What would I wait in a three-mile queue for?
This is one of the emptiest parlour games ever invented, because the answer is ‘absolutely nothing’! OK, you can re-work things and say that if it was a matter of life and death, or that there were untold riches at the end of the wait for the taking, but for anything else? No, I can think of nothing. At least nothing real and achievable!
And yet, thousands, tens – no, hundreds of thousands of my fellow countrymen, with a sprinkling of foreigners, are joining the queue to file past the coffin of a ninety-six-year-old woman. A woman with no real accomplishments to her name, apart from her longevity and an ability for small talk honed to perfection over decades of vacuous ‘service’.
On the other hand, I do understand that some people feel a real sense of personal loss and that by queueing and paying their respects they are honouring a debt owed to a lady who devoted herself to her people, I also understand that people feel that this moment is an historic one and that they are able to link themselves to a unique, unrepeatable moment in our national experience by actually being there. A feeling of linking oneself to something almost immeasurably greater.
You can tell that I am going through the motions and trying to think myself into the position of someone who makes the decision to queue for perhaps thirty hours for a distanced moment with the coffined corpse of a dead Queen. And I’m failing miserably.
In the same way I fail to understand the people who voted for Trump or continue to ‘believe’ the lie of the lost election; or the people who voted for Johnson and continued to vote for him long after it was obvious that he was singularly unsuited for any sort of public service.
I can understand people voting for self-aggrandisement and voting for the party that seems to offer the best protection for their interests, no matter how unfair it might be. I remember I once had a lapel badge that had “VOTE TORY” in the centre, and it drew quizzical glances because I was not known for my Conservative sympathies! It was only when those surprised people drew a little closer and saw the writing around the central ‘message’ that things became clearer: “Young and stupid? Old and selfish?” A gross simplification I know, but it does point to lack of education and selfishness at least playing some part in the way that the great questions of our time have been ‘resolved’!
Brexit is the perfect example of how the same badge could be used and the word “Brexit” substituted for “Tory”!
But that is not the whole explanation. Decent people voted for Brexit and are still (in spite of the evidence to the contrary) backing it. I have heard defenders of “the greatest act of self-harm in our history” passionately asserting that it has worked and that things are better. And this is not simply the idiocy of, for example, the Brexit Blinded MP for Dover blaming the French for taking us at our word and treating us like a ‘third’ country after we withdrew to become a ‘third’ country – it is more a sort of wilful determination to make the best of what is having a ‘few teething problems’ but, as usual, we will pull through: cue, Churchill speeches, rousing music and many references to the Second World War and the Blitz!
I suppose, when you come down to it, all forms of policy and government are precarious balancing acts, which only work because of the faith and belief of the people who are watching and want the act to work.
Johnson has been the single most destructive person in recent times to threaten the whole edifice of the Way Things Are Done by ignoring the “Good Chaps” system of administration, where leeway is given on the assumption that people will do the right thing, rather than having to act on a strict system of rules, laws, and regulations to limit behaviour. The problem is, when you have a buffoon and narcissist as leader then all those “unwritten” (but powerful) rules do not exist if they get in his way, and then the whole flummery edifice comes tumbling down. And even with him gone the so-called Tory Party de nos jours seems to have deserted any ethical basis for their action and is blithely following the wrecking strategy of the former (disgraced) prime minister and using their elected majority to rewrite or ignore any troubling laws that might get in their way – and they are supported by? Well, hardly a majority of the country because they were not elected by a majority after the farce of the First Past The Post system, we have to regulated democracy into a basic two-party state – but I am wandering and digressing and allowing my despair about the present situation in my country to pull my writing into too many directions!
What I do feel is that this (new prime minister, new monarch) could be a tipping point, where the tinsel of ceremony which covers the way that we are governed, begins to be seen as the superficial window dressing that it is and, as hunger and deprivation begin to hurt swathes of the population this winter, the people or The People begin to demand that the government governs for them and not just for the elites.
What a fond socialist (see? I don’t even have the optimism to start it with a capital letter) dream that is!
