Daily they drop into my email account — alongside the more obviously useful stuff about how I might elongate my penis or ensure it performs with greater fortitude than at present, and the charitable offers from women who live ‘nearby your house, Roderick’ and apparently wish to test whether or not those previous solicitations I mentioned have been acceded to with success. Alongside all that stuff are the fecund exhortations from a bunch of online campaigning organisations. Click democracy, a sort of spastic form of activism whereby you stick it to da man simply by pressing a button. They come, these missives, from the likes of Change.org and 38 Degrees. Sometimes shrill, sometimes cloying, almost always stupid.
Click here to stop the Tories selling off our hospitals to their vile friends in the City. Click here to stop austerity right now. Click here to let everyone into the country and click here to stop us deporting Mohammed Jihadi al-Semtex, a really lovely bloke who somehow got stitched up by Cameron’s fascist goons. Oh, and the bees, the bees. The bees are dropping dead all over the place. Click here to save the bees. If you don’t save the bees your children will be next, etc. So click here. Put your name to the petition and make a bee happy today. It’s always from the maniacally obsessive, relentlessly involved liberal left, this stuff. Always. There is never a right-wing petition to be signed. You never get an offer which says ‘Click here to deport everyone and don’t let anyone else in’. Or ‘Click here to gas a badger’.
It was the same when Labour was in power, by the way — just in case you’re thinking that the one-sidedness of this activism is a function of us all writhing under the jackboot of a Tory government.
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