The sump of England

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not many people would look back at the 50s and early 60s in the UK and describe them as a period of touching innocence, especially politically.  But compared with Conservative politics in 2021?

     To a pre-teenager like myself, the major political memory of the early 60s was The Profumo Affair, not quite in the way that I know the details now, but sifting through the things said and left unsaid at the time, even for a ten-year-old it was a time when you could tell Something Big Was Going On.

     A Conservative government minister, a Russian attaché, nobility, Great Houses, politicians frothing at the mouth and at the centre of it all Christine Keeler, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the most memorable image of her a photograph by Lewis Morley in 1963 where she is naked, sitting the wrong way round in a Habitat chair.  Heady stuff!

     But the key component in this story is the concept of consequences and responsibility.  The disgraced Conservative minister John Profumo resigned because he lied about his relationship with Christine Keeler in a statement to the House of Commons.  People went to jail, there was a suicide, reputations were destroyed, questions were asked which brought into question the foundation of the sort of society that we assumed we were living in. 

     One commentator, Richard Davenport-Hines in his 2013 book An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo said that what was destroyed by the scandal was the sense of deference to the governing institutions, “Authority, however disinterested, well-qualified and experienced, was [after June 1963] increasingly greeted with suspicion rather than trust.”

     How well the Conservative government has learned that lesson!

     In 2016 as Gove was lying his way through the Brexit campaign, he was asked to cite economists who were actually in favour of leaving the EU.  He named no one, and instead said, “I think the people in this country have had enough of experts.”  He was appealing to populism rather than facts and demonstrating that he could build on the catastrophic lack of trust that the 51-64 Conservative government left as a legacy.

     From Education, the NHS, Covid, Social Care, Immigration to every other aspect of government the ruling ethos is that of post-Trumpian false news.  The Doublespeak of Orwell’s 1984 is now the common language of right-wing politics, inconvenient facts are redefined: illegality, bullying, theft, lying, are all given a make-over so that the Conservatives can speak “the thing which was not” as Swift had a Houyhnhnm (a rational talking horse) describe the lies that Yahoos (Humans) tell in the Fourth Voyage of Gulliver.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     If lying to The House were a resigning matter, then Johnson would not have been the PM for a considerable period of time as he has done little else, especially during the farcical PMQs that he signally fails to answer with anything approaching truth.

 

The previous paragraphs were written in the morning.  Now in the evening, it is time to look back over the past few hours in Parliament and consider what the Conservatives have done.

 

Owen Paterson, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the former Conservative minister, who was to be suspended for repeatedly breaking the rules banning paid lobbying, found himself the recipient of the “Get out of Jail free” card, handed to him by a vote of Tory MPs in the commons who basically decided to let him off.  Despite a cross party report of painstakingly detailed damning evidence for his wrongdoing, 250 Conservative MPs voted to shelve Paterson’s punishment, including 22 Conservative MPs who have been investigated by the parliamentary commissioner for standards and 19 of whom have had complaints against them upheld.  The vote to “overhaul the parliamentary process” was passed by 18 votes, obviously the guilty 19 made sure that this travesty happened!

     Link this sickening piece of partisan favouritism towards an egregiously guilty man with the Conservative party’s willingness to welcome back into the party a man, ex-Conservative MP Rob Roberts, 

 

 

 

who abused his position by sexually harassing one of his staffers and you have a picture of a party rejoicing in its own corruption and putting up two fingers to the rest of the country as a gesture of contempt towards the electorate.

     I feel literally sickened, or at least disturbingly queasy about what these latest scandals say about the state of politics and the country.  Perhaps post-Trump it is impossible to feel the disgusted shock that blatant self-seeking aggrandisement, not only in terms of wealth, but also in terms of power, should actually provoke.

     I am tempted to believe that Johnson has barely considered the feelings of the electorate when it comes to looking after his own.  He has always acted as an entitled egoist and, as with his support (until it wasn’t) of the absurdity of Cummings, or the rapacity of Jenrick, the incompetence of Williamson, the viciousness of Patel, the languorous idiocy of Rees-Mogg and the rest of his dysfunctional crew, he clearly doesn’t give a fig for the optics of any situation because he knows that he will wriggle out, deflect, lie, or blame someone else for whatever fresh disaster his form of “government” brings.

     What is truly worrying is that some of the people in Johnson’s ambit might have encouraged the exoneration of trash like Paterson precisely because his favourable treatment by his mates, re-writing rules to suit themselves, brings MPs and Parliament into contempt.  The more contempt is felt for our ruling classes, the more scope there is for a charismatic leader to emerge and led the gullible to a bright new Jerusalem.

     The fact that the leader has created the morass out of which he can emerge will be lost on most, because populism does not rely on logic or reason or facts – it relies on the exact opposite of those.

     Johnson is a chancer.  He is not guided by ethos or ethics, only by his own narrow self-interest.  He is prepared to sacrifice anyone and everyone, as long as he survives. 

     Covid and Corruption should have been the downfall of this viciously incompetent and deadly prime minister.  The fact that he has survived so far with his breath-taking disregard for those for whom he should have had a duty of care, is chilling.

     American presidents usually end their television chats to the nation by saying “God bless America!” I feel like ending this piece by saying, “God help Britain!”

 

T

 

 

 

 

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS – Day 92 – Monday 15th June

So, I was wrong about our moving phases today; we are still in Phase 2, I think that there will be another week before we move to a more relaxed point in this never ending saga of the virus.

     I did not manage to get my slot either today or tomorrow for my early morning swim and my slot for Wednesday is at 11 am to mid day.  This is playing havoc with the arrangements for my ‘lesson’ with my friend in the pool who wants to improve his English by having conversation classes with me.  Still, I think that the classes are worth continuing, with benefits for us both!

We went out to lunch to one of our previous (i.e. pre-Covid) haunts.  The seating in the restaurant had been adjusted to reflect the reduction in allowed capacity and, as we were quite late getting to the place, we had a pick of the empty tables.

     We chose one in the same approximate place where we usually sit and then we observed the service.  The wearing of masks by the serving staff was patchy.  They seemed to take every opportunity to remove them or to push them down to their chins.  Even when they were being worn, some of the staff only covered their mouths and not their noses.

     The restaurant also has a thriving delivery service which utilises scooter riders to deliver the food.  When the riders came up to the counter to collect the next order (a counter which is also the bar for the place) they were not wearing masks.

     I can well imagine that wearing masks when doing your job in a restaurant is an irritating annoyance – but it is also the legal requirement.  Toni actually asked the girl who brought us the menu (shouldn’t it have been a one page disposable thing?) to wear her mask – she did, but she shouldn’t have needed to have been asked. 

     Toni became more uncomfortable as the meal progressed and we saw further casual attitudes towards the clinical necessity of wearing masks.  I do not think that we will be going back, in spite of the quality and value for money of the food.

     Nothing in the general attitude of people that we see around us gives us any confidence that this pandemic is going to trail off into memory.  Yes, people are eager to find the freedom that comes with summer.  They want to go to the beach, take a dip and sunbathe, enjoy a drink, socialise with friends.  But if the crowded beach scenes that I observed last weekend become the norm then we should expect a resurgence of the virus in a few weeks’ time.

Tomorrow we are going to Terrassa for a Name Day of one of Toni’s nephews.  This will be the longest trip that we have made for months.  We got the presents in a large supermarket and, apart from the fact that everybody was wearing a mask, it was like a normal day.  And we are nowhere near normality at all.  We are kidding ourselves that each day brings us nearer to the end of the crisis and a few good, sunny days will knock the virus out of our lives for good.

     The situation in the Republican states in America; the re-imposition of lockdown of parts of Peking; the situation in Brazil; the increase in cases in India; the on-going chaos of the UK; Argentina, Peru, Africa – wherever you look there is evidence that we have not managed this virus with any degree of authority. 

     I shudder for what the next few months might bring.

     Obviously I hope that we find a vaccine or at least a treatment; I hope that measures put in place around the world lessen the impact of the virus; I hope that the fatal demagogues in positions of power finally begin to listen to reason; I hope that governments take compassionate measures to protect the less fortunate and at-risk members of society including the old, the ill and schoolkids.

     The disruption of the virus does give an opportunity for an inventive and empathetic government to re-think priorities and concentrate attention on the power-less, rather than the oligarchs throughout the capitalist world who are urging their ‘puppet’ politicians to maintain the status quo which has given the rich even more during this time of crisis.

     The real plague is not Covid-19, it is the power structure that allow a disaster to become a revenue generator for those who already have too much.

     In the ‘good old days’ when Theatre In Education groups came and performed in schools, I was able to welcome one company to my last Cardiff school, it was called the 7:84 Company, because seven percent of the population of the United Kingdom owned eighty-four percent of the wealth.  Do the sums, that means that for ninety-three percent of the population that left just sixteen percent of the wealth to be distributed among them all.  The only thing that has changed is that now, the disproportions are even greater.

     And what about the under-privileged?  One newspaper reported that about 2 million kids in lockdown in the UK have done little or no school work during this period.  You can bet your bottom dollar that the privileged have been working assiduously – so the gaps between those who have and those who have not will become greater.  There will be a whole generation of kids who will be playing catch-up with little or no technology to allow them to access on-line material.

     The government has already stated that the coupon or voucher system which allows poorer kids to have a school meal, will end with the end of term.  How much has this government poured into the hands of million and billion -aire owners of firms and industries?  But they are not going to feed the most vulnerable in our society.

     It is a damning condemnation of our society that in the 300 years since the publication of Swift’s Modest Proposal, there hasn’t been a time when it is more apt than now.  For those of you who haven’t read it, it is readily available on line.  It is a fairly short work, but the punch that it packs is out of all proportion to its brevity, and it is sickening because it still describes the reality of the way that we are.

     Some governments have come or are coming out of this crisis with their reputations improved; some are still in a slough of their own making. 

     What has happened and is going on happening in the UK should be the moment when the people stand up to be counted and say, “No more!”  There has to be a better way than allowing the hollow man Johnson to kill even more than he and his cabinet lightweight misfits have already done.

     The decade of Conservative rule has cheapened, humiliated, divided, impoverished and coarsened, we deserve better!