I’m not talking about the latest contestants on Celebrity Masterchief or the people with Eastern European accents that cleaned the car the other day. No, I mean that most secretive, most elusive of beasts, the conservative voter. I know he/she exists. The Cameron Administration stands as testament. But like some exotic quantum particle, let’s call it the conservatron, it comes into being in the polling booth only to disappear completely between voting opportunities.
We do have some clues as to its nature. The nucleus consists of a comform quark tied to a paranoiatron by the strong nuclear force. The most significant property of the conservatron is its seeming inabilty to move forward despite the impetus of an evidence based understanding of the world. It’s fixed position in space time acts as resistance to all the potentially progressive matter around it.
Okay. Linking Britain’s current political reality with particle physics is tenuous at best but my grasp of quantum theory and conservative thinking are directly comparable. That is I only partly get it.
Anyone who spent any time in my company preceding the election will remember me droning on about how important it was to vote and I certainly wouldn’t wish to exclude our ephemeral conservatron. (Sorry, why waste a good invented word?). But as much as it would be democratic hypocrisy to question the political awareness of another active franchisee, I can’t help feeling the conservative voter hasn’t thought things through.
Phrases like “We’re all in this together” and “One nation Conservatism” have characterised the Cameronite lexacon but the unquestionable dismantling of the welfare system now underway does strike one as somewhat of a contradiction. Perhaps Mr. Cameron means we’re all in this together as long as we don’t expect the one nation we’re all part of to look after us when we’re in trouble. Or maybe it means we’re all in this together once we can afford a mortgage or extortionate rented housing and can command a living wage to pay for it. Surely it doesn’t mean we’re all in this together once we’re wealthy enough to attract corporation or inheritance tax , does it? We’re certainly not included if we’re expecting to belong to any kind of effective trade union. Being foreign won’t help the cause either, unless of course you’re looking for a tax haven (yes, the UK is just that), in which case we’d love you to be in it together with us. Mi casa es su casa. My one nation is your one nation.
You’ve heard about dark matter haven’t you? It’s stuff you can’t see that fills the universe but doesn’t interact with the other stuff you can see. Very hard to get your head round. Sound familiar? Does the made up word conservatron ring a bell? We know the conservatron’s out there because it has the power to generate a Tory government. Now you see it, now you don’t. Or is it you don’t see it but you know it exists? Whatever. Better leave all that stuff to the theorists and get on with interacting.
The featured image is by the wonderful Polyp – please visit his website here
The Emerald 