Recently I have been trying to notice more, and appreciate, how nicely-kept some of the front gardens are around my part of south London. In May and June particularly, their fresh colours have stood out against the brick and pebble-dash or arid drop-down driveways around them. They stand out too against a broader backdrop of dullness, for around them is a generally a street, is a borough, is a city, is a country, is a continent, is a world, in which all sorts of things seem to be going downhill. The town centre, for instance, is becoming noticeably more litter-strewn, more graffiti-spattered, emptier, less hospitable: we sense we are in decline. And there are some things that seem to crystallise this decline. One wet day in April a local pub, the Burn Bullock, a seventeenth-century coaching inn long neglected by its owners, was gutted by a fire so spectacular that local suspicions of foul play seem quite understandable. There is much frustration at the negligence of the owners and the borough council’s seeming impotence in the matter.
And Britain, too, suffering a similar sense of decline, of the decay of public infrastructure, of a weakening of solidarity and a sense of the common good, of moral and social disillusionment, goes to the polls today. With good reason many people are unhappy with the present government, dissatisfied with their record, and angry at the personal moral failures of its members, particularly during the crisis of the pandemic, and the indication of the polls is that they will be thrown out of office.
2024 is a year of many elections around the world, and ours is not the only anxious and fractious electorate with compelling reasons for its frustration. In some places crisis has spilled over into catastrophe: war (both in those places whose names we know only too well, and also in others of which we hear little), drought (East Africa), economic collapse (Lebanon, Venezuela) and the persecution of minorities (China, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, and more).
We remain fortunate in this country that, flawed and skewed as it may be, we have a working democracy; that we can vote out an unpopular government, and that the verdict will be accepted. Of course, in voting out a government we also need to vote in a new one, and, sanctimonious as it may sound, it is surely healthier to look for something to vote for, rather than the obvious things we might vote against — but this is harder than it sounds, and in this election the choice seems as narrow as ever. Anyone asking how the parties will look after the weakest and most vulnerable — the disabled, the destitute, the elderly, the unborn, small children, those vulnerable to crime, genuine refugees, and the otherwise downtrodden — and also those less immediately vulnerable but still in precarity — renters, the lonely, young fathers and mothers, the indebted, the unhappily employed — will find slim pickings indeed. Which of the parties will foster the common good and civic society? Who will uphold marriage and family life, and the happiness of children? Who has a competent answer to the twin problem of the energy crisis and our duty of stewardship to the natural world, our ‘common home’, and to people whose livelihoods bear the brunt of our over-consumption and waste? Who will enable the police and the courts of law to apply justice (tempered with mercy, not excuse-making), to the scourge of crime, of drugs, of dangerous driving, of vandalism, of burglary, of robbery, of assault and of murder, so that the law-abiding can live in peace? Who will manage the public finances prudently and with integrity? Who is worthy of the stewardship of the extraordinary bequest of our country from generations past, or worthy of the responsibility to hand it on, at least intact if not improved, to the generations to come? I am afraid I have found no clear answers.
I wonder if the main answer lies (and has always lain?) with us, with ordinary people. To return to the suburban gardens — here they still are, little defiant oases, easily missed but there all the same, quiet but eloquent counter-witnesses. Seeing them I realise that it is every day, not just polling-day, that we make a difference to our surroundings and our neighbours — and thereby to the world, however modestly. After all, a front garden, too, is a kind of vote: a mark made for a cause, a cross planted in a box, with a spirit of hope for the future.
