In Two Minds

The PN campaign song about togetherness is almost frightening. It is not about being together with others but about being together alone. To promote a single party government as togetherness is the height of exclusion. It is the ultimate expression of our political duality.

To those singing and to those to whom the song is addressed the limits of the universe stand within the PN. It is the only way that they can romanticise togetherness in the middle of a bitter contest for power against their adversaries whom they claim to despise.

It makes my hair stand on end to hear it. Now I have had my fill of political propaganda these last 18 years. I feel that I have heard it all before. I am a jaded politician myself but this form of “togetherness” gives me the creeps.

It is exactly the opposite of togetherness. It is the inward looking political pathology that makes a political party sufficient unto itself, detached from the rest of the country in which it operates. No doubt the Labour party suffers from the same syndrome. I have constant experience of two realities in the same space existing quite separately from one another.

If all your friends are blue or all your friends are red, you may already have fallen victim to it. You are at least exposed to it. Thankfully most people and particularly young people have developed immunity for political dualism. They are able to change their minds and are proud of the fact. They resent being politically labeled and their friends are their friends, period. They are the future.

For healthy people togetherness implies being with others and not a concentration of the like minded to the exclusion of all others. Today people enjoy diversity and they can cope with it easily. They can support a party on one issue and its adversary on another. They can turn up at a protest without promising their eternal political soul to the organizers. They can keep all political parties on their toes.

In the bad old days Labour Ministers stood on trucks in their singlets and shouted: “All we have is for Labourites, what remains is for Labourites and if Nationalists want a share they must become Labourites” Exclusion politics fully expressed. Nobody could be so brutal today. Instead we have a song about togetherness, a togetherness that excludes instead of embracing diversity.

The only thing that scares me more is that the people promoting and enjoying this “togetherness” have no insight of their political pathology. So what else is new?