Led by Donkeys to this Very Day

I've been researching some of my family's military involvements in the Great War; I think I've previously mentioned my great-uncle Tom Rudge, on my father's side, who was killed in France in the early weeks of the war, on the twenty-second of December 1914 at the age of just twenty-one. I've just made an application to retrieve his papers from the archives, should they still be extant. I've also been looking into another great-uncle of mine on my mother's side, who was fortunate enough to survive the maelstrom of the Gallipoli campaign, and hence how I am able to converse with my cousin Francis to this day.

His grandfather, Francis Hubert Southall (great-uncle Frank to me, growing up), my grandfather's brother, fought at Suvla Bay on the opposite coast of the peninsula to The Dardanelles; was wounded and captured, and spent the rest of the war in relative safety as a POW: without which fact, my late uncle Mike and cousin Francis would not have happened. Gallipoli has rightly been characterised as a military disaster which cost the lives of thousands of ordinary soldiers, organised from afar by senior generals and politicians, and executed by ill-prepared and out-of-touch senior officers present - again at some tangible, physical distance - within the ambit of the campaign itself.

As a country, we have a long track record of donkeys being in charge of governing our nation, but none so bad as our current so-called government, who we would do the poor old beast of burden a disservice in likening them to. The roots of this pathetic crowd of course lie in the fertile years of the Thatcher Regime, which tore up just about every rule-book of Conservative thinking and common sense in existence. In this week's New Statesman there is a lengthy but very incisive article by John Gray: 'The Conservative Paradox', which argues that both the nation's woes and the current government's are rooted in the Gadarene rush to unshackle business from reality and the process of due governance, that began in the mid-late seventies with the mad theorising of neo-liberals and the growth of macroeconomics as a doctrine; and which has severed the Tory party from its true roots of, well, being conservative of society and of polity, and stranded them and the rest of us in the anarchic free-for-all that subsists today.

His arguments are persuasive, not only because he voices concerns and ideas that I've held dear for decades, but that he's right; we need a return to a state of social stability. This does not mean a return to the kind of class-based, entitled nonsense that the far-right of the Tory party would yet still advocate, but rather to the State that the post-war Labour government - inherently socially conservative, but socially supportive and economically progressive - created. For the last forty-odd years we've had nothing but disruptors simply, well, disrupting, and where do we find ourselves? In a broken society where nothing functions properly and with growing inequality, poverty and ruined public services. Nothing gets done. In a society run by these neo-liberal donkeys, not even real business can survive, let alone the cannon-fodder of the hoi polloi that make up the majority of society. Society. It is real, but they just don't either see or connect with it, because they're too busy making money at our collective expense.

Rishi Sunak can justifiably be likened to Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford, who was in charge of the Suvla Bay landing at Gallipoli in 1915, where my great-uncle Frank happened unfortunately to find himself at the time. Stopford had no active service or experience to his name, being merely a gentleman officer whose military record to that date consisted solely of ceremonial duties, and like Sunak had no place being in charge of anything more serious that a garden fête; but was nevertheless was given authority over the plan by the powers that be. The inevitable happened, and many were killed, wounded and taken prisoner. My great-uncle was one of the lucky ones. He survived, despite the donkeys. Let's hope we all do, too...