So.
During the recent election campaign, I attended a packed parliamentary candidates’ hustings meeting in Lewisham-Deptford, my home manor. I bring it to you now as evidence that anyone relying on the political class to fight for public services should head out now to lie down on the M4 (the middle class does seem prepared to sacrifice the poor).
The meeting was just so appallingly civilised.
Five prospective MPs sat before the voting public in the middle of a recession, an expenses scandal, a public services funding crisis and – lest we forget – a war, and people just sat there and politely heard all five out. I found it hard to credit.
Perhaps we were looking at a crisis of representation. The audience was overwhelmingly white (which Lewisham-Deptford is not), apparently well-appointed, and inclined to kowtow, as the middle class seems fated to when presented with a lineup of wannabe service-cutting zealots. Well-mannered people asked civilised questions about MPs’ expenses, and touched on the recession and topup fees. Their prospective overlords gave answer in turn. I can say for a fact that I’ve been to less cuddly key parties. Middle class foment was as wedded to the horizon as it ever has been.
Things almost picked up about 20 minutes in when a commotion kicked off down the back, but alas – nothing useful was allowed to come of it. A young, local black man made his way into the meeting. His name was Tony Hambolu and he told us that lived on Deptford’s Tanners Hill estate. Straightaway, he got stuck into incumbent and prospective candidates about his cramped living conditions, and unemployment, benefits and social problems on Tanners Hill. He had to shout to make himself heard over a suddenly-ranting, one-issue long-hair – a bloke who had the face to tell Hambolu to shut up and stick to relevant topics, as you’ll see in the video below – but he stuck with it for as long as he could.
Hambolu saw the problem with the meeting – and indeed with millennium politics – immediately.
‘When they’re sitting in your face, you don’t want to tell them the truth!” he yelled at his fellow audience members while pointing at the candidates. ‘There are people in council flats that have got six children, living in a three bedroom flat, living on benefits every two weeks. What do you want to do about it? Please tell me. How are you going to help people? How are you going to help people?’
‘Let’s stick to the issue,’ the ranting socialist said. ‘Let’s stick to the real issue, which is environment and technology.’
Hambolu didn’t think environment and technology was the real issue, particularly. The yelling went on for a while. ‘You’re all full of shit, man,’ the kid said in the end. He stomped out. That, unfortunately, was that. Nobody on the platform, or in the audience, asked him to stay, or went outside to call him back in, or insisted that the candidates dealt with the points that he raised.
A commentator on a Deptford blog later put it this way:
“Tony had a point, but talked over everyone, lost his temper and ended up effing and blinding. His emotions got the better of him – a real shame because he really had something to say.”
There was an uncomfortable truth in there somewhere: that people may participate in democracy, but they must toe arse-tight etiquette lines while at it. Raise a difficult point in a loud, angry voice, and you’ll be abandoned on the grounds of taste.
I had a camera, so followed Hambolu out of the meeting and asked him to expand on his views.
‘They’re putting money in irrelevant things,’ he said. ‘You’re characterising the wrong things. Housing, benefits issues, work, lots of people are out of work. The safety of our children…they are not tackling those problems, and they expect us to vote for them. All these MPs, they don’t look for the real people, the real voice, the people that actually have problems. All these people work. They don’t know about the real issues going on in society.’
PS – please excuse the ghastly standard of the second part of the vid. Have improved since then.