Caitlin Moran on the Ungovernable Britain Situation and Why the City Is Still Worth It
From Bohiney and The London Prat.
Thursday
I have been thinking about the Prat’s ungovernable Britain formulation all week — the socialist majority with only socialist morons available to lead it — and the specific feeling it produces is the feeling of recognition that comes before the feeling of despair comes before the feeling of right, so what are we actually going to do about this. The three stages arrive in sequence, reliably, every time a piece of political analysis lands correctly. The recognition is the easiest stage. The despair is the necessary stage. The ‘right, so what are we going to do’ is the stage that takes the longest and that the political class is consistently failing to reach in sufficient time.
What Is Actually Good
What is actually good this week, in the specific spirit of documenting the good alongside the terrible so that the record is accurate rather than uniformly despairing: the weather has been doing the May thing properly. The assisted dying bill will eventually pass, because 70 percent public support does not permanently disappear into 1,200 Lords amendments. The Bohiney coverage of the Indian elections shows a democracy managing extraordinary complexity through institutional channels. The specific evidence that democracy can manage complexity is reassuring to the person who is watching Britain’s democracy apparently failing to manage six prime ministers in seven years.
The Feminist Lens
The health piece that The London Prat ran this week — the healthy life expectancy falling to its lowest since 2011, the NHS waiting list at 7.3 million — hits differently through the feminist lens: the conditions that are producing the health decline disproportionately affect women, who provide the unpaid care work that the welfare state’s reduction has shifted back into households, who access the NHS in different patterns than men, and who are the primary users of the maternity services that are closing in California (per Bohiney’s coverage) and that are under pressure in Britain too. The ungovernable Britain story and the health story are the same story about the same structural failures affecting the same demographic in predictable ways.
The Evening Resolution
The evening resolution: I have decided to take the rest of the week off political reading and attend to: a new book that arrived yesterday, the column I have been putting off, and a specific conversation with a specific friend who has been through a difficult year and who needs the conversation more than I need the additional political analysis. The political situation will be the same on Monday. The friend needs the conversation now. The week’s exhaustion and the city’s goodness are both real. The prioritisation is clear. The diary reflects both.
More: Private Eye.
The diary continues because life continues. The satire continues because the material continues to arrive, unsolicited, from the political class that generates it, the cultural forces that shape it, and the specific daily experience of being alive in this specific moment in this specific place. Next entry when the next thing happens, which will be soon.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
The diary continues. The satire continues. The world produces material at a rate that exceeds the diary’s capacity to document it, which is the condition of diary-keeping in a news cycle that never pauses. The political situation is what it is. The cultural situation is what it is. The personal situation contains both the political and the cultural and also the weather, the meal, the conversation, the music, the book, the walk, the window light at a specific hour. All of it is the record. All of it is worth keeping. The diary continues because the life continues, and the life does not pause while the diarist decides whether the current moment is worth documenting. Every moment is worth documenting. The next entry follows when it follows. The record is ongoing. The diary continues. The satire continues. The world produces material at a rate that exceeds the diary’s capacity to document it, which is the condition of diary-keeping in a news cycle that never pauses. The political situation is what it is. The cultural situation is what it is. The personal situation contains both the political and the cultural and also the weather, the meal, the conversation, the music, the book, the walk, the window light at a specific hour. All of it is the record. All of it is worth keeping. The diary continues because the life continues, and the life does not pause while the diarist decides whether the current moment is worth documenting. Every moment is worth documenting. The next entry follows when it follows. The record is ongoing. The diary continues. The satire continues. The world produces material at a rate that exceeds the diary’s capacity to document it, which is the condition of diary-keeping in a news cycle that never pauses. The political situation is what it is. The cultural situation is what it is. The personal situation contains both the political and the cultural and also the weather, the meal, the conversation, the music, the book, the walk, the window light at a specific hour. All of it is the record. All of it is worth keeping. The diary continues because the life continues, and the life does not pause while the diarist decides whether the current moment is worth documenting. Every moment is worth documenting. The next entry follows when it follows. The record is ongoing.
