‘The left in Britain is still in shock. We did not have time to emotionally prepare ourselves for a Tory majority government, because the pollsters and analysts with their fancy graphs and scientific formulas were insistent that the election race was neck and neck … For many, it is as though time stopped at 10pm on 7 May 2015: we’re still trapped in that moment of horror and panicky disbelief.‘
Owen Jones, The Guardian, May 27th 2015
Three weeks last Thursday, the election result was announced and I woke up the next morning feeling quite numb. I’ve shifted away from the feeling of ‘panicky disbelief’ Owen Jones describes above to feeling simply, angry.
Which was why I was keen to respond to a call I saw on Twitter over the bank holiday weekend just gone; a public request from artist Peter Liversidge, asking for peoples’ nominations of protest songs to add to his own. I nominated Elvis Costello’s Tramp the Dirt Down which remains as powerful a song to me today as it did when it was first released in 1989. It’s nothing, if not angry! You can listen to it by clicking on the link at the end of this post.
Costello clarified the song’s message in Q Magazine in March 2008: ‘You shouldn’t really celebrate when anybody dies, but I think she did this country a disservice in the things she tricked out of people.’
I also believe Thatcher did Britain a disservice – a huge disservice and I dread what Cameron and his government’s imposed austerity measures might do to so many vulnerable people of this country over the next five years. That said, it feels important to maintain some degree of hope and to hold onto the fact that someday, sometime in the future, things will be different. Change does happen, campaigns for fairness and justice do succeed and people power works.
‘Where there’s hope, there’s life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again.’ to quote the inspirational Anne Frank.