The only game in town

You would wonder why we play politics.

Here's a game with ill-defined (and often undefined) rules where people who are all striving for the same thing end up with temporarily different views of slight variations of the same thing. Similarities that allow them to posture, scream at each other and offer the occasional witty barb in defence of their position. People who manufacture 'sound bites' to attract applause of their own kind, a section of the population who would probably applaud just as enthusiastically at a flushing toilet.*

Thus we have, say, two or even three political parties (three if you count a bunch of former members of one party who had a split over some faint brand of their ideology from their mates, or couldn't get the power they wanted. You choose which issue forced the split that shattered British politics, etc) who are arguing about the same thing. Arguing about shades of the same thing.

Not one of them, for example, would say that we don't need schools or the NHS or any army. Unthinkable! They argue about how much schooling, the amount of medical care or the degree of defence we need. No question to be asked on the subjects themselves. It's not big differences they have either on their agreed platforms; the gaps are minute in global terms. Ten billion or ten billion one hundred thousand? The differences are marginal but the rhetoric inspires the fans of these strange groups of people to get agitated and blubber that their person has it right.

More? Well, how about our involvement with Europe? Do you want more Europe or a lot more Europe in your life?

No, that's silly. You are never asked if you want any Europe in your life. It is there and we are subservient to it that's all there is to that subject. You are told it's good for you and the discussion -- grown people acting like kids and making gestures at each other across a polished table in a long room not big enough to seat everyone who wants to be there -- is just then about how much Europe is good for you.

You see, the battle lines have already been drawn up, the site of the battleground fixed, the 'forces' of each side using the same words and ideas and the terms of our surrender worked out. It's just how much surrender can we manage.

The end result is the same in all these politics. The mindless slaughter of a few thousand words with people retiring into dark corners of a subsidised bar or restaurant to lick their wounds over coffee or wine. Reserve forces, aka the media, are wheeled in to report the conflict as unfairly as possible but the battle is over. Oh well, after a good night's sleep and the due claiming of expenses, its back to the fray for how much of this or how much of that.

Perhaps one day there will be a party who says that, actually, we don't need any of this or that. I wouldn't however count on it; all of them are capable of 'crossing the floor' to join the other side, or sides, without any loss of rank of privilege.

But worse of all, these people want this 'battle of wills' to be exactly as it is. They want power and all the trimmings of glory and elevated position -- with attendant wages and expenses -- to be in this strange game. How strange? If you play chess with someone else you try to win, not reach compromise. You play with pieces of quite different colours, clearly identified with clear rules. Yet politics is not like that. The rules are vague and can be bent, the pieces have no real clear function and better still they are all on the same side of the board and might only be distinguished by a subtle shading that requires you to hold each piece up in the brightest of lights to check which 'team' it belongs to.

Best of all, the chess pieces in politics are changeable. They are not fixed forms. They are changed sometimes by circumstances and whispers beyond your understanding but mostly altered by whim and whimsy as the need arises. Or they are changed by those people -- often not even elected by you and yours but secure in foreign climes and tyrannies -- who can offer something tasty for a change to be made. Further, what one piece says can say something quite different a while later. What one piece will attack will vary depending on the direction of a political wind that you don't generate or even have felt.

There is however a declared 'need to do things' given credibility by statement and bluster and yet it wasn't you who stated it. You might go along with it, if so instructed or guided or misled, but frequently the issues are all the same on both sides of the board. Sorry, I meant the one side of the board; I was forgetting there is only one side in this.

In which case, it suddenly dawns on you that there are actually two sides to this game but it is you on the other side of the board. And the politics side has all the power and all the self-serving interests to put them out of your reach. They may be misshapen and unidentifiable pieces but they gave themselves all the power and money.

So why do we play this when it works against us, the people? Simply because it is the only game in town. All you can do is stop playing because, frankly, it is the only move you have left.

Happily nothing will alter and the discussion of degree can carry on among the similar but shapeless pieces arrayed on the far side of the board, well out of your reach.

*I regret the reference to flushing toilets and any slight on them my blog may have made. Flushing toilets are, in fact, the opposite of party politics. The mechanism that causes a mini tidal wave to get rid of what you don't want is far more useful, and more clever, than all the overpaid, preening, posturing self-servers in public life.