The University of Essex is a truly ghastly place, a monstrous carbuncle despoiling a glorious area of parkland once painted by John Constable, an essay in 1960s architecture that was deemed so bad - even at the time - that development plans for 29 towers were cancelled after the first 6. Within its concrete walls run a rabbit warren maze of corridors linking often windowless and confusingly numbered rooms (there are 3 different systems), creating a mind-boggling and unmappable network. Urban legend has it that the architect responsible ended up in a physiatric hospital, and that wouldn't surprise me, as no sane mind could ever create such an oppressive, unpleasant and inhuman environment - let alone one so confusingly arranged. I never found out who he was, he obviously decided to stay quiet!
Now if any building in the land was in need of something cheery hanging on the walls, the University of Essex would I'm sure you agree - even from my brief description above - more than be a candidate. However the University of Essex has a particularly left wing reputation, sadly resurgent despite the best efforts of myself and other members of Conservative Future, and this leaning is manifested in art. In the deepest depths of the University the Department of Government is identifiable by two things - the skirting boards and doors suddenly turning [blood] red as you turn the corner, and the fact that everywhere you look there's art. But not just any art, oh no, only the most depressing, oppressive, pessimistic and socialistic art will suffice here. All in greyscale and starring out from the wall are terrifying looking beggars, tearful children without shoes, women sobbing, broken down elderly folks and other similar images of suffering, which I believe are from South America and make Haiti look like Henley.
These artworks - if you can call them that -are however I feel illuminating in an unintended way; they carry to me not the artist's anti-capitalist message, but a message about the artist and his socialist kind. And that message is simple: socialists are pessimists. About human nature they are pessimists in that they see us all as either the oppressed, as featured on the art, or the oppressors, the unseen bogey-people responsibile. Never to them could we have the capacity and moral fibre to be neither the oppressed nor the oppressor, without of course the State. About the economy they are pessimists in that they doubt our ability to develop without them leading the way. Not apparent to them are humankind's unlimited talent, creativity and enterprise. To the socialist it's never sun, always rain: something becomes successful - that's inequality; something ends or changes - grab the violin. In a carnival of joy they'll find the child who lost her balloon, and rather than hope she gets another one, decide instead to ban balloons. (I'm stretching it a bit but you get my point).
What makes this election so interesting is the starkness of contrast between the parties in terms of Labour pessimism and Conservative optimism, and the choice of direction facing Britain. Labour has always been on the side of pessimism, of socialism, and Conservatives almost always on that of optimism, of freedom, but the clear blue water between the two in these terms has widened dramatically. It has become a choice between a Labour Party that believes in only the State and a Conservative Party that believes in people, between trust the masters and trust the people. Some find trusting people rather than the supposedly magical government to be uncomfortable - as reaction to the manifesto has shown - with fears that "ordinary people" (as opposed I assume to the magic pixies of the LEA) will be incapable of running schools or managing their own choices. It's a pessimism in ourselves that Labour plays on, just as they played on fears when BA, BP, British Gas, BT and other nationalised giants were denationalised. It makes the election not only a choice between Optimism and Pessimism, but a referendum on ourselves. Are we capable of making our own choices, or would we just rather be told? Let us hope optimism wins through.
