I haven’t really written much about Corbyn. I dared to dream back in 2015, but he’s really been a bit of a let down. At this stage of my life I’m X times bitten X² times shy. I’m not prepared to invest hopes and dreams in a political party or its leader. A party, especially, that is made up of so many competing and non-compatible interests. Now, that’s true of the Conservative party and others too, of course it is. And it was never more starkly revealed than in the surprise pulled by the “yellow book” liberals when they got into coalition power and revealed themselves to be, um, neoliberals. By which I mean, not perceptively different from Tories.

I actually briefly joined the Labour Party but became almost immediately disillusioned when I was excluded from the leadership vote as an arriviste. Oh, well. I would never really want to belong to a party that would have me as a member, would I?

The Labour party under Blair took us into Iraq and lied to us about why. And we’re still dealing with the fallout and the radicalised generation from that. Under Brown, they bailed out the banks who then gratefully altered the narrative so that the financial crisis became the fault of the Labour government that had rescued them. And lo, the last 10 years of hell came to pass. Schools, hospitals, the sick and the disabled: all paying for the mistakes of the bankers, who can afford private schools for their kids, private health care for their families, and ferry themselves around in great big cars tearing up the streets that we all paid for.

And in a way, of course, it was the Labour party’s fault. Because they didn’t do enough to change the fundamental underpinnings of our society, which may have been showing restraint—but no such restraint has been shown by the last three governments, who have dismantled our social support structures and are now blithely escorting us into the unknown Brexit black hole. The 2008 crisis happened because, over ten years of government with a huge majority, the Labour party did nothing to increase oversight or regulation. And we still have private schools. People’s private school fees are still being funded by offshore accounts. Nobody who has any money is paying any fucking tax. Nobody is doing a thing to reduce CO² emissions. Blair’s government “banned fox hunting”, but people are still chasing animals through the woods and across the fields with dogs, so it doesn’t seem to have worked.

And as if they hadn’t massively let us all down, Blair and Campbell and Mandelson are still hanging around, being given column inches by the Guardian, and acting like they know best.

I tried joining the Green Party for a while, but the Green Party is not really a national political party, it’s a series of loosely related local groups. And I honestly couldn’t be bothered to go to meetings.

Why? Fundamentally, I have a problem with activists. I just don’t like being around those kind of people. It’s not that they are wild-eyed and unhinged. It’s more that they’re both bureaucratic and dogmatic. They run things the way they run things. They have fixed opinions. And in this way, all political parties are the same. And therein lies the reason why nothing ever changes: because all political parties, underneath the surface, are running the same old clockwork.

And so to Corbyn whose response to everything is the same low-key muttering. Who treats Brexit like some giant multi-dimensional game of Ludo. You can tell they want a complete clusterfuck so they stand a chance of winning an election. Because notwithstanding the shit show currently playing in Westminster, they’re only level with the Tories in the polls. Level. With Theresa May’s Tories. Corbyn is supported by a cohort of activists who have a certain reputation. They try to shut down dissent. They reportedly get abusive: I mean, we’ve all called someone a fascist, but there’s something exceptional about our socially networked world, where people get to pile in with their pitchforks and everything, that crosses a line. And, there’s this problem with anti-semitism. Now, it probably is a media hatchet job: when Corbyn won, such things were inevitable. But it’s also like a crack in the facade, a vulnerability: the media have chipped away at it, because there does seem to be something going on, when particular MPs are targeted for abuse, and people spread dog-whistle conspiracy theories Zionism. It seems perfectly legitimate to be supportive of the Palestinian people and their plight, but you don’t have to bandy the Z word about.

In the end, I don’t think Corbyn is a saviour. And I don’t believe, even after the last election, that he can bring Labour back into power. And if he did, I’m not sure he’d effectively run this country. He seems a bit wet to me. Like Michael Foot back in the 80s, he’s too vulnerable to the satirists and the newspapers and the Today presenters and the tappety-tap-tap of people like me. And I don’t trust the movement. And I know he’s happy for Brexit to happen, as previously discussed. In the end, he’ll face the same interference from MI5 that any left-wing government would face, and he’d be blocked at every turn by the City and the CBI, or whatever.

Everything feels hopeless at the moment. I was forced, this week, to go to the Post Office and pay £5.50 for an international driving permit that looks like a wartime ration book. I actually asked, at the counter, for a “1950s driving permit, please.” Which is about right, because we’re being launched back in time to the era of blue passports and cardboard and rubber stamps. And I was also forced to check the expiration date on my current passport, because in date will no longer enough. You will/may need at least 6 months of validity. Britain is like Sideshow Bob stepping on the rakes, endlessly. We are self-harming, throwing our toys onto the bonfire, lusting after turnips. And Corbyn is looking at his Ludo board from all the different angles and pondering his next roll of the dice.