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

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.