A month ago, I logged out of Twitter, desperate to take ownership of my life after some of the most turbulent years politically and personally. I want to thank the people who have sent me best wishes - your messages mean a great deal to me.
Some have asked me why I left. While I have had some recent pressures in my personal life, fundamentally my decision to leave stemmed from where I now find myself politically and mentally. I feel an increasing pessimism about the direction of the West. Recently, that pessimism has been tinged with a nihilism that I am admittedly uncomfortable with. An overwhelming feeling of futility and powerlessness dominates. Is political change possible? Boris Johnson is shameless, but what are the chances anyone will remove him? It is no real shock that the same person who gained political power using lies, after pursing an entire career based on falsehoods and trivial hair-flipping, has the same intolerance for truth now he is in office. The man thinks he is Churchill when he would be better placed as a court jester. His career trajectory has depended on his ability to fail upwards. When he was fired from the Times, the Telegraph welcomed him with open arms. The usual accountability norms do not seem to apply to him. That he was ever given any power in the Conservative Party is an indictment of its creeping moral failure as a political organisation. And so I feel Twitter as a platform doesn’t serve much of a purpose now, in terms of domestic politics, other than a means to shout into a very large void. And shouting incurs the risk that Twitter admins will remove your account for violation of their rules. I wonder what the point is.
Aiding and abetting this climate of right-wing corruption are the sections of the left that betray contemporary socialism’s worst impulses. I worry that the left often fails to make the case for Western liberal values, with some progressives regarding them as akin to a form of (implied racist) cultural supremacy. Liberalism has no race, but this argument is silenced in a culture absorbed by identity politics and American political ideas that often do not apply in a European context. Starmer’s attempts to move the Labour Party into the centre ground are welcome, but I am still unsure it is possible for the underlying culture of the party membership to change so dramatically in just a few short years. A culture of spoilt faux-progressivism dominates online and retains a kind of cultural power that influences otherwise sensible politicians. We see the capitulation of the Labour Party leadership to its maddest online fringes when we look at the debate surrounding transgender rights. That so many Labour politicians tripped over the question “do only women have a cervix?” at the latest party conference shows just how out-of-touch the left is when it comes to identity issues. In the minds of some politicians, fear understandably dominates and so the mob rules.
I have to wonder when exactly everything fell apart. In the political world the usual rules of engagement have been torn up. Is the right still right and the left still left? In the UK the right wing fought and won a landslide in a general election on the basis it would extricate the UK from frictionless trade with its largest trading partner, while promising forgotten provincial working class towns Keynesian cash injections. Limited government and free trade has been thrown out of the window in the Conservative Party’s yearning for populism. China marches under the banner of communism while controlling geopolitical affairs with its multinational corporations. Stop The War implies it is NATO’s fault as Putin’s tanks roll into Ukraine. Novara Media sells “I’m literally a communist” t-shirts for a £15 a pop. Cancel culture was ushered in on the same online platforms that originally vowed to remove barriers between people and nations.
The world is in chaos. The advent of social media gave the briefest illusion of an upturning of apple-carts and a renewed power in the voices of individuals. Now, despots have learnt to control these platforms and so-called “grassroots” movements are becoming little more than mobs.
I realise this is little more than a meandering ramble. Who cares what I think? I barely do! I mostly hope that my Twitter followers understand my reasons for my Twitter absence. Some of my feelings about domestic politics seem trivial as Ukraine is plunged into war; they likely are. Given the recent events in Ukraine I may return. What I do next will depend partly on my own outlook but also on whether there is any appetite online for my thoughts. If - if! - I continue to write, I will likely do so in a longer format. Twitter is for slogans - admittedly my forte - but in the current tense climate soundbites don’t do my full views justice. It is also too easy to stereotype and to make unfair statements with so few characters. When I talk about “the left” on Twitter, for instance, I am usually referring to a specific subsection (such as acolytes of Stop The War) and not the whole. I believe that dilutes my message, but it is hard to prevent this without changing platform. I would rather people understood my full position on a topic, if they want this, than a few brief sentences that could be misconstrued.
I also need an income. I am now recovering from a several-years-long illness and am trying to pick up the few remaining pieces of my life. Around a month ago, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and the treatment has given me much more energy, so I am getting to a point I may be able to work again. My cyclic vomiting syndrome is also relatively under control with some dietary and medication changes. There were moments in the last few years I wasn’t sure whether I would survive the illness - at times I was vomiting more than 20 times a day and was in severe pain. It took around seven years of daily vomiting for a gastroenterologist to prescribe me an antiemetic. This has been the real backdrop to the vast amount of abuse I have been receiving on Twitter since 2018 when I left the Labour Party. While people screamed at me, I was writhing in pain. Twitter was in many ways a refuge - a place I met new people and found common ground with so many after I had walked away from my life in the Labour Party and while I was incapable of leaving the house. I lost everything - most of my friends, my health and my career in the same period - and I found solace online. But now I am no longer bed-bound it’s time for something new. I am considering setting up a YouTube channel alongside my blog, streaming on Twitch, or setting up a Patreon. I may also post more about my day-to-day life, if I do. Please tell me if you have any ideas, thoughts, or preferences. I want this to be a conversation.
