Certainty

Who knows? I know I don't. There used to be a time when it was so simple. You knew where you stood, on everything. I remember reading somewhere - a writer - saying that an intelligent person must be on the left. It seemed so obvious, so right, so correct that it didn't need questioning. But that was before Thatcher, Reagan, and the re-emergence of the right and their re-invigoration of some older certainties.

Now, over the years - so-called - certainty has collapsed, so now there seems to be nothing left on the left that can be pointed to and proclaimed as a principle to rally behind.

Each monument built, each icon set forward to venerate, each possibility of a new, better, way of ordering this world has collapsed into the rubble of its own contradictions. Progressive politics has suffered the same fate as progressive rock music. It shares the same fate as so many promises.

I don't know why it all went wrong. I don't know if it is possible to fix it. All I know is that now it seems as though it is over, perhaps even dead.

It seems as though it is all finished. Those few successes the ‘progressive left’ did seem to have, have - in their turn - brought just as many - if not more - problems in their wake than they attempted to solve. What has not already been lost is collapsing and dying.