2013-2018
The other day, I saw this post on Facebook. Here, Paul writes to Jeremy Corbyn to ask him to campaign for zero-hour contracts “to be banned for all industries where quality, consistency and reliability of service is to vulnerable or dependent people?”
Politics in the West, particularly the UK and the USA, is a bit of a shit-show. The current President and Prime Minister are probably the least popular leaders in the last 100 years. The division between the right and the left is more palpable than ever. On the face of it, this is terrible. But lying beneath the surface is the reality that for the first time in a long time, people are realising that politics is important, and that their beliefs are worth fighting for.
I’m by no means an expert in political thought. I’ve never studied politics, up until recently (Brexit, Trump, the mindfuckery of Theresa May’s wheat fuelled political suicide otherwise known as the snap election) politics has never really affected my life. I think that’s why, lately, I’ve been relatively quiet on the blog front. Since I stopped identifying with Christianity and ‘completed’ my deconstruction, I’ve had no real need to post about theology. Philosophy and ‘radical’ theology have interested me, but again, since God died, I’ve not many ideas interesting enough to blog about. Politics is something which I’ve had a growing interest in, and have touched on a couple of times in my blog but, most of the time, I’ve not felt confident enough in my understanding of politics to contribute anything meaningful.
2016 has been a tough year for politics. We started with the EU referendum, where the United Kingdom shocked the world by voting to leave the European Union. Then this was well and truly Trumped (pun intended) by the presidential election in the United States. Both of these countries were split by two opposing sides, broadly speaking it was between liberal and conservative politics. To me, being unashamedly left wing, (I make no apology for that. I am, as my good friend so gracefully put it, a ‘fucking lefty liberal’ and proud!) the whole thing felt like a rather depressing game of snakes and ladders.
