Groundhog years

As it has been 18 years since I haven’t been al­lowed to vote in Britain, and as I have no in­ten­tion of mov­ing back there (alive or dead) I tend not to fol­low the coun­try’s pre-elec­tion de­bates. But days be­fore the June elec­tion, I stum­bled across one which had me all but chok­ing on dejà vu. The for­mat - a cross-sec­tion of British cit­i­zens ask­ing ques­tions to the two main can­di­dates in a TV stu­dio - was iden­ti­cal to one I saw at the age of eight, back in the ’Six­ties. To make mat­ters worse, the Tory can­di­date, Theresa May, was stun­ningly sim­i­lar in man­ner and ap­pear­ance (es­pe­cially the eyes) to her ’Eight­ies equiv­a­lent, Mar­garet Thatcher. And then the pre­sen­ter - hereto­fore in­vis­i­ble - broke in with a ques­tion of his own and I thought no, it can’t pos­si­bly be, surely he’s not still alive, but yes, it was David Dim­bleby, he who had pre­sented the cur­rent af­fairs pro­gramme ’Panorama’ when I was in my teens, four decades ago. The ques­tions too, had a creep­ily fa­mil­iar ring to them. May was be­rated for in­tro­duc­ing cuts to the Na­tional Health Ser­vice, some­thing which Con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers have been be­rated for, for at least five gen­er­a­tions. And Cor­byn was asked about whether he would launch a nu­clear at­tack if nec­es­sary. Seen from Cat­alo­nia, this sounds ex­tra­or­di­nary, if not down­right de­mented; but in Britain, pointed ques­tions about the nu­clear threat have been a way of cor­ner­ing the more left-wing mem­bers of Labour since time out of mind. I felt I was watch­ing a de­bate which could have taken place when I was a kid, an ado­les­cent, a twenty-some­thing or even when I was squirm­ing into early mid­dle age, not least be­cause the brand new con­text cre­ated by Brexit - which ob­vi­ously didn’t exist in past elec­tions - was steered clear of, de­spite all of its many po­ten­tially dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences for the UK. (Things are, in­deed, look­ing so bad that even Eng­lish farm­ers, stead­fast con­ser­v­a­tive Brex­i­teers in the main, faced as they are with re­duced in­vest­ment and a dwin­dling Eu­ro­pean work­force, are hav­ing sec­ond thoughts - or per­haps the first thoughts that some­how eluded them when they cast their votes).

How­ever, when I fi­nally tuned in to elec­tion night, any sense of dejà vu was swept hap­pily away. It was the first time I’d seen at least half of the BBC’s elec­tion re­porters with Asian or Afro-Caribbean phe­no­types (Cata­lan pub­lic TV, please take note!); and it was the first time I saw Scot­land, Wales and Eng­land being treated as three dif­fer­ent po­lit­i­cal sub­jects (Madrid, please take note!). And the elec­tion re­sults too were like noth­ing I’d ever seen be­fore, with a gen­uinely left-wing Labour Party win­ning an as­ton­ish­ingly large num­ber of votes. And the morn­ing after, closer to home, I was hit by an­other first: in a move un­prece­dented in all of Eu­rope, the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment an­nounced the date for its uni­lat­eral ref­er­en­dum. All this po­lit­i­cal change, then, all brought about by the sim­ple plac­ing of pieces of paper in bal­lot boxes. In a nut­shell: last month left me feel­ing more op­ti­mistic than I had in years.