People in the US aren’t obsessing over the UK’s election result – and that is both a comfort and a curse

The removed vantage point of watching the election was therapeutic at first, explains Holly Baxter, but that feeling was quickly replaced by hollowness

You want to feel like you’re a part of the society you live in, but the society you vote with isn’t there (Bloomberg/Getty)

When you watch an election unfold in your home country from thousands of miles away, you feel pretty useless. Though I did vote last Friday (via proxy vote), I felt very removed from the political mood of the UK and was genuinely stunned by the results. Sitting on my sofa in Brooklyn with a large glass of red wine, I watched Jo Swinson lose her seat and then Jeremy Corbyn announce that he would not take Labour into the next election. I texted my dad, who lives in Newcastle, about his door-to-door conversations with voters and his predictions, and I got a sense of how people in my hometown were feeling.

I have lots of friends in London who also kept in contact through the evening – but it wasn’t the same as watching the election results come in on a big screen in a pub in Hackney or in the London newsroom, while discussing predictions with friends and colleagues. When I woke up the morning after, the Americans I lived alongside didn’t even remember there had been a seismic political event across the Atlantic at all. There were no fluttering “Vote Labour” or “Get Brexit Done” stickers left behind as testament to a moment in history. What felt like a gut-punch to me was nothing at all to 99 per cent of the people I lived around.

In a way, that’s therapeutic. You get to escape the immediate consequences of a left-wing nightmare. You don’t have to watch the celebrations of people you didn’t vote for, and you don’t get bombarded with crowing right-wingers on TV (well, you do, but they’re Trump-supporting Republicans, and their concerns are a little different).

In another way, it’s psychologically tough. You want to feel like you’re a part of the society you live in, but the society you vote with isn’t there. I have no vote in the American elections, or the local ones in New York. There are large parts of the political system which are obtuse and difficult to understand. I never attended an American school or university and I didn’t grow up in a flyover midwestern town, so I can’t talk knowledgeably about much outside the much-maligned “coastal metropolitan media experience”. That’s why I ended up getting involved with abortion clinic escorting.

Clinic escorting isn’t a thing in the UK (as far as I know) so it’s difficult for some people to get their heads around what it is. Essentially, it’s getting up at 6am on a Saturday, traveling to a part of New York state where you’re needed (and which I can’t specifically pinpoint here for safety reasons), putting on a brightly colored gilet and helping to shield women from extremist religious protesters. Such protesters usually stand in a line outside reproductive healthcare clinics and try to intimidate women into not proceeding. They hold posters of dead babies and call doctors murderers.

When I did my compulsory phone training to become a clinic escort, the woman in charge of the operation told me that she has a lot of British volunteers. She also said that I should prepare myself for protesters shouting things at the clinic escorts like “you never know when you’re going to die.” I steeled myself for a tough time.

On the morning I was scheduled in for my first appearance as a clinic escort, I put on my five layers of clothing, pulled out my umbrella, and went out to battle the cold. I was ready, I had my mental armour on. I was prepared for anything.

And then... nothing. For the first time ever, the clinic had no evangelical protesters for procedure day. The streets were quiet as we stood around in our gilets and the rain pelted down. Eventually, we left – because the time for free parking had expired and, as the people who worked at the clinic told us, those professing to do God’s work will only do it if they get free parking.

Why had they stayed away that day? The clinicians shrugged when I asked. They had two prevailing theories: it was raining; and it was the last weekend before the Christmas holidays. “They’re probably out doing their Christmas shopping,” we were told when we were dismissed. “They’ll come back with renewed fervor in January.”

I guess I’ll see them then.