Politics

(Just one – honest!)

Whilst pontificating on the subject of Brexit – and I promise that I will shut up again about it hereafter – there is one other thing that exercises me greatly about the current situation in the UK – and that is the nature, the misunderstanding and the abuse of democracy.

Two years down the line from the ill-thought-out exercise that was the 2016 referendum (at which everyone claims to have known exactly for what they were voting though, of course, none of them can now agree with each other as to what that was) the loudest cries come from the Brexiteers who demand that the democratic will of the people be honoured. Any suggestion that the ‘willofthepeople’ might have shifted somewhat since the referendum is met with sneers of:

“You lost. Get over it!”

It seems that to these folk democracy is a static concept and that having achieved their goal in gaining a slim majority the result is now immutable. For all time!

This is, of course, the favoured modus operandi of despots, fanatics and extremists of all hues – those who fervently demand their right of access to the democratic process – once! Should power be gained history suggests that such democratic rights as exist tend mysteriously and irrevocably to be withdrawn shortly afterwards – usually as a response to some sort of emergency (such as any opposition to those now in power).

I am not, of course, for a moment suggesting any equivalence between the Brexiteers and such fascistic regimes (though you may choose to draw your own conclusions) but I am troubled that in all of this I detect a tone – a mood – of which I had not hitherto been aware. The constant chatter of the many and disparate voices of the more prosaic Brexiteers online and in the media suggest that they believe that, through the referendum, something fundamental has changed – that those like them who had previously felt deprived of a voice have now gained one – that the dis-enfranchised, the ignored and the forgotten now have a hand on the levers of power. It is clearly this to which they refer when they talk of ‘taking back control’ and their dark mutterings against any who threaten to deprive them ever again are intended to chill.

One almost feels that one should call out a warning – so oblivious are these zealots to what is really happening. They seem blind to the obvious fact that they are being ‘played‘ by a relentlessly determined and extreme ‘elite’ who are almost certainly going to be the only ones to emerge from a ‘hard‘ Brexit (should that be what the UK ends up with) better off (in their case probably considerably so).

Further – having observed the emergence of this new mood throughout significant parts of the land, those who are actually calling the shots will certainly ensure that never again is the populace as a whole given the slightest chance to repeat this ‘show of strength‘. Control may well have been ‘taken back‘ – but not by those who currently suffer the greatest democratic deficit.

When what I should almost certainly should not call ‘the great unwashed‘ discover that not only are others going to enrich themselves at their expense, but also that their glimpse at the controls of the mechanisms of state has been but a fleeting one…

…they are not going to be happy!

I mean… WT actual F!!

I do try – tucked away as us semi-retireds are in this idyllic corner of the planet – not to let myself get too exercised about the frankly bizarre goings on in other parts of the world. Regular browsers of these meanderings may also have noticed that I have been trying in these dog days to refrain from allowing my feelings regarding the current political – er! – climate in the western world from igniting my admittedly short fuse and triggering one of my more intemperate rants on the subject.

Sometimes – however – such a zenlike state of restraint is just too difficult to maintain…

It is bad enough having to watch the orange buffoon re-invent international diplomacy by adoption of the mores of the play pen. Following the roaring ‘success’ of his apparently entirely content free summit with the North Koreans the tiny-handed blob has clearly determined to outdo himself. His recent European tour involved giving NATO a good kicking and then lying about the outcome of the summit, followed rapidly by issuing a (twitter) declaration that the European Union is an enemy of the US! He then trashed his hosts in the UK in an interview with a tabloid rag even before the visit had properly started, announcing that the Prime Minister of that independent state had got it all wrong and that she would be better replaced as leader by the rebarbative (and recently resigned) BoJo – a buffoon even more ludicrous than the 45th president himself.

All of this was, however, merely a teaser for the climax of the tour – an historic summit with Russian Premier Putin in Helsinki during which the orange one happily threw his own country under a bus over Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election (a position from which he has inevitably retreated once again back home). It was all that Putin could do to keep the smirk off his face whilst the cameras were still rolling. Jeez!

And what of Brexit – I hear you whimper? What indeed? Watching the tories tear themselves apart as they lurch from crisis to crisis is usually cause for amusement (as it is with Labour – though somehow never quite as funny in their case) but this has gone way beyond a joke. Having spent now fully two years getting somewhere near the point that they should have been before invoking article 50 in the first place they are now rapidly approaching the terminus with all the velocity of a runaway train and the resultant cataclysmic collision is not just going to hurt the tories as a party – it is also going to cause as yet unimagined damage to the United Kingdom itself.

This worries the hard-line Brexiteers not a jot. They simply force open the throttles and pile on the steam, whistles awailing, pounding ever onward toward their unicorn-inspired ignis fatuus of a low-regulation, low-wage economic playground in which they can all filthily enrich themselves before retiring from the resultant wasteland to live abroad.

At each of their successively more outrageous stunts Prime Minister May – seemingly almost as cowardly as her predecessor – bends over and gives them what they want. What neither she nor they seem prepared to admit is that the parliamentary topography has shifted to the extent that none of the possible options for Brexit is now likely to be able to attract a majority in parliament. Do any of them care? Eyes closed, fingers firmly in ears they simply chant “Na na na na na!” at each other.

Let us be blunt – no-one has the slightest idea what will happen next or how this farce can possibly be resolved!

Thus far the EU has itself had little say in the proceedings – and nor has it yet had to. The image that comes to my mind is that of a championship golfer – or tennis player or suchlike – who, geared up for the big match, watches in amazement as their opponent simply implodes psychologically before their eyes – gifting them an unexpectedly easy win.

Seems Putin is not alone!

There are many across the globe – it would seem – who have over the last half decade or so (and certainly since the financial crisis of 2008) come to feel that the society of which they are a part has been of late seriously in ‘democratic deficit’. They may be right.

Certainly there have been in recent times a plethora of elections and referenda throughout the western world and in the melee that passes for electoral normality these days the body politic has done its best to destroy any possible vestige of complacency in those who govern us – by means of the delivery of a number of short (and not so short), sharp shocks to the system. Once upon a time we might have called this ‘sticking it to the man‘ – but we were all a great deal younger then!

In the UK the repercussions from the 2016 Brexit referendum will rumble on for years yet and may even lead at some point to a rerun of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Prime Minister Theresa May – in an effort to demonstrate irrefrangibly the strength and stability of her government – has decided that the UK has not suffered enough at the polls in recent years and has called another (apparently one-sided) election for June. She has presumably been seduced by the prospect of doing to the UK Labour party what the Progressive Conservative Party did to the Social Credit Party in the 1984 Canadian federal election (and in turn had done to them by the Liberals in the 1993 election!).

Trump’s administration in the US is the gift that keeps on giving… should you happen be a satirist (or indeed just a smug cynic who likes to be proved right!). The orange one has only held the reigns of power for a few (though seemingly endless) months, but has already provided enough material for a trilogy of (extremely weird) mordant film-scripts. You quite literally could not make this stuff up!

The outcome of the recent French election was met with divergent reactions throughout the western world. The heavy sighs of relief from well-meaning social democrats everywhere as the French (following the example recently set by the Dutch) chose to reject the far-right populism of Le Pen for the centrist Emmanuel Macron were, of course, to be expected – not to mention welcomed with open arms. The howls of rage of those on the right in countries having little connection with France took me momentarily aback. A little contemplation, however, shed further light on the matter.

In a manner somewhat akin to that of the Bolsheviks in the early years of the last century (who believed that their communist revolution must not be limited to Mother Russia and her colonies but must sweep across the civilised world) those on the far right require that all nations should bow to their brand of populism… that the European Union must be seen to fail, that all forms of collaboration must be suppressed and that the globe should revert to comprising a set of adversarial nation states.

As ever there are some areas in which the right and the left are practically bedfellows. Both strains reserve their greatest hatred, not for each other, but for those who occupy the centre ground. The recognition in the latter part of the last century that elections are primarily won and lost in the centre inspired such dogmatists to paroxysms of rage. What they required of the centre was a large pool of clear blue water, such that their class war might be kept alive indefinitely.

One thus finds oneself assaulted by those on both flanks (though particularly by those on the left in this case) braying about the failure of centrist, liberal politics, along with the demand that such be consigned to the dustbin of history – all the while conveniently ignoring the fact that their own brand of dogma has itself demonstrably failed repeatedly.

Such ironies…

In British Columbia – meanwhile – the recent provincial election resulted in the first minority government for many a long year, with the crucial balancing riding being won by a mere nine votes!

Now that’s how you send a message!

“The worst part about being lied to is knowing you weren’t worth the truth”

Jean-Paul Sartre

The release this week of UK cabinet papers from the 1980s reveals as true something that opponents of Margaret Thatcher’s administration have long protested – that she and other leading tories had continued to plan the dismantling of the welfare state – including the privatisation of education and the National Heath Service – even in the wake of her sophistical proclamation that “the health service is safe in our hands“.

It is – of course – jejune to be shocked at the mendacity and dishonesty of politicians of all hues… a truism that has been borne out in spades this year. As far as I can recall I graduated my own education in such matters shortly after the 1979 UK general election in which Thatcher came to power. That election campaign had featured prominently the infamous Saatchi and Saatchi advert showing a long snaking queue for the dole (unemployment) office, under the banner heading “Labour isn’t Working“.

In 1979 the tories inherited an unemployed total of 1.4 million. The monetarist policies pursued by the Thatcher government saw this figure rapidly rocket to north of 3 million! It subsequently became apparent that the thinkers behind the tories’ strategy – and in particular Keith Joseph, the chief architect thereof – had known all along that their policies would indeed cause unemployment to soar… a price that they considered ‘worth’ paying.

Such hypocrisies have led me to adopt the attitude attributed to Louis Herren – foreign correspondent for The Times in the 1960s and 70s. He would ask himself – on being briefed by some politician or other – “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?“.

Good advice!