Election Thoughts

I was seventeen years old when I first realised Conservatives existed.  I mean, I knew they existed in Parliament and on the telly, but not in real life.  Cossetted in my liberal-leftie anti-Thatcher pre-social media upbringing, I assumed that all ordinary people shared my views.  Not so.

I was a teenage communist (next album title).  I stood as the Communist Party candidate in my school's mock election (frustrated that my eighteenth birthday was a few days after the actual election and furious with my friends who were eighteen and did not vote) and plastered the school in anti-fascist posters, earning one of my (fairly) rare calls to the Head's office.  I read Marx.  Tories were the enemy.

So imagine my surprise when I encountered a real-life Tory party member (at a classical concert in a rural church, so hardly surprising in hindsight, but not to my teenage self.)

"You'll grow out of it," the patronising (elderly) Tory assured me, on discovering my political views.

It made my blood boil.  It still has an adverse effect on my blood pressure now.

I haven't grown out of it.  I may (finally) be able to accept that I am no longer pollster-classified young and am far outside that oft-quoted 18-25 age bracket, but I certainly haven't grown out of it.

I was also told that as I earned more money, I would change my mind about fair distribution of wealth.

I haven't.

I hate the rhetoric floating around that somehow young people have been 'fooled' by Jeremy Corbyn's Labour.  That, somehow, encouraging young people to exercise their right to vote was a dirty tactic.  That young people are too naive, too ignorant and too stupid to know better.  That they'll regret it.  That they'll grow out of it.

I don't agree with everything Corbyn stands for.  But I do agree with the central idea that prompted 72% of young people to come out and vote in this election: that a fairer society is possible.

His detractors tend to fall into one of two camps: those who genuinely believe that some are owed more than others and those who see a fairer society as an absurd fantasy.

Why should it be?  Those people - the politicians, the political commentators, the media - who want you to believe it's not possible are acting under the assumption that humanity's default position is selfishness.  Everyone looking out for themselves.  This is my money - I earnt it, I deserve it and it's mine to keep.

Well, I like to think a little more optimistically than that.  I would happily slash my not-particularly-large public sector salary if it meant state education could be properly funded, to give more children the start in life that I was given; if it meant that everyone could access the highest quality free healthcare; if it meant that the most vulnerable in our society could be looked after.  (And if anything is worth getting our country into debt over, it's funding these three areas, surely?  Not wild speculation on the financial markets and bailing out irresponsible banks.)  I don't believe I'm alone in thinking like this.

Politics can be a force for good and people can come together.  We are not all selfish.

Labour lost this election, but Theresa May's arrogance failed to win it for the Conservatives.  Although we are entering uncertain, somewhat terrifying times, I am hoping that the people who voted in this election for the first time - the young, the old and the somewhere-in-betweens - have seen that they can make a difference.

And here's a message to the right-wing and centrist cynics: don't tell young people they'll grow out of it.  I hope they never do.

In Pursuit of Justice: Review of The Butcher's Trail by Julian Borger

If nothing else, Julian Borger notes in the final chapter of The Butcher’s Trail, the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia) has made the Balkan wars the most well-documented and catalogued conflict in history.  In this meticulously researched account of the manhunt for the Balkan war criminals, Borger draws on this evidence, as well as extensive interviews, to chronicle the pursuit in fascinating detail, with the story rattling on in places like the paciest of spy thrillers.

They say truth is often more fantastical than fiction, and that proved to be the case in the work of the ICTY; from the bungled arrest of the wrong pair of identical twins, to a plan involving a gorilla suit, to Radovan Karadžić, political leader of the Bosnian Serbs, living the flamboyant cover story of a mythical healer in Belgrade.  Borger’s tale is layered with political intrigue; in this telling, prosecutors and investigators work tirelessly on a shoestring budget, against death threats and government roadblocks from all sides.

Nearly two decades after the fighting finally ended in the region, with all the indictees arrested and only one more verdict, that of Ratko Mladić, leader of the Bosnian Serb Army, left to be handed down (as well as Karadžić’s appeal against his 40 year sentence), it feels as though a chapter has been closed on a terrible era.  Justice has been served.

Mladić and Karadžić on trial in The Hague

Or has it?  Borger muses on this in his conclusion.  Many people in the former Yugoslav states do not think so, believing the tribunal to be either too one-sided or too lenient.  Borger describes the Scheveningen prison as a place of harmony, where former enemies play football and cook together, attend yoga classes and learn new languages, without regard for ethnicity.

Many indictees have been released early or acquitted, free to return home and stir up nationalistic hatred once more.  As for the tribunal's legacy, attempts to set up an International Criminal Court have been hampered by the most powerful nations, wary of the precedent set by the ICTY of holding leaders to account for the crimes committed by those beneath them.

Nevertheless, the ICTY has completed its mission.  All the indictees on its list have been brought to some kind of justice.  It was, as the book’s tagline states, the most successful manhunt in history.  The court's place in history, however, has yet to be decided.

The Butcher's Trail by Julian Borger, published by Other Press (January 2016).