When it comes to anger, I can pretty much rely on Mr Rees Mogg and Boris Johnson. I really struggle to control my emotions when I hear people who have lived in a bubble of utter privilege moaning about the nanny state and telling us how much they care about people in the back streets of Stoke or Sunderland. What a man who has had 7 kids but never changed a nappy because, in his own words “the nanny does that”, understands about the life of a woman bringing up kids in Stoke I fail to get. It makes me so furious that they dare to present themselves as the champions of the under privileged.
Fortunately, I can always rely for light relief on Mr Grayling. Having instructed officials to break the law by awarding a contract without a competitive tender to a ferry company without ferries we then discover that he spent £800,000 on consultants advising him to do this. He then proceeded to break the contract with equal disregard for the law when it became too much of an embarrassment. This is, of course, a man with a high tolerance level for personal embarrassment. He is the one who presided over a transport system that introduced new train timetables without bothering to check whether the companies he was responsible for overseeing had actually trained any drivers. The result was that he led a system that inflicted chaos on millions of commuters. He is also the one who cancelled the East Coast Railway contract and allowed a private company to walk away from millions of pounds worth of legal obligations. He claims to be the champion of the Northern Powerhouse transport revolution which is supposed to happen with less public spending per head in the North of England on transport than happens in London. By a factor of 3 to 1. Oh, and he let strikes drag on in a chaotically privatised rail system for month after month without doing anything effective to intervene. All of which will almost certainly get him sacked a few days after Brexit but meanwhile there is much amusement to be had by listening to his colleagues damning him with faint praise as their eyes roll to the ceiling when they realise what complete incompetents they have to work alongside. Has a ‘government’ ever possessed such a small talent pool of loyal supporters and been forced to stick with such a drastic failure?
Just when I had finished laughing at Grayling’s latest cock, along came Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary of a once proud nation. He just makes me depressed. How can anyone think that the international reaction to Brexit has been that the leaders of other nations have been waiting to see Britain step forward to take leadership on the world stage? What makes him think nations that are increasing in power and influence are itching to see a country in a complete mess increase the lethal effect of its armaments so that it can fantasise about past glories and exercise hard military power across the globe whenever and wherever it so chooses. No doubt Mr Williamson won’t choose to turf our Saudi allies out of Yemen. No doubt he will continue to waste money on an utterly out of date Trident system that sucks funding away from the conventional armed forces that might actually be of some use in a crisis. Either way he is living under so many layers of self-delusion about Britain’s best way to secure its future that it would take a week to unravel every layer of nonsense that he proclaims in a few short seconds.
I get almost as depressed when I encounter blind faith enthusiasm for the Labour party opposition. Mainly because it isn’t actually opposing the central policy obsession of the party in power. For at least a year I got regularly abused on line for saying that Corbyn supported Brexit. He has now articulated his insistence on delivering Brexit with even greater clarity and written to May telling her the terms on which Labour will vote Brexit through. Tellingly he missed out one line in the letter that had been agreed by the rest of his Shadow Cabinet. Apparently, he “forgot” to include the “threat” to support a People’s Vote if agreement wasn’t reached. It depresses me that anyone could think this was an accident when he has clearly moved heaven and earth to dodge a People’s Vote despite his own members’ massive support for it. It depresses me further that his Shadow Cabinet thinks a People’s Vote is a threat. I think it is an opportunity. It sinks me into the depths of depression to hear people on the left telling me that anyone who exposes Corbyn’s failure on this issue must be some kind of neo-liberal Blairite. When did the left wing of the Labour party cease to be internationalist? When did opposing the ambitions of Rees Mogg to open the UK up to the fierce winds of globalisation without any of the protections we get from membership of the EU become a left wing policy?
All of which could cast me into a genuinely deep depression were it not for a few bright spots in all this. Within the Conservative Party it cheers me up to hear Anna Soubry and Ken Clarke tear apart their party leadership with clear and rational arguments. It then disappoints me when they vote that they have confidence in that leadership. Within the Labour Party it impresses me to see some sincere longstanding radicals like Angela Smith voicing the obvious fact that supporting Brexit puts jobs at risk in working class communities. I met Angela when we were both working to try and improve education in one of the poorest estates in the country in Parson’s Cross in the north of Sheffield and have no doubts that she is a sincere and committed champion of working class communities. Because she doesn’t support every word Corbyn issues she is under attack as a betraying of the workers. Her bravery in persisting to make her case cheers me up. Those Labour centrists who think that the solution is to go back to the good old days of Blair don’t. They weren’t good days. He was a liar and utterly failed to understand the boom and crash that he fostered.
The woman who really cheers me up is, however, Caroline Lucas. She has played an absolute blinder and been consistently sensible, rational and forceful at a time of great stupidity and weakness. Her latest move is to tour the country visiting areas that heavily voted to leave listening to concerns and trying to share perspectives on how those concerns might be properly addressed. It is wrong in the extreme to dump abuse on car workers in Sunderland for voting to leave. In my work I made a visit to a deprived estate in Sunderland to help out a school that had been defined as failing. The government’s solution to that failure was to force it to become an academy. You only had to walk through the streets around the school to know the real reason for its problems. It was taking in kids from a very deprived area and struggling to attract staff to work on one of the hardest educational frontlines in the country. Blaming the mothers of those children for being angry about the horrible neglect of their community, the poor education or their children, the lousy bus service, the zero hours contract jobs they had to juggle, the mess and confusion of Universal Credits or the loan sharks and gambling companies that legally preyed on their poverty gets us nowhere. Someone of Caroline’s obvious sincerity arriving to listen and learn and articulating positive policies that would actually work is the right way forward. We must stop blaming Brexit voters and shouting at them and start working flat out to offer better alternative solutions to neglect of deprived communities.
Where would we be right now if the Labour Party had spent the last two years strongly articulating those alternatives? Where could we be a couple of years from now if a lot more of those energetic and sincere young people who cheered for Corbyn switch their support to a radical party that genuinely does understand the big issues that we need to tackle right now? In the midst of incompetence, venality and corruption one political leader stands out as being of a very different stamp. Thank you Caroline Lucas for offering a beacon of hope at a very dark time!