Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, a freelance writer and self-proclaimed liberal, wrote a column for the Guardian newspaper website entitled “Why It's OK to Cry About This Election,” when candidates in the conservative Tory Party scored a significant victory on May 7 over the liberal Labour Party without losing any of its seats in Parliament.
“'Don’t despair,' came the resounding cry from the earnest, energetic left on Friday,” Cosslett said at the start of her column. She continued:
Despair is, after all, the enemy of action. They say that we -- by which I mean “the left” -- must, in the aftermath of defeat, regroup and reassess, find out what went wrong, then prepare and fight.
But despair? Despair breeds inertia, leaves us vulnerable and weak – and so we mustn’t just curl up and cry.
“Except many of us did,” Cosslett stated. “This weekend has, for me, been like the most savage of hangovers.” she stated while noting she and fellow liberals felt “waves of despair, punctuated by panic, anxiety, paranoia, and fear.”
“I wonder how many of you, up and down the country, have been trying to hold it together, too,” she noted. “I finally broke down properly at around 6 p.m. on Friday, when I allowed myself, finally, to think about my little brother -- who is severely disabled -- and what might happen to him.
“I would say sorry for the lack of nuance, but I’m not sorry. I’m just scared. This morning, we hear that Iain Duncan Smith is back in office” pushing welfare cuts, she noted. “Considering how benefits cuts under the coalition have already been blamed for people's deaths, you can't help but fear the repercussions of further cuts.”
The columnist also noted:
You can call me bitter. I’m not exactly thrilled that my best childbearing years will take place under a government that considered getting rid of statutory maternity pay and does not seem to think affordable housing for young people is of any real importance.
You can even call me a sore loser if that is what it means to be scared that the vulnerable will lose everything.
However, there's “something vaguely embarrassing about crying about the government,” Cosslett stated. “It buys into a stereotype of left-leaning people as overly emotional and childlike in their naive idealism and belief that there is a better way to run the country than cutting services to the bone.”
But “those of us who cried over the election result should not feel embarrassed” because many people will suffer under the new administration, including: “the young. Pensioners. Those on benefits. Civil servants. Low-paid workers. The unemployed. Teachers. The old, the sick and the lame. Nobody will be spared.”
Well, not exactly nobody, Cosslett continued. “You might not even know anyone personally affected by the cuts but simply exhibit that most vital of traits: empathy. It’s an emotion so often derided as a weakness of the left, but it is our strength. We mustn’t abandon it.
“Despite the Tories’ efficient media facade, it’s obvious that much of their campaigning was predicated on emotion,” she stated. “It relied on fear, jealousy and suspicion of other members of our communities.”
Meanwhile, the Labour Party “failed to connect with thousands of voters” and was seen as “too left-wing. It failed to tell the stories of those who suffer most.”
The party also “failed to realize that a significant proportion of people in this country refuse to look over their garden fences and ask: 'Why him? Why her? Why my taxes?' because they have more heart than that.
“And it’s that, I think, that makes the whole thing so sad, Cosslett added. “Aside from the fear that we or our loved ones will struggle to survive this time around, it’s also all the people out there in this country who did not want this government, whose hearts, whose empathy, whose compassion have all gone to waste.”
However, Simon Kent -- an author-at-large with the Breitbart.com website – came away from the column with a different perspective, calling it “an archly self-parodying piece.”
“Forget the fact that Labour lost because it was unelectable,” Kent stated. “Ignore the reality that Ed Miliband (the leader of the party) couldn’t even eat a bacon sandwich without looking like it was the first time he had ever fed himself.
“The evil right stole the election from righteous, caring and perfectly formed socialists everywhere,” he added. “Somebody has to pay for all that suffering so it might as well be readers of the Guardian.”
It's odd that someone who goes into great detail about her emotions then accuses her opponents of campaigning on ... emotions. Now she knows how the Tories felt after the Labour Party won a big election, and she will hopefully have more compassion for conservatives when that happens again.
