Politics is not football

Politics is not the same as football. What I mean is: if one team scores 3 goals and the other scores 2, then the issue is settled. For good. There is no going back and asking for another go. One team has proved their superiority, at least on the day.

Some people seem to think that politics is - or should be - like that. It isn't. In politics we are not playing merely to 'win' or to show our superiority. We are having a perpetual conversation about which approach to the country's problems is likely to prove best in the long run. And I'm afraid 'perpetual' is what it is. It is an ongoing conversation, during which many people will shift their position, even change their minds all together. Have you not met people who say, "I used to vote Conservative/Labour/Liberal/Green because of.... And now I think...?"  This is not unpatriotic. It is not a sign of moral weakness. It is the way democracy works. We - as a community - have had many shifts of opinion on major questions over the years. Take the hanging question. Take the legalisation of homosexuality. Take the broad question of equality before the law. 

It's fortunate it is so, otherwise we would still live in the seventh century in terms of law and cultural attitudes. Some people still do, it seems, but we have plenty of evidence of how damaging this is. Ultimately, it has led to war on a scale that seems unthinkable in its consequences for many of us.Without changes of mind in the UK, we would never have established a welfare state, never invented the NHS, never granted women the freedom to develop careers outside of the home environment. You may approve or disapprove of these changes. That is not the point. Probably you like some things and dislike others, like most people. This is what it means to live in a liberal democracy. What you don't like you are free to speak against, to campaign against, to do anything within the law to persuade others of the need for change. And don't imagine you can't achieve anything this way. After the formation of the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787, William Wilberforce led the successful cause of abolition through the parliamentary campaign. He was not alone, though the most famous. Legal judgement helped the case by pointing out that there was no basis in law for slavery - we had imported it from societies who had established it in that way. In this way different aspects of our society combined to get change implemented - Parliament, the judiciary, the press and the people working together. Plenty of people opposed the abolition - it was not in their interest, no doubt. But we have to have a means of decision-making which goes beyond individual or group interests, otherwise progress would be hard to make.

What I'm suggesting is that conflict is normal in terms of the democratic process, and we don't have to fear it. Churchill expressed it well when he said,

 "It is not given to human beings, happily for them for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values."

He was a better historian, in my opinion, than a politician and he was talking about the process of history here. What seems like the most important thing in the world NOW can seem obviously wrong in a few years' time. We look back and think, "Did I really think that in those days?" I am rather more worried by people who never change their minds, than by those who do.

So where does that leave us regarding the present Brexit crisis, which has led to a major parliamentary crisis? I think we can step back a few feet and remember that we are not in a football match, for starters! Whatever happens today, however much it may not be what you want, things will move on soon enough. We will not be out of the FA Cup forever! Tomorrow things will look different. Somehow we have got ourselves hung up on one aspect of a decision that has blocked almost everyone from thinking sanely about where to go from here.

The most hopeful thing I heard said recently was from the unlikely source of Jacob Rees Mogg, who remarked, hesitantly, "I hadn't thought of leaving as a process... " Now, I thought, we're getting somewhere! Once anything becomes solidified into reinforced concrete: 'this forever, never that forever', you have a definition of 'intransigence.' And intransigence is a recipe for changing nothing,  Ever. No matter what. What it means is that no progress can happen, no change can even be given a try! If we have to stay in the 7th century, then that's what we have to do. And if necessary we have to start killing people to ensure that it happens. This, I suggest, is no way to live!

Another word for intransigence is fear. The fear of whatever change is proposed seems intolerable to bear. Actually, strictly, this is anxiety rather than fear. Fear is about what has happened, anxiety is about what we imagine may happen. And this can open up a whole world of fear, since no one can predict, as Churchill pointed out, what will happen. It could include the arrival of aliens on our doorstep, the end of the world, the dawn of cancer or dementia. What may happen is unlimited disaster without boundaries!  Who can bear this kind of burden with cheerfulness?

It may be useful to make a list of all our fears of what may happen, which could be a long one for some of us! And then ask ourselves which of them is a dead cert, Which would you bet the ranch on? Not many, I'd guess, if you put it that way. How about sticking with the dead certs for a while and doing what you can to prevent those from happening? And putting the rest on a shelf for a rainy day? Tell yourself you'll worry about those tomorrow. But for today, stick with what you know you can influence - which is quite a lot if you think about it.

Now self-help books are aimed at men

"Having fed every kind of female insecurity, we now aim self-help books at men. It’s a new market. Kiera O’Brien of the Bookseller magazine said: 'It’s almost like male readers are looking for guidance or reassurance on how to be a man in a post #MeToo world.' It’s a constant surprise that I haven’t been commissioned to write such a tome, although stretching 'Don’t be a dick' into thousands of words would be quite the ask.” 

This from Suzanne Moore in the Guardian. It illustrates the whole problem. We - by which I mean the sisterhood - would always go for the ‘don’t be a dick’ type of advice, if asked with insufficient time to think! This is because we do not, at a basic level, understand men at all. It is beyond us to grasp that when a man says, ‘Could you just move your legs further apart so that I can see up them?’ he is in fact trying to solve his life problem. Had we understood this, we would probably have been born men, or had the operation to get to the core of it some time ago. I can talk to the sisterhood about this mysterious behaviour, and they will quite understand my astonishment. Few men will. They will go into Wittgensteinian explanations of the complexity of language, legs, and how easy it is for us to misunderstand them. Legs, I mean. The problem is, they cannot move out of a place in which they are in perpetual denial, about themselves, their lives, their attitudes and their absence of a sense of a male future which has nothing whatever to do with legs.

Men need to talk to each other, and this is my conclusion. With no women present who can make awful jokes like the above, which go down like an atomic chastity belt in my experience. Men need to share what they think about women - what they really think, as opposed to trying to please the sisterhood.  I’ve noticed a few more sensitive of my male friends lately mentioning, cautiously, the things men say about women when they are talking among themselves. They always claim to be embarrassed by it, sometimes shocked, but nobody has yet explained to me how they then told their fellow males what a bunch of dicks they were! It seems it doesn’t happen. Men lead two parallel lives (at least two), the one they live when they are with women, and the one they live when they are with men. If a woman told me that she felt honour bound to be knocked about every Saturday night because that is what women do, I would tell her to get her head examined, and then find a man who could treat her like a real person and not a doll to break at whim. Or even consider not having a man at all! Which (outrageous suggestion though it is) would appear to be several points up on the previous scenario.

Men need to do what women have been doing for decades:  speaking their own truths, banging the table, kicking the cat (gently), reading liberation articles and books, discussing progress, holding sit-ins, raging and storming and ultimately weeping for what has been done to them! Only they know this. We have been trying our level best to tell them for decades, and for decades they have failed to hear us. I don’t think they can hear about the damage of patriarchy to them - not to us. When we mention it, it just makes them feel guilty and impotent. They need to tell each other, to discover for themselves that there are other ways to live, that they can choose for themselves, don’t always have to be nagged or lectured by feminists, or kicked into line by other men who always seem to know better how to be a man. And who tell them how far short they are falling? Which seems to be the way men relate to each other. (Search me, guv, I've no idea why this is an essential part of male relating.)

My great news is: a man can decide how to be a man without reading a single self-help book, which will know less than him about it, and is probably written by a woman anyway (the writer’s wife). I wish them all the luck in the world in this project.  But it is time they got down to it.