A Radical New Government? An update.

This morning, I listened to The Laura Kuenssberg Show, featuring Labour leader, Kier Starmer, and I have slightly moderated the views I outlined in my last blogpost. In that post I attacked the Tories for their ideological stance on the NHS and Brexit. The opposite position to ideological dogma is pragmatism, which is the idea that we don’t impose ideas onto reality but respond to the world as it really appears to be.

In his interview, Starmer said that his values, in respect of the NHS, were to oppose further privatisation, but that the practical reality he is likely to have to engage with, if he became Prime Minister, would be that he would have to reduce hospital and doctors’ patient waiting times, and that would mean having to use private health services. I can’t criticise the Tories for their idealism and lack of pragmatism, while at the same time insisting that Starmer stick to his principles. So perhaps I should give him more of a chance.

Not sure that his pragmatic approach to Brexit was quite so convincing though. When the British people voted for Brexit, they weren’t given the option of whether they thought we should leave the Single Market, the Custom’s Union or whether they thought we should allow free movement. Yet we left all of these, which were driven through by the Tory ideological zealots with, a kind of, winner takes all mentality, regardless of the impact they might have on ordinary peoples’ lives or on the economy. Why did Brexit happen? The only possible driver for Brexit could have been the intuitive drive to promote British sovereignty and its perceived status in the world, underpinned by feelings of patriotism, but what is patriotism and why is it there?

As human beings we seem to have an instinct for what scientists call in-group/out-group behaviour, and patriotism is a manifestation of that fundamental human instinct. We divide us, Britain, from them, the EU and all those other funny foreigners. The problem is that the instincts that underpin our behaviour evolved during the emergence of our species, when we were living in tribal units in a world very different to the one we live in today, and under the auspices of the mechanistic forces of nature, like Darwinian natural selection, and selfish genes, that have no moral dimension nor any bearing whatever on what we want, or should want for ourselves. The consequences of the behaviour of the simple-minded ideologs, like Brexiteers, could have even more profound and dangerous consequences:

We evolved; we are a species of social primate with a suite of behavioural attributes. If we are to understand what it is to be human, we must learn what these instincts are, the context in which they evolved and to confront them where necessary. This has important implications for philosophy, our view of ourselves, and by extension politics.

In the final episode of my series of podcasts, I pose the question “Could our species be terminally ill with the genetic disease of patriotism?” In a world bristling with nuclear weapons, it may turn out that Brexit is the least of our worries.

Find out more by listening to my podcasts: https://podcast.peterdfisher.com/share

A radical new government to deal with radical problems?

We are indeed living in strange times. The National Health Service is on its knees, or as in the words of Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer, “it’s not just on its knees, it’s on its face”. People are dying on hospital corridors, or in their homes waiting for ambulances that don’t arrive on time, or sometimes not at all, while all the main stories in the press, on the BBC and news channels is what Harry said about Wills. What is going on? Don’t ordinary people matter anymore? When did we lose perspective? Has human life somehow been sneakily devalued?

The undermining of the NHS, and by extension the value of human life itself, seems to have happened directly as a result of the failure of successive British governments to understand what is important.

When the Tories were elected twelve years ago, they had a clear vision of how things should be run. No one doubts that they had a plan, a clear and simple ideology, that they “knew” would provide the answer to the problems of the British economy. Simple minded ideologies are wonderful things, and they have special appeal to the simple minded. In the clear-cut Tory doctrine, if they focussed on creating economic growth, they would be better able to fund public services, and they claimed, paradoxically, that by cutting back spending on public services with swinging austerity measures, that the economy would be freed from the cost burdens creating a boom time, and that these “jam tomorrow” policies would eventually produce benefits for all. A less kind interpretation of their aims, given that all during the austerity period they cut taxes for the better off, was that they and their supporters had an antipathy about paying their fair share of tax, and just wanted a better income for themselves. Why put their hard-earned income into the pockets of ordinary folk, and especially the subset of the “poor” who they deemed workshy benefit scroungers?

Now, I am not an economist, and the following comments must be seen in that light, but as I understand it, economies are driven by supply and demand. And what the Tories wanted to do was to support the supply side of the economy: the small businesses, the producers, entrepreneurs and multinationals (their people), who, in their mind, produced the wealth. Unfortunately, the deficits of poor ideologies, whether clear-minded or not, are soon revealed. As soon as simplicity collides with the complexity of reality things start to go wrong. As I see it, there are two problems with the Tory approach, one is that if the better off do well they tend to filter much of their money into offshore tax havens so that tax revenues are reduced, and this money is effectively lost to the economy, reducing the effectiveness of their policy. The second is that for a supply/demand economy to work effectively there has to be a balance between the two parts, and by imposing pay restraint on vast sectors of the working population, this necessarily reduces demand. The supply side cannot make big profits, grow the economy, and pay their taxes if no one can afford to buy their products, which is where the impoverishing of the majority in an austerity driven economy inevitably leads.

Most people in Britain were clever enough to be suspicious about the Tory’s wonderfully clear vision for the future, despite the Tory “friends in high places” right-wing press propaganda. And in election after election the majority of voters voted against them, unfortunately the corrupt first-past-the-post electoral system meant that they won time after time, and in one case with a massive majority.

However, no one can deny that the British public voted for the Tory policy of Brexit however narrowly the result was, even if the suggested benefits of it were grossly exaggerated, and even lied about, and the hard-line extreme Brexit that was eventually implemented seriously damaged the economy, and meant that one part of Britain, Northern Ireland, was left without any government at all.

While the Labour Party have much to be proud of for creating the NHS in the first place, the half-way-house policies of Tony Blair introduced an internal market in the NHS, and we now see the results of that policy as contractors are now creaming off NHS funding for their own private profit, at the expense of the taxpayer, and robbing funding from the cash starved hospital trusts who desperately need the money.

If, as expected, the Labour Party win the next election, they will be faced with a massive task to rebuild the country and repair its devastated economy. Radical action will be necessary. A new EU referendum would obviously be a necessary step, and a recent poll found that two thirds of the British public would favour a second referendum. And, in the massive NHS crisis, where innocent people are dying all over the country, what is the cornerstone of Sir Keir’s message? While he is right to want to increase taxes for non-doms and those who can oppose it, his key policy seems to be… Wait for it… More devolution. Let’s move decision making from Westminster out to the regions. What! Who cares? People want their loved ones to have ambulances available for them. They want to know that if they become ill, they will have the treatment they have a right to expect, they want to know that their wages will be enough to cover their monthly costs. At a time like this, who among the general population is interested in devolution? As for a second EU referendum this also seems to have been ruled out.

Will we get a Labour government the country needs? The signs do not look good.

The Hour has come! Where’s the Man?

“Cometh the hour cometh the man.”

I’m not much given to quoting from the bible, it is prone to contradicting itself, and, in any case, there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to suppose that just because some emergency arises there is any mechanism by which “the man” should automatically, miraculously and serendipitously appear. Today, with the arrival of a deadly pandemic that has infected the entire inhabited world “the Hour” is definitely here, so where’s “the Man”? Is “the Man” Boris Johnson?

If you, as a non-aviation specialist, get on a plane, go up to the cockpit and tell the pilot to “pull that lever”, “press that button” and  “flip that switch”, the likelihood is that you and everyone else on the plane will crash and burn. We all have to defer to specialists when we do not have the expertise ourselves, but during the coronavirus crisis, it seems that Johnson’s hands were pulling the levers. Political correspondent Mikey Smith on the Daily Mirror website claims that Johnson and his ministers:

“…were told in July that the worst case was avoidable – if their advice was followed. They urged ministers not to rush to reopen schools and universities, not to plan a relaxation over Christmas and to keep people working from home wherever possible. But in each case, Mr Johnson’s government ignored the advice – and in each case had to perform u-turns as transmission rates rose.”

What was driving this policy of science denial? In the sitcom, Only Fools and horses, Derek Trotter’s misplaced “This time next year we’ll be millionaires” optimism is a source of one of the series most effective comic tropes. Unfortunately, Boris Johnson’s famous “Dell Boy” optimism is rather less funny, when the figures show that this country has the worst death rate in Europe, and one of the worst in the entire world. Johnson’s lever pulling may well have cost the lives of tens of thousands of British people.

It may, however, be too simplistic to claim that that the failure is down to the individual peccadillos of one person. It could be argued that there is a more sinister underlying mentality infecting the cabal of failure that is currently running our country. Johnson might well have been restrained by the good and sensible advice of more restrained and wiser colleagues. He wasn’t, so why not?

The political system in this country is founded on the concept of winners and losers. The fact that this government sees itself as the winners of the last election, in their minds, gives them complete entitlement. They have the right to fly the plane and to hell with anyone who tries to tell them which way to go. And the “right” direction for them is set out in Conservative Party ideology that favours free market economics, individual freedom and most of all serving the god of the economy.

Politics is not a game. The primary role of political parties ought to be to serve the country, not to win the political equivalent of the FA Cup, especially when we are presented with a corrupt political system that, in the last election, gave the winning party a grotesquely large majority when it only won 47% of the vote. To put this another way, most people in the country did not vote for the Tories but ended up with them in charge anyway. One can only hope that the public will finally see sense, and agree to get rid of competitive elitism and reform a voting system that is geared towards political medal winning instead of what is best for the county.