Imagine a world in which no one can remember who
Gavin Williamson was, all cars are electric, and gas-fired central heating is
but a distant memory.
A fifth of our farmland is being used for growing
trees or crops for the production of biofuels, and out in the North Sea, we’re
not pumping up oil but pumping down CO2.
Well, I can dream, can’t I?
Yesterday was one of those days when the sheer
inadequacy of our politics was on display in all its tawdry splendour.
Westminster was agog with chatter about who leaked
what to whom, whose skeletons will be next to come tumbling out of a cupboard,
and whether a former Chief Whip and defence secretary of whom few people had
heard was about to turn the drama series House of Cards into reality TV. And
whatever else you do, don’t forget Cronus the tarantula. (If you don’t know
what I’m talking about, count yourself lucky.)
Meanwhile, in another part of Crazytown, the
grown-ups were discussing a report by the government’s committee on climate
change, described by the business and energy secretary Greg Clark as a ‘seminal
work [whose] impact will be felt for decades to come … one of the most
important publications not just that we’ve had on climate in this country but
around the world.’
In other words, nothing of importance. The future
of the planet, or the future of Gavin Williamson? You choose …
I wrote about climate change last week, so I don’t
need to repeat myself. (If you missed last week’s piece, you can catch up by
clicking here.) My point today is to highlight the yawning gap that separates
the capacity of our leading politicians from the scale of the task that faces
them.
It is often said, for example, that a government
has no more important duty than to protect its citizens from harm. You might
have thought, therefore, that the job of secretary of state for defence should
be held by someone with some experience of high office and a modicum of brain
power. In other words, not someone like Gavin Williamson, whose considered
response to the nerve agent attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury
last year was to tell Russia to ‘go away and shut up’.
You might also have thought that the job of
foreign secretary, at a time when the UK was facing its most complex and
sensitive foreign policy challenge of recent times – how to extricate itself
from an international organisation of which it had been a member for more than
forty years – should go to someone with at least a minimum degree of diplomatic
skill. In other words, not someone like Boris Johnson.
It would be funny if it weren’t so serious. (And
don’t even get me started on Chris Grayling, whose continued presence in
government provides incontrovertible proof of the accuracy of the so-called
Peter Principle: that in any organisation, an individual will be promoted until
they reach their level of incompetence.)
Why is it serious? Because useless government
breeds contempt for government – and contempt can too easily translate into
votes for someone like Nigel Farage. (The overnight results from yesterday’s
local elections suggest that both the Tories and Labour have been hammered –
and that’s even without Mr Farage putting up any candidates.)
Barring some political miracle which would see
Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn hugging each other deliriously in an orgy of
Brexit-induced passion, cheered to the rafters by their adoring backbenchers,
we shall soon be asked to vote in the European parliament elections for MEPs
who may well be out of jobs again before they’ve even had time to book their
next trip to Brussels.
The likelihood is that Mr Farage and his unlovely
bunch of acolytes – not to be confused with UKIP 2.0, which regards the
Farageist Brexit Party as little better than apostates – could emerge with the
most votes. It would be an appalling indictment of a broken politics, in which
too many voters have seen the government for what it is – a dysfunctional, incompetent
administration that has proved beyond doubt that it is not fit to govern – and
drawn the logical conclusion: kick them where it hurts and let good old
pint-swilling, straight-talking Nige have a go.
That’s what the Italians thought when they first
discovered Silvio Berlusconi, Mr Bunga-Bunga, in the 1990s. It didn’t turn out
too well, alas, so now they’ve decided instead to try Matteo Salvini of the
proto-Fascist League party. (He’s the charmer who said yesterday that he wants
lots of votes for ‘nationalist’ parties because ‘to leave behind an Islamic
caliphate with sharia law in our cities is not something I want to do and I’m
going to do everything in my power to avert this sad ending for Europe.’)
The Ukrainians, on the other hand, have gone for a
TV comedian who made his name pretending to be a president, so is clearly
qualified to be president. But given that the UK is a country whose Cabinet has
included Boris Johnson, Chris Grayling and Gavin Williamson, I would suggest
that we really are in no position to mock. Why be satisfied with just one
comedian when you could have three for the same price?
It’s not as if we don’t have several competent
politicians: there are plenty of them, both in parliament and elsewhere. Some
have been striving mightily to extricate us from the Brexit quagmire. The inescapable
tragedy, however, is that the two most senior politicians in the land, the
prime minister and the leader of the opposition, are both grievously ill-equipped
to do the jobs we pay them to do. Not comedians, not Fascists, just rubbish.
The risk the country faces is that their
all-too-evident shortcomings will encourage too many voters to turn in
desperation to the clowns, conmen and charlatans. So if the Euro-elections do go
ahead in three weeks’ time, our duty is clear: to resist the temptation to sit
on our hands and refuse to vote for any of them, and to cast our votes instead
in a way that will show Westminster and the world beyond that the UK has not
yet entirely succumbed to insanity.
Given what I have said above, you may have little
difficulty guessing how I intend to vote, but I will spell it out in more
detail nearer the time. For now, I’ll just say that I’m looking for a party
whose slogan could be boiled down to something along the lines of ‘For a fairer
Britain, in a better Europe, in a greener world.’
Meanwhile, if you still haven’t registered to
vote, you have until next Tuesday to do so. You can do it online by clicking
here.
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