My Google Assistant had an interesting message for me this morning. I apologise for the aspect ratio; if it helps, please rotate your head.
It seems young, thrusting Past Me left a reminder for old, busting Present Me, directing me to a blog post. This blog post, in fact, posted ten years ago today.
Here’s the salient quote, and what made me leave the reminder to myself:
I’ve said this many times, and it’s truer than ever. The test of any proposed new law should not be how it is intended to be used today, nor how the next government or the next set of police commissioners might decide to interpret it. It’s about the government and the police that come after them. The ones we cannot know, living in a world we cannot know, with pressures and technologies and enemies and realities we cannot know.
The post ends with this:
Who will be prime minister on August 20, 2023? Cameron? Miliband? The other Miliband? Johnson? Farage? Griffin?
It seems quaint, naive almost, to think that there was a chance Cameron would still be PM today. Cameron! Posh PR man, pig man, Brexit man, austerity man. In the last ten years we’ve had “Brexit means Brexit” May, father-of-n Johnson, that one who killed the queen and the economy (I had to think: Truss, who was swapped at birth with a deer in some headlights), and now we’re on Sunak, currently fresh from a $1200-per-head meal at Disneyland and richer than the King. Sunak, who – don’t forget – lost to a candidate so poorly equipped for office she was unceremoniously dumped after 45 days.
Sunak wasn’t even an MP ten years ago. In 2013, he was director of an investment firm, coincidentally I’m sure owned by his father-in-law. And neither was Keir Starmer, now leader of the Labour Party, then Director of Public Prosecutions.
Since 2013 we’ve also had Corbyn, Trump, and Brexit, and Ukraine, and we almost won a couple of football things, and Liverpool hosted Eurovision, and we had Covid.
We still have Covid.
And Sunak has been curtailing the right to protest, and pushing laws about police surveillance of private communications, and leads a government that hates immigrants and trans people, and happily allows corporations to pollute the rivers and seas, and pretends it cares about addressing climate change while continuing to subsidise and push fossil fuels.
The ones we cannot know, living in a world we cannot know, with pressures and technologies and enemies and realities we cannot know
Where will we be in another ten years?
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