While we allow ourselves to be distracted by Andrew Mitchell's antics and conference season, in Spain and Greece citizens are fighting for control of their destiny
Cull the Lib Dems. No more apologies. Ask the Queen what she thinks. Or elect badgers, as they will be just as useful. Make Andrew Mitchell minister for truth! I may be a pleb – mirabile dictu! – but I know a distraction when I see one. Domestic politics enters conference season and we all have to pretend it matters. What we are actually seeing is the brandishing of powerlessness from our political class, the shrinking of their ability to think differently or even widely.
Gate-gate was amusing for all of five seconds, though I don't mind a bit of swearing myself. That a muppet such as Mitchell looks down on working people hardly struck me as a scoop. Phillip Blond's peculiar suggestion that we start talking about caste instead of class would I suppose make clear who the untouchables really are, and stop the worrying delusion that the majority of people are middle-class. Nick "I am sorry" Clegg and Vince "I told you so" Cable have jostled for power and defined freedom for us. Clegg himself veered between The Thick of It's quiet batpeople and visions of fascism. As you do.
What interested me was his warning that if we do not write our own budgets we could end up like countries that "find their right to self-determination withdrawn by the markets, and new rules imposed by their creditors, without warning or clemency". In other words there is no alternative to cuts. "The markets" are in charge, so why then even have party political conferences?
This just after we have seen the extraordinary images from Madrid where protesters were shot with rubber bullets. No, we are not Spain. And "Spain is not Uganda", as the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, helpfully texted his finance minister recently. Spain is not Greece either, but why do we play down what is not so far away? Two hours away becomes another world.
So we watch protesters bludgeoned and accused of an attempted coup. We see the graffiti – "The End of Fear" – and we surely recognise, even though we are not in the euro, this attempt to slam austerity on to the population for their own good. The Spanish economy is contracting. For months miners have been fighting police with rocket launchers in Asturias. They don't want a revolution, just a living wage. Unemployment is crippling. There are no jobs for more than half of Spanish youth. Ghost villas crumble as the construction industry grinds to a halt, yet Rajoy is expected to make spending cuts of more than €65bn. There is still a middle class in Spain, unlike Greece, able to soak up some of this damage.
But as the government spends a fortune on tear gas, the centre cannot hold. One and a half million Catalans marched for independence. Constitutionally, no one knows how this can happen, but it is spoken about with inevitability. Thus the crisis will tear apart countries as well as families. It will be a tough technocrat who can hold the north and south of Italy together.
These people who hurt in the places where we used to play have been told like us that they overdid it, and now it is payback time. Our government's story that it is all Labour's fault works only if you avoid all foreign news. But how are we to position ourselves? Must we merely accept that politicians have no choice? That punishing the poor is simply pragmatic, so let's not get all hot-headed like these Mediterranean types?
Well, look at Portugal, hardly famed for its crazed radicalism. When Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho announced a rise from 11 to 18% in social security payments as part of its €78bn bailout, Portugal saw the biggest demonstrations since ridding itself of dictatorship in 1974. The government has now U-turned in the face of masses of all political persuasions. Their posters were telling: "We are not the children of democracy, we are the parents of the next revolution."
This is the backdrop to which our party leaders will set out the agenda. We will have to accept that there is no alternative and that only the likes of Osborne and Laws understand the complexities of what they will push through.
Globally, another narrative exists: from Occupy, from the 99%, or even the 47% – or even us plebs could roll one out. But nowhere is it represented in the party system. As party leaders congratulate themselves on the tough choices they make, not one will say we are slashing the NHS by precisely the amount the war in Afghanistan costs us. Not one will explain that stopping tax avoidance by the super rich would pay for a functioning welfare system. Instead, we are offered the choice only between who can cut most earnestly and most efficiently.
We do not need to be tear-gassed into submission as we simply keep our eyes shut tight while Athens burns. Again.
The message remains that there is no alternative to austerity, but remember the Paris 1968 slogan: "Those who lack imagination cannot imagine what is lacking." When no alternative can be voiced by our main parties, the deficit is not purely fiscal. It is one of democracy.
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