I want it now

Delivery is slow. Voters move fast. Politics in the age of Amazon Prime is challenging for both governments and opposition parties.

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The other night, I decided to watch Badlands, a film I had never seen before. Less than a minute later, there it was on my TV.

If I want to order food of almost any variety I can do so at the touch of a few buttons and it will turn up at my house in less than an hour.

If I want to buy a new hair accessory, or the decorations for my birthday party or a personalised cake, I can do so from my sofa and it will arrive within 24 – 48 hours.

That is the world we live in now. Of course there are all sorts of problems with that. Problems in compensation for the creators and deliverers of these products and services. Problems for society and the local economy of the fragmentation this causes. Problems of the environmental impact of the way all this is done. I am not unaware of these problems.

But this is the world we live in – and the one we have lived in for some time now – and that world shapes us and our expectations of everything else in it.

This is as true of politics as it is of anything else. And yet, we tend to hive off our expectations as citizens as different from our expectations as consumers. Many of us have a combination of high-minded ideals about politics not being the same as consumerism and equally an understanding that good government takes time.

However laudable the former sentiment and however true the latter both are utterly debilitating to the modern practice of politics.