Seymour, Benedict. 2020. Dissolving the People. In: Tories Out Propaganda Unit, ed. How To Win. London: Tories Out Propaganda Unit (TOPU), pp. 87-90. [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

‘Dissolving the People (Blue Redaction)'. Text in How to Win, a print and online publication launched 27 September 2020 at ASP Artists Self Publishing Fair, ICA, London. Edited and published by Tories Out Propaganda Unit (TOPU). Featuring texts and images responding to the TOPU group's activities around the 2019 general election.
'It’s been six months since the U.K. general election. We started this anthology as a way of thinking through what came out of that election, why we had bothered campaigning so hard for Labour when we were hardly great believers in parliamentary democracy in the first place, and what it meant to come to terms with the reality of another 5 years of Conservative governing in the already existing racist shithole that is ‘Great’ Britain. Seems pretty small fry now as we live in the contradictions of a global pandemic disproportionately killing Black and Brown people while mass protests against the murder of Black people in police custody actually bring forth a reality of the once seemingly impossible abolition of the police.

So this anthology is maybe more than a bit out of date. But it’s still a document of what the fuck was going on back then, and perhaps in some way reflective on how we find ourselves now.

With contributions from: Tom Allen, Toby Bull, Sophie Carapetian, Miri Davidson, Gloria Dawson, Peter Ely, Alva Gotby, Aurelia Guo, Danny Hayward, Sam Keogh, Vlada Maria, Mira Mattar, Jessa Mockridge, Daniel Neofetou, Ben Polhill, Julian Pritchard, Ralph Pritchard, Ash Reid, Hannah Schling, Erica Scourti, Ben Seymour, Chris Timms, Ishbel Tunnadine, Laurel Uziell.

We launched How to Win online at the Artist Self Publishers' Fair, 27 September 2020. Download the pdf: https://tories-out-propaganda-unit.tumblr.com/

By some accounts the right had basically won in advance with Brexit. Decades of Thatcherism, Blairism and austerity led up to the great referendum like a rising scream. They had managed to tap into the increasingly polarised and bitter class dimension of the Brexit vote that Labour had somehow missed. They did so using a nationalist anti-migrant, anti-bureau- cracy pretext to exploit real pain and a real desire for change, however self-deluding and fantastical. A vote for instant ‘real change’ through Brexit segued into a vote to ‘get it done’ with all the cathexis and magical efficiency of a psychosis. The sense that voting changes nothing and all politicians are bad meant only a non-politician as in the USA or Europe in the ‘30s could win with these people, and Boris Johnson played it well. Labour had none of the ‘riot in office’ dynamics of a Trump or Boris, putting forward by polar contrast a politi- cian with the longest (albeit most principled) political career possible, not a ‘non-politician’. Jeremy Corbyn didn’t formally propose to offer alternative canalisations of rage and re- sentment as an official part of the programme, it was more about positivity, fairness, hope, etc, than smashing the elite/bankers/high end scroungers. Meanwhile the Tories made the most of their phantasmagoria of benefit scroungers and migrants to supply hate fuel for their vote: collect your narcissism of minimal difference points, proles! Nonetheless, the latent anger and explosive sense of suppressed possibility (with free wifi as a fore-glimmer of vaulting commie ambition, no more or less plausible and effective than the promise of a warehouse full of trainers) was growing increasingly explicit in the weeks up to the vote.

Item Type:	Book Section
Related URLs:	https://tories-out-propaganda-unit.tumbl...
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Art
Dates:	Date Event 27 September 2020 Published Online 27 September 2020 Published
Item ID:	38509
Date Deposited:	28 Feb 2025 11:01
Last Modified:	01 Mar 2025 21:27
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38509

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