The Fact Hunt.

It’s scary to think that we’re only a day away from a general election. I don’t know about you, and I can’t possibly imagine in what direction you’re leaning, but I hope you have at least decided who you’re going to vote for, or rather which party; because of any general election in my lifetime this is definitely not the one where you’re likely to be voting on personality. Of course, you may have decided not to vote at all, and there are at least seven good reasons for that. If you do abstain, either through apathy, confusion, ignorance or idleness then that’s fine, but it does mean that you can’t moan about what goes wrong when it all goes wrong. And it will all go wrong.

It will all go wrong because whatever or whoever you vote for is achingly unqualified to govern this country. We seem to get weaker and lamer by the day and that’s because we don’t have a single person from whom we can draw a drop of inspiration or afford a shred of respect. They are all, quite literally, making it up as they go along and when one of them does end up at the top of the table come Friday morning they will be hit by the realisation, sudden or otherwise, that they really shouldn’t be doing this at all. If you can wrestle one positive from the situation it surely has to be that we aren’t alone. Look across the globe and political turmoil and incompetence are all you can see. Oh, I’m sure Lichtenstein may be governed in a decent enough fashion, as might some incestuous by necessity, remoter than remote Pacific island, but then these are places that have little heft when it comes to global stability. Any country that has any kind of gravity at all is all over the shop. It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.

And that’s important. The fact. And all the other facts. Because at least when you have a fact to play with you can’t leave people in the dark. So let’s just work with the facts and it will all end well, eventually. Except, and this is quite a major snag, we can’t even trust facts anymore. Facts are blurted out with careless abandon and then questioned immediately and dismissed out of hand as either fake news or complete bullshit. It would be easy to blame Donald Trump for this kind of high powered hijinks but I’m afraid it’s been going on for centuries. People lie to get into power and then lie when they’re in power and then lie when they retire to earn obscene amount of cash for telling everyone all about their lies. Only today, Joe Biden has blamed his scarily bad presidential debate performance on jet lag and travel arrangements when we all know, and can clearly see, that he is old, exhausted and slipping ever faster into a swamp of dementia; now, that’s not strictly speaking a fact, but there’s a lot more truth in it that most of what you’ll hear in the next couple of days.

Separating the lies from the facts has become so impossible and so pointless that it explains why the last few weeks of clawing, hand-wringing electoral campaign have been so limp and pathetic. I’m bored of hearing all this stuff, over and over again, and while I don’t know much I do know this: a lie repeated over and over again by someone who has convinced themselves it is the truth is still just a lie, it merely becomes what is best described as a personally prescribed fact (terms and conditions apply, please read the small print). Everyone has already decided how they’re going to vote and there’s nothing the rest can say – white lies, black lies, small lies or big lies – to change minds. There will be a brief wave of adulation and celebration for whoever gets in and then within a week we’ll see whoever runs the country for the next however-many-years fail in almost every promise, each one backed by cast iron ‘facts’ which will blister and crumble as if made from nothing but dreams and wishful thinking and, especially, lies. Which is what they are. Anyway, I’ll be voting tomorrow but it won’t be for the best party and it won’t be for the party I think will win. And like it or not, that’s a fact. I’d advise you to choose wisely, but in this election that simply isn’t an option.

G B Burton. 03.07.2024