Five days of rushing slowly across England, thirty-five railway stations, thirty-five high streets or marketplaces or seafronts – and still there’s more of all of this to come. One song, over and over and over again.
We’re starting to get an inkling of what it might be like to be a politician, making the same stump speech at every stop on an endless itinerary. But we are not trying to convince anyone. If you’re trying to convince anyone, you don’t go out dressed like this.
Each time we get off the train at a new place, we find ourselves sniffing the air, sensing for clues as to what it is like to be getting on with your life in a place like this. And the clothes, the music, the harmless foolishness of our little gang seems to open up a line of contact, so that within twenty seconds people are talking to us about their lives.
In Brighton and Lewes, the air smells green, and then we cross some unmarked threshold and in the next few towns another reality takes over. Listening to the way people talk, we find ourselves starting to understand why they are drawn to UKIP, not because the facts or the arguments add up, but because in this reality it could sound like they make sense.
Repetition is boring. Repetition is endlessly fascinating. Keep repeating something beyond the point where it starts to get slick and sometimes you break through to another level you didn’t know was there. The song is the same in every place and in every place it is different. The events that run into us take us by surprise.
In Trowbridge, we started playing and police came running round the corner. There had been a theft of a piece of meat from a shop. A shopkeeper came running towards us, she thought we were just shouting in the street, shouting like a thief. Well, we were shouting in the street. A few minutes later, Bill was listening to the story of a man who had been homeless for twelve years as he talked about his father’s addiction and how he died. At the end, there would have been no point in words. The two of them stood there in the street, holding each other, crying.
The song is the same in every place, but something changes, grows, deepens. Maybe what we’re doing is charging up the song, like we have to keep charging our phones whenever we get a few minutes near a socket. All of these encounters, conversations, stories are charging up this song we started out with and the song is carrying them.
Tomorrow, we head out east from Canterbury and loop through the constituency of South Thanet, the closest we will have come to any of the big stories of this election. Who knows, maybe we will bump into Nigel Farage and sing for him. (We nearly got to sing for Caroline Lucas in Brighton on Monday night.) That’s a thing about singing for people, you can do it in a way that is nothing like an endorsement and nothing like an attack.
Then, on Thursday, we arrive in Finsbury Park to pick up the milk float and drive it down into the heart of London.
We’re going to deliver The Power to Westminster.
When we started saying that, it was a joke, but as we kept joking about it, the thought deepened on us. We’re still figuring all of this out as we go along, finding out what we’re doing by doing it, but it’s starting to seem like this journey culminates in an ironic ritual: the delivering of The Power to Westminster, to remind the politicians that The Power doesn’t belong to them, not really, not on polling day, or even on any other day.
The Power is loaned to them by the people, and they can hardly dare to acknowledge how grudgingly that loan is made, how overdue the repayments have become.
This is the other deficit, the one that no one is making pledges about, and someday the people may call in the loan.
