A good New Year to one and all, as the Scots phrase it - far better than the English who want us to insist on being 'happy'. Who can be happy with the current state of the world - without lying to themselves or others?
Those of us who cared about far more than 'getting Brexit done' have spent the season in various stages of despair. By the time I had heard round upon round of the sense so many had of being at the bottom of an endless pit with nowhere to go, I began to feel it was time to buck ourselves up. Can it really be that bad?
What are the negatives - the big ones? First of all the absolute denial of climate change seems in the mix. Yes, if you are very lucky, you will get the EU Withdrawal Agreement ratified (which is by the way not at all the same thing as 'getting Brexit done'). That remains to do, on our list of this decade's self-improvement targets. Meanwhile we have elected a government who appear constitutionally blind to the reality that the planet is going down the tube on a fast train! We are now stuck with this government for the next five years, minimum. The scientists tell us meanwhile that we have ten years at the very most to save the planet... The New Year brought tragic pictures of a world on fire down under, while the world up over - us - drowned in floods of rain. Greta Thunberg should have been born ten years ago at least! But she wasn't, and we are only now just waking up to the reality that we we should have worried about it a long time ago. It was ironic that the Brexit debate coincided with the first real signs of a population starting to worry about the health of their planetary home... Was Brexit defensive, all the time? Enabling us to roar and whinge about things that were far less important, and in doing so to look away from what was really bothering us?
Second big negative is the appalling state of our public services. No Tory party that I can remember has ever understood the importance of the public services. They really did seem to be obsessed with the idea that the state was not to be trusted with our well-being, that the staff who worked in them were overpaid, bureaucratic and idle, that we didn't need half the services we had, and meanwhile private industry was undervalued and underpaid and could do everything twice as fast and twice as well. The Tories really did seem to think at times that no public services at all would make us a healthier and more productive society. No, really! They did seem to think that. But they felt they had to keep kowtowing to the public sympathy for the NHS etc., in order to get elected, and then simply chipped away, inch upon inch, until the heart and guts of these services were relentlessly worn down, and we were left with a society on the brink of disintegration. Now, after ten years of austerity, we know exactly how important the public services are - and how wrong the Tories were. It is not only the underclass who feel that trying to get a GP appointment is a bit like planning to climb K2 with a week's training. Those very middle class Tory sympathisers who always voted for them - and did again - have concerns about the decline of the public schooling system, the expense and overcrowding of our trains, the sense of insecurity that comes with a reduced and underfunded police service - need I go on? And will an American trade deal actually compensate for all this? Not in this life!
The Johnson group did try to promise to throw a bit of money at these chaotic services. But already we have the usual sense that the promises are paper thin, and may amount to very little when they finally materialise. Why is it that somehow nobody gets anything in this country except the well-to-do, who even made money out of the banking crisis?
Third negative is the obviously desperate state of our constitution, which goes way beyond individual political positions. We need to give people back a sense that who they vote for matters - that, indeed, it matters that they vote at all The people I meet are simply tired of placing a vote they know well is useless because they live in a 'safe' Tory or Labour seat where the same old, same old process and result occurs. If democracy itself is to be kept alive, we need to feel that we can make a difference with our votes! This means some kind of proportional representation, surely, at the very least has to be considered. We have no real way of knowing how keen the population as a whole was on the Johnson manifesto. They might still have won under a PR system, of course. But they would have won with a much smaller majority, I would guess, and some negotiation would have been necessary to ensure that all points of view had a voice. Democracy is not solely about numbers, as I keep boring you by saying. Democracy is about creating a society where all points of view have a chance of being heard and respected. Switching the problem from one so-called 'winning' side to the other is not a solution. Johnson himself nodded in this direction in his acceptance speech. It's probably not that he doesn't know it, but that he will, like every other PM, soon become buried under a mound of clever and rich lobbyists who will get their way because they always do. Power counts, and unless we are willing as a nation to make it harder for the powerful to count so much, things will go on much as they always do.
Fourth negative is that the Labour Party let the country down badly. They presented their case poorly, behaved as though they thought the electorate was for sale, just as the Tories do, by 'offering' - the very language they used - a manifesto that seemed to the electorate to be full of calories and no nutrition. They offered no vision about what kind of country they thought they were heading for. And as a member of long-standing, can I make a few points that I have not heard around the media? Like, for example, that lack of trust went way beyond whether they liked Jeremy Corbyn's hair cut. Trust took a nose dive when they so obviously failed to expose the wide range of opinion within the party. Hence, some of those who are now standing as future leader are hardly known among the mean streets of Glasgow and Southend. We are told that Rebecca Long-Bailey is the front runner. Really? My sister phoned to say, "Can you tell me who she is?" Were there, in fact, gags on the mouths of anybody who did not entirely share the details of the 'message' - or were not seen as reliably 'one of us.' These are not, please understand, people who are secret Tories, as some of the hard left seem to believe. On the contrary, they are passionately caring people who didn't get a look in because the inner cabinet of the leadership did not allow them to. And there was zero discussion of the presence of Momentum over every decision made. I have never understood why we need Momentum at all. Why do we need a party within a party? Why cannot those people simply be Labour party members and activists? It is clear to me, at least, that they exist in order to keep control of the party in the hands of the chosen. And what is democratic about having 'chosen' ones among us? Is this not the same Toryism we have fought for decades? I do not want to go back, but I do want to look forward to a Party which is open to debate on all fronts - where power does not lie in the hands of a few.
Last negative. In the light of the fact that many of our great northern towns and cities voted Tory for the first time, who will now have the courage to point out to them that, while we understand their impatience, and absolutely sympathise with their desire to 'catch up' with the rest of us, whom they see as having got it made at their expense, we cannot share any position which is essentially climate change denying, white supremacist, narrowly nationalist, and based on some muddle-headed economic theory that says that if we 'put Britain first' we are bound to grow rich and powerful again as a nation. We aren't. All these so-called theories and attitudes have been tried and tested throughout the world, usually with disastrous consequences.
Take the USA as an example right now before our eyes. Some people grow rich, it is true. The same people who always seem to grow rich no matter what the economic theory in place. The rest remain hopeful but hungry, cold and disadvantaged, waiting for the good times to be delivered. At the same time, the nation grows ever more bitterly divided and restless - as America has.
The newly disadvantaged do not go away, they keep coming back.
"Hurrah for revolution and more cannon shot.
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on!"
said W B Yeats. Crime and alienation in their cities grows worse, leaving the white and supreme high and dry in their gated communities, afraid to go out and face those who have been let down once again. Most tragically of all, their nation becomes disrespected and unpopular all over the world. There has been no return to glory in the US. Rather a greater and wider loss of prestige and value by almost every other nation. One of the saddest things that Trump has done to the United States is to make it more despised than it ever was before. We see it now as a laughing stock, not a real place at all, which has somehow got lost in a fairy story a million miles from reality. Does Britain want to go the same way? I think those who voted for Johnson did not vote for this!
What can we do about it all? What we can't do is despair, I'm thinking. Now more than ever we need to keep our hopes alive for a better world. Now more than ever, we need to hold on to our liberal values, our belief that we can achieve a truly united, peaceful, healthy and wealthy enough country to be able to provide for those who have too little. (We don't need riches that do the poor down, we just need enough - to borrow a famous idea from D W Winnicott.) Despair is self-indulgence - it is the 'me' game all over again. Yet most of those who moaned to me in the agony of despair and disappointment after the election were not really badly off people at all. They often had interesting jobs and decent homes. They had some kind of life. It is easy to be an optimist when the going is downhill. Now, we need to be prepared to continue to battle for a better world, even if the going seems frighteningly uphill. We need to demonstrate by our lives, our work and attitudes that concern for others as well as ourselves is not fairy land, but a real and happy way to live.
The weakness of liberalism has often been said to be its lack of strength in action. It's all very well but doesn't get us anywhere, it is said.
Now is the time to show those around us that liberal values do get you somewhere! We can continue to work to draw attention to climate change, continue to work to do what we can about it. Marches are fine if you can make them, but there are small everyday things we can do better, like not buying single-use plastic, eating less meat, and recycling where we can. Recycling is a bore but we can do it anyway, instead of falling back on cynical excuses like the belief that the collection leads straight into landfill anyway. Two wrongs don't make a right! Just because some MPs cheated on their expenses, doesn't mean that none of them are honest or sane. The fact is that most things are curate's eggs - good in parts! We must stop throwing the good part out with the bad! It's a straight road to getting an entirely bad world, if that's what we want. We can write to our MPs and be a nuisance pointing out where the manifesto commitments have not been honoured. 'Oh they won't read them,' I hear you say! Remember the lottery slogan? you have to be in it to win it! It applies to much of life.
The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing
We don't know who said it, but it is apparently the most popular quotation there is. How interesting! So if you love it, could you consider responding to it? Instead of nodding your head wisely and going away to watch another episode of 'Strictly Come Dancing'? (I really have nothing against 'Strictly', truly, except that it gets massive viewing figures while Rome apparently is ok to carry on burning! Could you watch it and also do something?)
What it boils down to is this; we need to find our voices! We all have voices, we just don't use them. We let other people ride roughshod over us when we hear them pontificating so much nonsense about race, sex, age, politics, religion, art, society, behaviour, education, crime et al. The essence of the populist attitude to life is: find somebody else to blame for whatever is wrong with the world. Somebody whose main qualification is that they aren't you!
Tolerance is about finding yourself to blame sometimes, I'm afraid. Being prepared to look inward, and not perpetually outwards. The single best thing you can do for the world is be a positive voice for good, for loving kindness, for awareness, for acceptance of difference, for liberty of values.
It won't save the world, you say. Really? So how come you have believed in liberal values all your life, in that case? Do you mean that you espoused them but never really believed in them before? And now, when the crisis is upon us, you are admitting that you have no faith in liberalism, and that's the truth? Well, I'm afraid you have to find that faith now. Starting today. Whatever you did or failed to do in the past, it's over now. From today we need to demonstrate, to model liberal values and be proud of them. Nobody is asking you to be a saint or a martyr. We need you to do whatever can, to whatever extent you can. One step at a time is enough. If we all take that one step. Whoever raises a lone voice to protest when they pass that daft sexist resolution in the golf club is saving the world. Whoever refuses to move house in order to get their daughter into the best school is saving the world. Whoever pays their tipping fees instead of fly-tipping them as a present to the rest of us is saving the world. Whoever refuses to disrespect a policeman who is black is saving the world. Whoever allows some teenage nerd to use social media to slander and threaten someone they dislike is supporting the populist cause. It's saying nothing and doing nothing that allows populism to win.
These are the things to avoid at all costs. They are all forms of defence against the pain of feeling despair.
1. Cynicism
Easy to wave it all away as rubbish and useless. It will be if you do that!
2. Anxiety
Fear is what prevents you constantly from finding your voice. Standing up to the intimidators will reveal to you, to your astonishment no doubt, that they are more frightened than you.
3. False good cheer disguised as humour
Yes we need to laugh, now more than ever. But beware of reducing it all to a joke. Be not afraid to be serious, concerned, worried about threats that are real. Speak your worries and don't let them frighten you into silence.
4. Depression that renders you inactive
Find your own activism and stick with it. It doesn't have to be political. It could be just getting up a bit earlier in the mornings. It could be forming a group of neighbours to keep the street clean. It could be just mildly letting people know that you can't afford to keep up with the Joneses. (Truth is good for the soul and saves the world.) It could be refusing to blame the school when your son goes wrong. Get him some help! Or some for all of you.
5. Losing hope. The whole world is in a mess, but it is not an irrecoverable mess. Focus on what is going well, and don't let it slide out of your consciousness. Tell other people what is going well in your opinion.
And a good New Year to one and all!
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