The Point We MIss

I remember the day in 1997, in London. A much younger Tony Blair, fresh from the landslide that swept the decaying and useless government of John Major from power, walking along Downing Street shaking hands with supporters. The party that evening, where they played 'Things can only get better'. The country had finally lost patience with a dessicated and incompetent Tory government, empty of ideas and crippled, then as now, by xenophobia and nativistic hatreds of Europe; a government that knew it was all over and was begging to be euthanised.

I won't even start to chart the story since then. How could I? There are plenty of books out there with titles like 'How did everything get so screwed?' or 'How this disaster unfolded'. I remember a few months after Blair took office, the Princess of Wales died in a horrific pile-up in Paris, and our new baby faced Prime Minister seemed to judge the national mood perfectly, whilst the Royals clung on to ritual and remoteness. But from there? Chart the process as you like. 9/11? The Iraq War? The Arab Spring, that created turmoil, civil wars and millions of refugees? The Financial Crash? The aftermath, austerity? The Eurozone Crisis? Step back if you like and say the current mess is a consequence of neoliberalism, late capitalism, the marketisation of everything, the way the world's capital now flows through hyperfast networks into 5 swollen corporate bank accounts on the West Coast of the United States as we troll each other online.

It's all true. But for me, it doesn't explain why I feel so defenceless now.

For me, it's actually about the fading in the West of the beliefs and principles which we once thought were locked into our culture. Albeit imperfectly, albeit with injustice and failure at every turn. But present, as a basic aim, and to which politicians of all stripes (apart from the lunatic fringe) had to pay attention and had to claim that they were addressing in their different ways. Decency, honesty, fairness, opportunity, equality. The hope that life would get better for us all, no matter the place from where we started. The commitment to lift everybody up, somehow.

This was as much present in the narrative of the mainstream centre-right as it was in the left. Whatever they did in office it was couched in at least the language of benefit for all. With their 'trickle-down economics' and all the rest, I felt they were wrong, but also that the large majority of them believed that they were acting in the national good, that eventually somehow we would as a nation all benefit. If they adhered to these same primal hopes for society, albeit with different interpretations - the ones that sit at the very root of everything, below even party politics - then we could at least have a conversation about how to manifest them in our country?

Power has always animated politicians. But for decades the route to power was to adopt this narrative of liberal democracy - a system of organising society that had been taught such a grotesque lesson about failure by 1945 that it seemed obvious, self-evident, literally unchallengeable ever again?

1997 seemed like a moment when the embers of hatred and prejudice (flickering through Major's government, but set alight by his predecessor) has been pretty much put out. It felt like we had won.  The nation collectively breathed a sigh of relief, you could feel it. For me, despite the tumult of the next 15 years, despite the Iraq War, despite the disaster of the financial crash, it continued to feel like the guiding principles to get out of the growing mess were still indisputable. We simply had to hold to the liberal values that had been the guiding light for sixty years, through all the ups and downs. The principles that had faced down Enoch Powell, that had eventually seen off Thatcher, that had decriminalised homosexuality, had repealed Section 28, introduced human rights and employment and environmental laws. The principles we celebrated at the opening ceremony of that high water mark, The London Olympics, in 2012.

How long ago that seems. In 2019, a hard-right government is in office in the UK. Authoritarians and neofascists are in power in the United States, Italy, Hungary, Russia, Turkey, India, Brazil and China. Poland is swinging hard that way. France and Germany are under pressure. The far-right is surging in Scandinavia. A stand-up comedian runs Ukraine.

In the UK, we stand in the headlights, transfixed, as the neoliberals, the disaster capitalists and the xenophobes deconstruct society for their own profit. As Muslims are vilified in the Tory-supporting press. As EU citizens are used as bargaining chips. With a Prime Minister who said "Fuck business", who lies, who wanted a journalist beaten up, who cheated on his wife, who has produced an unknown number of children, whose privileged political ambition has been naked since he was a child...

We sign petitions, talk to ourselves. And we lose.

I think it is because we are having the wrong conversation, with the wrong people.

The things we assumed we shared, which were culturally unquestionable (the first principles underpinning notions like fairness, equality, decency, opportunity and the need to construct a society for all) were, we see now, far from unquestionable all along. We stopped teaching ourselves the vital value of these things because we didn't think we needed to anymore. The world in 1945 had learned its lesson. The generation that came from that war created a political and social settlement built on the horror of it, creating a Welfare State in the UK and beginning a slow, wriggling, journey towards a better world. In Europe, they created the EEC and thence the EU. They had seen with their own eyes, and in the loss of many millions, the consequences of not believing in the values of human decency.

But this generation is dead now. Their children - myself amongst them - remember what they said and what they believed in. We took these values for granted, mostly. Lessons in them didn't appear on school curricula. They weren't made explicit in the media. They weren't even challenged by politicians, mostly. They simply were. 

We live in a country now where the grip on the utter, central importance of these things is vanishing. Once we knew that these ideas are really the only things protecting us from barbarism and that our best defence was in holding to them. Now, we as a country are far from clear. Racism and hate rise, and we don't have the arguments to fight them.

When xenophobia and nativism and bullying and prejudice and greed take over, we must swallow our astonishment and go back to first principles, because those who have been taken in by these sicknesses may not even know what these first principles are. They haven't heard these ideas, less still understood why they actually work - to produce safer, more productive, more successful societies, for all. They haven't heard them because we haven't articulated them - because we have ourselves never bothered to actually learn their backstory and the strength of the ideas within them. Maybe we thought that after Europe lay in charred ruins in May 1945, after two cataclysmic wars that killed at least 90 million people, no-one would ever need to be taught them again? The bigots and the dictators understand our omission very well, and into the empty space created by people's lack of understanding they have poured hatred, sneering at the liberal snowflakes on the run. But it's really our own fault. We got deeply complacent. We fell asleep at the wheel and are now waking up to find the cliff edge yards away and the brakes cut.

We need to get back to our principles, explain them, stand by them, use them, fast.