Cry, my beloved country?

It is dark, and I am afraid.

And I am moved to 'pick up my pen' and 'write'. Hopefully, it is for the best.

A General Election has been called, with a fractured, crippled Opposition, liberal forces recovering from a near death experience and with a Government who, despite showing all the signs of having no idea as to how a modern economy works, seem determined to apply shock therapy in a manner comparable to that applied to the economy of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, albeit hardly on the same scale. My recollection is that the latter didn't work so well.

Governments come and go. If you're old enough, that knowledge offers some reassurance. And, as a liberal, you're relatively prepared for defeat. The catch is that, whilst there has always been something that philosophically separates the two main parties, they have enough in common that you can be reassured that our society will remain evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Not this time.

A governing party that intends to fundamentally change our relationships with our neighbours in pursuit of an ideological chimera will, in doing so, risk what many of us thought was the comfort of a community working to bring neighbours together. Oh yes, it wasn't, and still isn't, perfect, or even close to perfection. But it had potential, it had kept the peace, and it created opportunities and freedoms that we hadn't previously had, and quite appreciated once we'd got them.

And whilst some Conservatives chuntered on about how awful the whole thing was, we didn't take them seriously, especially as what they offered as an alternative really wasn't very attractive. And, the more you dug beneath their rhetoric, the less attractive it became. They were persistent, though.

Their opportunity came, in the shape of an ideologically vacuous administration, mired in cynicism after years of austerity, with a Labour Party veering towards anti-globalisation. And they certainly took it.

God, I hate them for that.

The expectation, as it currently stands, is that whilst the Liberal Democrats will recover somewhat, the Labour Party will suffer a crushing blow and the Conservatives will gain a majority large enough to inure themselves against short-term unpopularity and by-election defeats. I hope that this doesn't come to pass, but some of my lifelong optimism has been knocked out of me over the past few years.

Thus, my sense of fear. A fear that our country will be changed forever, a country where blame and recrimination displace the decent, tolerant, imperfect society where most of us tried to rub along. A fear that we stop looking outwards to see what we can do to build a better world. A fear that we become mean-spirited and suspicious of our neighbours. Because that is the sort of society that some of our opponents appear to aspire to.

But there is only one thing to do with fear - confront it and use it to your advantage. 

And so we must, as individuals and as communities, send out a message that we are better than that, that whatever our political beliefs, we believe in a broadly internationalist approach, in working with our neighbours for a common good. And, regardless of the result of the election, perhaps our efforts will cause an incoming government to hesitate before it takes irretrievable steps towards severing our ties with the European Union...