In this election, Keir Starmer is keen to tell us that it’s time to ‘turn the page’ after the past fourteen years.

In The Sellout, Paul Beatty writes:

That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book—that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper it’s printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions, and song. History is the things that stay with you.

To improve the standard of government in Britain would be wonderful. But even if that’s achieved, the trauma inflicted by the last fourteen years—the emotions, the song, the things that stay with us—feels like it might take far longer to heal.

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.