Voting with my feet

 There are many significant elections in 2024. Tomorrow is the UK national election and the current government is universally predicted to lose. 

That government has caused me so many significant problems that, although I was living - and expected to live - my life in the United Kingdom, I felt compelled to leave in 2018. 

I now live in Italy. That's partly for health reasons since the naturally grey, dank climate of the British Isles was causing me many problems, but also for the significant economic damage, xenophobic abuse and now transphobia that has been pushed on me by that government since 2016. Italy afforded me a path to alternative citizenship through a very old law of theirs that anyone who has had an Italian ancestor from 1860 onwards is automatically an Italian, too. That connection merely has to be proved with suitable documentation. Thanks to Italian emigration in the last 165 years, a significant proportion of the world is now Italian! That's why pizza is the world's favourite food, right? Check your ancestry to tap into any benefits. Anyway, that was my ticket out of that hate-filled chaos of Brexit, the UK's crass, corrupt handling of the Covid pandemic, and the current brazen transphobia there. Italy has an officially extreme right-wing government now ... but one that's essentially pro-democracy, pro-Europe, pro-NATO, upholds the rule of law, constitutional arrangements and rights. Unlike the UK government that is so extreme it has seriously considered leaving the UN, human rights organisations and courts, and is frothingly enraged by vulnerable boat people, and by any organisation with "European" in its title, such as the European Atomic Energy Agency ...that oversees power stations!

This extremist insanity has been countered since 2016 not by reason or concerted opposition but by the government's own incompetence. The government has been made up largely of people educated in Britain's private education system (which is, with typical British perversity, known as the public school system), the chief function of which is to give its protegés the aura of competence in command and a right to rule but without providing them with any practical know-how at all. And it is only this failing that has prevented the UK from becoming a new Nazi state, though it came close with Boris Johnson's coup-like antics in 2019. Hitler, by contrast, was not an unimaginative guffawing dimwit, which is why his destructiveness was universal, not merely local.

It is beyond my understanding how a new government is to combat the corruption and criminality left by the outgoing one; the cost of living crisis; the decades-old housing crisis; the financial strains and damage of Brexit isolation; the ongoing banking crisis recession; the loss of international reputation because of the visible incompetence of the last few years; the ownership of much British public and private estate by private equity, shell companies in tax havens and foreign investors; the extreme right-wing leanings of most of the few owners of Britain's media and their corruption of the once politically neutral BBC; and all the other challenges of the 21st century for a country that has a constitution forged in 1689. I'm out of it and am glad to be so. Life in Europe has its complexities, stresses and problems, but nothing like as bad. I feel safer and less put upon. Trans rights are not very developed in Italy but they are not, so far, under that much threat. When I started this blog 13 years ago, Britain was progressing with trans rights, now it's regressing and the Labour Party leadership that is widely tipped to win tomorrow has said that it intends to accept many findings of the recent dishonest Cass report. The UK is a worsening place for trans people now.

When I went back to Britain in May I did renew my UK passport. That's simply to save hassle at the border after the harder effects of Brexit come into effect in due course (Brexit hasn't been fully implemented yet, you see.) But my Italian passport has more value and clout in the world than the UK one right now. How are the mighty fallen.

Incidentally, the UK government made a huge fuss about the return to blue passports after the years of European ones in plum colour. My UK one is unequivocally black, or 'blackshirt' as I call it. They couldn't even get a colour right! Or manufacture the passports in Britain (they are made in Poland, an ongoing member of the European Union). 

So I don't greatly care what the outcome of the election is tomorrow, although the eradication of the current malignant government that has caused me so much direct harm would give me some pleasure for a few hours on Friday. I'm staying in Europe now, like the hundreds of thousands of other Brits who've left and sought a life and citizenship elsewhere. Human rights, liberty and peace are essential to me. I will go where they can be found. The crazed state of the world scares me right now but I have my passports and I will go where it is safe. I hope you may find the safety to live peacefully, too.

Sue x