Opinion: Guildford, Like Everywhere Else, Is Living Through ‘Interesting Times’

Published on: 22 Nov, 2016
Updated on: 10 Dec, 2016

By Martin Giles

We appear to be living in the kind of “interesting times” that the Chinese are often said to wish on others as a curse*.

World population is ballooning, we face uncertain climate change, and all its possibly planet-threatening consequences, the world’s trouble spots remain troubled, including the tinder-box Middle-East, the whole Western economy based on debt, seems dangerously fragile, and millions struggle for a crust while the US president elect poses in front of gold-plated front doors.

Is it any wonder that there is a restlessness in the air?

Is it any wonder that workers in the North East of England who have seen their wage packets undercut, or even disappear, felt they had nothing to lose in voting for Brexit, or those in the “rust-belt” of the United States, given the choice of Trump or Clinton, decided to go with someone who at least promised some change?

Interestingly, the second choice for many Trump voters was Bernie Saunders, far to the left on the US political spectrum. Either the simplistic “left” and “right” labels are no longer useful or voters were so desperate for change they were not fussy about what kind.

The other day someone showed me a cartoon map of the USA which showed all those living in the areas other than the west or north-east coast regions as dumb (that’s not precisely how it described them, as you might imagine).

I have heard similar descriptions used of Brexit voters.

To my mind it is a lazy and insulting generalisation by those who sometimes smugly claim some sort of intellectual superiority.

The same group label views, with which they disagree, as populist, ignoring the fact that democracy is based on popular votes.

Others seem to hold equally prejudiced views of anyone better off than they are as undeserving, selfish and uncaring.

David Brooks, an American journalist to me sums it up well when he says: “Populism and elitism are the same thing. They are class prejudices, crude class prejudices that so-and-so, because they are uneducated, is less worthy, or so-and-so, because they are richer or more educated, is unworthy.”

But why I am I writing about all this in a Guildford online newspaper? Will the restlessness affecting much of the Western world be felt here?

Perhaps not. Most of us in generally prosperous Guildford might have good cause to be quite happy with our lot and the way things are, or at least were before June 23. Only a minority of us here voted for leaving the EU, albeit a larger minority than some, including our MP Anne Milton, expected.

There is undoubtedly some disquiet within certain parts of the borough about the Local Plan, particularly those most affected by the proposals to earmark large strategic sites within the green belt for development.

But will that be enough to significantly change the outcome of future elections?

Despite the limited success of the Guildford Greenbelt Group and truly remarkable election results in Lovelace, where the Lib Dem candidate won, and held, what had been the safest Tory seat in the borough, the likelihood is that if an election was called tomorrow the Conservatives would still be returned with a working majority.

Why is this?

It could be that most of us are content with the way the borough is being run and the Local Plan is shaping up. Perhaps we feel that growth and development is inevitable and there is little point resisting it, or that given the national housing shortage and the need for our younger folk to get on the housing ladder, we should have more development, even if it does cost us a bit of green belt land.

Or perhaps most of us, in our busy lives, are relatively unaware of local politics and planning proposals and simply vote, if we vote at all, depending on our current attitudes towards political parties at a national level. Certainly the correlation of national and local election results indicates that is the case.

In any case, with our first past the post system, even quite sizeable swings of opinion may not be reflected in the number of seats that change hands.

So, if the Conservative government is gambling that there will not be enough discontent in constituencies like Guildford to threaten electoral success, in their heartlands, they could be right.

But it is a bit of a gamble. Most GGG voters would previously have voted Conservative. If GGG steals enough votes and the Lib Dems recover some ground, it just could change the balance of power at Millmead.

And the Tories must think that their voters are concerned about the green belt. Why else make election promises about it, however hollow, as they did last year, in the lead up to the 2015 election?

Anyway, whether it is a curse or not, we certainly are in “interesting times” and Guildford is not isolated from the rest of the country or the world. Perhaps Guildford voters will yet change their political allegiances, whether influenced by local issues, national issues or by major political changes that are still to come, changes that might even transform our own local political landscape.

*The provenance of this saying, sometimes attributed to Confucius, without any apparent accuracy, is uncertain. The earliest strong match appears to come from a March 1936 newspaper report in the Yorkshire Post of West Yorkshire, England. The expression was used in a speech by an influential British statesman Sir Austen Chamberlain (half-brother of PM Neville Chamberlain). He said: “It is not so long ago that a member of the Diplomatic Body in London, who had spent some years of his service in China, told me that there was a Chinese curse which took the form of saying, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ There is no doubt that the curse has fallen on us.”

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