17th February 2022
Today and tomorrow there are severe storm warnings for the United Kingdom.
Brace, brace.
And these storms are a convenient – if not perfect – analogy for what is happening in our constitutional affairs.
As it happens we have a prime minister and cabinet secretary under police investigation.
We have a prime minister who, no doubt, will seek to stay on in office even if he is fined and found to have broken the law.
We have a Queen – of whom I am personally a fan, even though I am a republican – who is 95 and who has one son who has settled a case in notorious circumstances and a heir who is facing police investigation over cash-for-honours.
We have a delicate situation in the north of Ireland and the possibility of the Good Friday Agreement coming under immense strain.
We have a Brexit agreement with the European Union which the very government that negotiated it is disavowing.
We have government ministers deliberately – joyfully – stoking culture war and divisions.
We have the Metropolitan Police leaderless and deep in scandal.
We have increasing inflation and an imminent cost-of-living crisis.
All this – and there is a realistic prospect that Russia is about to invade a European country.
And nobody knows how any of this will end.
Brace, brace indeed.
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All’s well that ends well, Boris will resign, the new PM will get the UK to start honouring the Brexit agreement that it signed recently, the Irish will hold a unification referendum and NI will rejoin the Republic, the Metropolitan Police Force will come under the leadership of a professional and moral man or woman and those who are doing their best to destroy the reputation of the force will be booted out. Russia will decide that Ukraine has had a big enough taste of what being NATO’s front line state is like and it will withdraw – NATO will tell Ukraine that for the foreseeable, they can’t join NATO, Ukraine will heave a sigh of relief. Oil prices will begin falling easing the cost of living everywhere, the pandemic will be redefined endemic and we’ll all live happily ever after…..no, you can’t have some of what I am smoking!
May I just mention a Home Secretary who wants the power to deprive a UK citizen of citizenship, without notifying them, citizenship being a privilege, not a right.
The thing is, braced or not, it never ends. Its all ‘events, dear boy, events’. What we see clearly is a government, at political and staff level, generally incapable of managing situations that are increasingly complex. Also, incapable, generally, of making decisions in the interests of the community rather than the individual or with any useful dose of goodness of chap. So we have Windrush, the Post Office, Brexit, Partygate…there is a long list. A period of policy to despair of.
It’s more subtle and complex than that, though, isn’t it? Just as Gordon Brown signed the order to build the Navy’s 2 new carriers, striking a deal that required the work to be done in a yard in his constituency, striking a deal that required the UK tax payer to foot the complete bill for both carriers even if we asked for one to be cancelled, we had Gideon Osbourne decide that what we needed was HS2, with a new line run through land that belonged to his mates being subject to compulsory purchase orders…
And all the while the per-capita spending on London projects dwarfs anywhere else in the nation. There used to be a north-south divide: now we have a London/Rest of Country divide, made worse by the blatant, rank hypocrisy of successive governments of all stripes.
Just think what the funds spent on HS2 could have done to rejuvenate towns and cities in the north. Think about the grants that could have been made to get business humming in the midlands. To invest in sea ports, clean energy, quality homes, high speed internet, better schools and hospitals.
Who was it that said that nations tend to get the governments they deserve?
At times like these I find Marty Feldman’s wisdom a solace – it could yet be raining (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AFf0ysgNiM)
But since it is actually raining, the real wisdom is when Froederik looks upon the UK govt: “What a filthy job”
Ummm DAG you didn’t mention that UK has also become an international laughing stock and as a result of a 51/49 decision 6 years ago it’s international influence has and will continue to diminish inexorably… and for whom the depths have been far from been plumbed yet… brace, brace indeed.
It’s genuinely awful, it’s terrible – much is going wrong in a) UK b) EU c) World.
Rumour is, if we think of the earth as one big jungle – no one gets out alive.
It seems to me that ‘brace’ is a great position to take until the next unidentified crisis.
Or, maybe, events & challenges are all just part of whatver Life throws at us, and that we have the joy, ability and time to respond to the these blog posts.
Maybe global governance is a bit skew-whiff currently – nature I’m sure will nudge back into harmony at sometime in the near future.
Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind, be sober, and hope to the end for the grace that is to be brought unto you . . .
Yes, but we are in the Curling final so there is that *hic*
Yes, that narrow decision almost 6 years ago, ie longer than a Parliament is allowed to rule without a new election. So what are the plans for deciding how long the referendum’s remit extends and when we are allowed to practice our supposed democracy by means of another vote on the issue? A real job for constitutional lawyers, I would say!
I assume all these are signs of our previous culture dissolving and that it will take some fifteen to twenty years until new sustainable structures emerge that will become reliable again. It might even become worse than today. We are in a period of a profound transition, and when talking about that with a friend (70 years of age) she mused that she might not live to experience the arrival of quieter times.
Sorry, I meant of course: “It might even become worse than today *before getting better again*.”
“Excutimur cursu et caecis erramus in undis.
Ipse diem noctemque negat discernere caelo,
nec meminisseviae media Palinurus in unda.”
Virgil’s words seem terribly adequate these days.
But most people know how all these things started:
lack of any real sense of duty or moral integrity.
This malaise typifies the UK establishment and the various individuals and systems of power and authority within it.
And so it will continue, and decline further.