A Kipling poem hangs above my desk. I was still staring at it at 3 o’clock this morning, wide awake as the reactionaries relentlessly obsessed in the white noise of the internet. “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, / If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, / But make allowance for their doubting too …”
Contrary to what appears to be popular belief, I am not very organised, nor particularly good at “media”. Anyone who pointed out the sicked-up shrimp in my hair on BBC1’s Question Time will know that. Yet if I could have predicted even a tenth of the reaction to my exercising my democratic right to vote for whoever the hell I like, I might not have chosen my birthday to do it.
It was my 27th birthday, and I had left the Labour party. In fact, I had quietly left some weeks beforehand, and run away to look for the living wage, the social housing, the repurposing of abandoned buildings, free education and the NHS. I had left the Labour party to find the values that I thought that it once stood for, and I found them, in the Greens.
Like greeting old friends, I embraced the importance placed on a national health service, on public transport, on sustainable energy, on fair pay for fair work. Here you were, all the time. Oh, how I’ve missed you. I couldn’t see you for a moment for all the Ukip drawbridges and Labour tougher-on-welfares and Tory making-works-pays, but there you were all along.
My politics have not changed. I have been campaigning for the living wage for as long as I have been campaigning, and it was the Greens at their 2013 conference who made a commitment to it. I have been increasingly uncomfortable with the “drawbridges” rhetoric on immigration of the far right, and was horrified to see similar suggestions on leaflets under Labour party mastheads. I am deeply grateful to the Labour party for its commitment to the food bank debate in December 2013, but that petition was also widely supported and shared by Green party members and activists.
For a long time now I have found myself defending my membership of the Labour party while wondering what values of mine it defended any more. I didn’t leave the Labour party. It left me, and many others besides. Yet we, the “defectors”, are lambasted as traitors, since it’s easier to launch personal attacks than political arguments, easier to insult and scaremonger than to reflect on why so many core and loyal voters are edging away uncomfortably. “Vote Green and you’ll get Tories!” they shriek at me. I voted Labour last year. I got Tories. There are no guarantees in a first-past-the-post system that we get the government that represents us.
The joy of living in a free and democratic country is that you can work out what your fundamental ethics and values are and vote for someone who you feel represents them. Oh for proportional representation: perhaps politics would be less brutally tribal. Perhaps politicians, at all levels, would do better to focus on their policies and shout loudly about those.
Forget what I’m doing; my little ballot-paper cross means as much as the next person’s. The only person whose vote you should care about is your own. Because if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything – and many a glossy leaflet shoved through your front door over the next seven weeks will be relying on exactly that.