Last
weekend I have made a breakthrough that I have been waiting to make all my
life. I voted in an election, and for the first time in my voting life which
began in 1949, everyone I voted for got elected.
Is this what Christian people would
call a miracle? The occasion was the election for Mayor and councillors in
Montreal. A pleasant-sounding woman called Valerie Plante opposed the blowhard,
one-term Mayor Denis Coderre, who had been a Liberal MP in Ottawa before
tackling municipal politics. His affiliation with the Liberal Party itself
would have been enough to disqualify him in my eyes, so I decided to vote for
Plante’s team, Projet Montreal, and they all won.
The irony is that my vote was based
on probably the least information I have ever had about someone I voted
for.
I think back to that first vote I
made, in 1949. It was in the national election in New Zealand, and it took
place in dramatic circumstances. The Labour Party had been first elected in
1935, in the depths of the depression, and had been in power ever since. During
those years I had never read a word favorable to that government in any
newspaper or magazine, and as I grew through my teens I developed a detestation
for the sort of people who owned the media of information, and for all their
values. That government had been
composed mostly of working-class unionists, self-educated, and for my money
they were the best government I have ever lived. They made our country the pacesetter in the English-speaking world in constructing
a solid welfare state, their creation of a National Health Service in 1935
being a good ten years ahead of any other such scheme in the so-called
Commonwealth. In addition, they carried on the relatively progressive attitudes
towards government of the indigenous Maori people that had become habitual in
previous decades.
The drama came from the fact that our
Prime Minister Peter Fraser, who had first been elected to Parliament in 1917,
when he was in jail for opposing conscription for New Zealanders in the First
World War, had returned in 1949 from an Imperial Defence Conference in London
convinced that to confront the menace of Soviet aggression we needed to
introduce conscription. Talk about an
apostate! He thereafter stumped the country arguing the case for conscription
in a referendum, appearing alongside the hated leader of the National (Conservative
) party, to make his case.
I was working as a journalist in one
of the daily newspapers, which, like all others, represented the conservative interest.
But that didn’t stop me from joining a band of outraged leftists who gathered
around a progressive bookstore in the centre of the city of Dunedin, to stuff
letterboxes with pamphlets arguing against the warmongers, as we thought of
them.
In the event, Fraser won his
referendum --- it was more or less a foregone conclusion, given the Prime
Minister’s ruthless control of the information environment for the occasion
---- but it also had the peripheral effect that it split he New Zealand Labour
Party right down the middle, making it a sitting duck for the National Party
who ended the 14 years of Labour government in the election held towards the
end of the year.
Disgusted, following the defeat, I
got married to my girl-friend, and we headed off for Australia, where a
colleague had fixed me up with a job on a small daily newspaper in the town
of Mackay in northern Queensland.
I didn’t stay in Australia long
enough to be confronted with a vote, but if I had been there I would have voted
for sure against the detestable Robert Menzies, an old-style British-type
Imperialist, who was kept in power in Australia
for 18 years. Talk about going from the fat into the fire!
It wasn't until I arrived in Britain
late in 1951 that I had a second chance to vote. I was just in time for the
election in which Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who had been elected in 1945
with the biggest swing ever known in British politics, and had been narrowly
re-elected in 1950, when his party lost 90 seats to Winston Churchill’s Conservatives,
chanced his arm again. I went around to my
local Labour constituency office, joined the party, signed up to be a local
election worker, and set off towards the expected smashing victory. That euphoria lasted only until the evening I
went to hear Attlee speak, when I was so disgusted immediately lost interest in
the election, withdrew from my stamp-and-envelope-licking job on Labour’s
behalf, and watched in dismay as the dreadful Churchill, always an enemy of the
working man, was swept back into power.
He had a narrow majority, but it was enough to keep his party in power until
the next election in 1955. By that time I had quit the United Kingdom and taken
up residence in Canada. Here, I
supported the CCF, which became the New Democratic Party, but it always lost
whenever I was around to vote for it.
I was sent back to England in 1960 by
The Montreal Star, to find Harold
Macmillan as the Conservative Prime Minister. Now, as a working journalist, I
had the pleasure of attending the House of Commons regularly, and I also was
present at the annual conferences of the major political parties. By this time
Labour was in the hands of Hugh Gaitskell, who was never my idea of a leader of
the working class. Of course, I never liked Macmillan, but, with the benefit of
hindsight, I have to say he wasn’t half as bad as I always thought him. He is the only person I had ever seen who,
when making a joke of the kind usually called a tongue-in-cheek joke, he
actually stuck his tongue in his cheek.
He had a certain sangfroid: for example, on the occasion when Khrushchev
took off his shoe and banged it on the desk for emphasis at the United Nations,
Macmillan asked, “Could we have it in
translation, please.” I was always
amazed at the effrontery of the Tory leaders who talked of their attitude in
terms only of duty, as if no one else could pretend to leadership of the nation
because only they, after being specially educated to the job, were ready to
face up to the heavy duty imposed on them by their birth and upbringing.
I was never high on British life,
having been appalled by its class structure on my first four years in Britain,
from 1951 to 1954. But I was witness to some stirring events during my eight
years as a correspondent in London. For example, the only really democratic
debate ever held on the question of nuclear power and its horrendous dangers
was held at the annual conference of the Labour Party when it came to discuss
the idea of unilaterally renouncing nuclear weapons. The left took the lead,
and I will never forget a five-minute speech by Michael Foot, standing on a
lecturn in front of the assembled leaders of his party lined up behind him, his
long hair bobbing up and down as he turned furiously, his finger jabbing in
contempt at the leaders as he reached a peroration that sent the conference out
for lunch abuzz with excitement. The
argument, and the vote, was won by the left: in theory this should have
committed a future Labour government to renouncing nuclear weapons, but in
practice, it had no effect whatever, because the next Labour government, headed
by its new leader Harold Wilson, simply ignored the wishes of its assembled
members. Britain has the American-made
trident missile with its nuclear armament, until this day.
Come to think of of it, one hardly
ever hears a debate in which he result is not known in advance, the result
depending on the skill of its practitioners, and it is on that observation that
I have come to the conclusion that the idea of a democratic government, of the
people for the people, and by the people, is as myth.
I don’t think I had a vote in the two
elections held while I was living in Britain, but if I had had the vote I would
have been on the winning side once, and the losing side the next time around.
When I returned to Canada in 1968 I
was in my traditional mode --- I could never vote either Liberal or Tory, and
whoever I did vote for lost. I suppose, given that I have hardly ever been represented in the political
discourse of the nation, it is not surprising that I have never much cared to
which nation I was attached. I lived in
Canada, or was domiciled here, for 26 years before deciding to apply for
Canadian citizenship, and when challenged as to why it took me so long I always
said, “I vote every day.” I guess that was my slightly flip way of saying that
I took a full part in the nation’s affairs, through my work and other
activities.
I cannot describe myself as politically
active, although I am a sort of political junky. I joined the NDP again in
order to vote for its new leader recently, but once again I was on the losing
side. My only action was to turn up for a meeting to be addressed by the
candidate of my choice, but when she had failed to turn up 45 minutes past the
advertised time, I quit in disgust, asking the fellow at the door how, if she
couldn’t get to a meeting in time, she could ever hope to run the government of
Canada?
I can say now, of course, that I am
eagerly awaiting proof that I have made the right decision in supporting Projet
Montreal, about whose programme I have only the most minimal knowledge. But
even if that proof is not forthcoming, it will hardly make any difference, one
way or the other, any more than my one
vote in their favour has had any influence on their accession to power.
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