People are passionate about politics again – and they want radical solutions | Owen Jones
For two and a half years, British politics has been a pantomime played out in the corridors and boardrooms of Westminster and Brussels. The electorate has barely managed to press their noses against the glass and peer in: much of the Brexit debacle has unfolded out of sight and scrutiny. Instead, ever since Boris Johnson's ascent to the premiership, the country has effectively been treated to a one-sided general election campaign; the opposition has been all but squeezed out of media coverage. All of this now changes: the spectators can storm the stage.
In the 00s, it was often claimed that political apathy had replaced political participation. Membership of political parties and electoral turnout were both said to be in irreversible decline. Who can bemoan the lack of political participation now? This is our age of mass politics: the Scottish independence movement, Farageism and Brexitism, a youth-led climate emergency movement, and Jeremy Corbyn's Labour, which began as a husk and flowered into western Europe's biggest political party. And it is this, in large part, that makes the election so unpredictable, so volatile. There is a politicised populace united around a single but fundamental point - desire for rupture with a status quo that never enjoyed enthusiastic support and now has lost popular acquiescence. If Johnson triumphs, his government will wrench Britain out of the EU with a deal that threatens to punch a hole the size of Wales in the economy, and use Brexit to remake British society in a hyper-Thatcherite mould. Labour's mission, on the other hand, is to up-end a generation-long experiment in market fundamentalism and redistribute wealth and power away from its principal beneficiaries. Each represents an abandonment of the old order, even though the Tories' version will benefit the vested interests who bankroll them.
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