be 50%, but I’ll take it. It’s also likely that Rachel Reeves will become Britain’s first ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer. For my US readers, this is the senior government minister in charge of all things economic and financial.
Losers:
As always, the people who didn’t vote. Voter turnout was only 60%, the lowest since 1885.
I would love to say that the far-right populists were the big losers, but they’re still kicking in the guise of Reform UK. They did take a beating though, with many high-profile far-right Conservatives losing their seats.
Finally, the media coverage of the election campaign deserves a wooden spoon. Sound bites and click-bait culture reduced candidates to automatons repeating well-chosen scripted phrases with little substance. The media’s attempt at ‘balanced coverage’ translated into one party’s negative story having to be offset by the other party’s negative story, even if the later had to be created through exaggeration of loose facts.
Whew. I hope this has killed the earworms. Time to check up on David to see if he’s still awake.
What I’ve been reading
After hearing Irish writer Anne Enright being interviewed on This Cultural Life (BBC Sounds podcast), I ordered from the library her latest book, The Wren, The Wren. At one level this is a story about three generations of resilient women, exploring the complexities of their relationships to each other along with the themes of love and abandonment. The underlying catalyst that shapes these relationships is a renowned poet, Phil McDaragh. He was married to the first generation of these women. When Phil leaves his family for a new life, and in time for a new wife, in America, his daughter Carmel tries to reconcile the beautiful love poetry he wrote to her mother with his betrayal. Carmel’s daughter, Nell, who was born after her grandfather’s death, is also under the magical spell of Phil’s poetry and uses it discover her own direction in life and the terms of her relationship with her mother. All of this is told in prose and poetry rich in wit and Irish vernacular. It’s worth mentioning that while working on this novel, Enright had some of Phil McDaragh’s poems accepted for publication using his name as her pseudonym.
Paola Trimarco 