Don't Kill Your Roots

 

I caught the clip of Rishi Sunak getting chippy and defensive about his use of private jet flights again this morning, which highlights just how out of touch he is with either the current political/ecological ethos or indeed 99.995% of his electorate [category error: he was anointed to the post by his party], and how thin is his veneer of understanding of, and concern for, the climate crisis into which we have thrown ourselves head first.

"...the most efficient use of my time..." is the most gloriously inane and hubristic phrase that 'high-flyers' like him trot out routinely, to justify insane levels of expenditure in just doing their job. As rich as the bloke is in his outside-politics world of personal wealth and business, he is nevertheless is doing a public service job, paid for out of our pockets, during the day. As I've said before - broken record time - politicians of independent means are disconnected from the job of governance, both financially and more importantly, psychologically, and should de facto be excluded from public office.

In this week's New Statesman there's a piece about Freddie deBoer and his new book 'How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement', about why the Black Lives Matter movement ultimately failed and is failing to achieve the meaningful and targeted impact it should have. His thesis bears out my view that the cognitive disconnect between the realities of [albeit often well-meaning] middle-class elites - I don't lump plutocrats like Sunak into this group: they're just disconnected from normal realities, period - and the subjects of their protests, the victims of gross inequality; turns debate from one of issues and change, to one of personality and appearance.

This is as much of a block to real political and economic change as are crass indifference and venal self-interest. If the issues at hand are suborned into a system of virtue-signalling by comfortably-off middle class intellectual elites, vying between themselves for political righteousness, then the rise of ultra-right populism is what you get. deBoer argues that the biggest pitfall for the Left is to try and completely expunge erstwhile natural members of their congregation who just happen to harbour some slightly unpleasant personal views, from their ranks; but who could be accommodated as imperfect [and who is, after all, perfect?] supporters of the general cause: the corralling of capitalism and reducing social inequality.

The alternative - as demonstrated in particular by Trump and to a lesser extent by Johnson - has already been seen to be the remaining bolthole for people essentially disenfranchised from normal debate: the Right offering nothing to the hoi polloi but condescending stricture and poverty, and the Left a never-ending stream of face-saving, on-message thou-shalt-nots, as evidenced by the purges and pogroms that have divided the Labour Party in opposition in the UK. Throwing brickbats at one another and applying Maoist restrictions on who can say what, may get you some way to getting into office via a placated media, but given the current shambles of a government, an electoral victory should be a shoo-in, anyway. If this Tory government had talent, concern or smarts about it, it would be a very much closer call than you'd like to think: we need to sharpen our thinking on the Left, and alienating our natural, often quite flawed supporters is not the way to go about it. Think on, Keir...