The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
So what was it all about?
In the chaos of human affairs, it can be foolish to look for reason or a common theme. We blunder through and leave it to historians to make sense with hindsight. But in the spirit of seasonal foolishness, I’ll take a stab that the big question of 2017 was: what’s the point of government?
The year began with the inauguration of Donald Trump as US president. He won on an antigovernment ticket and spent the year undermining the institutions of the American state. At times he seemed to be proving his own point – government must be a mess if it could be led by a man like him. The effect was that many of us came to see the “leader of the free world” as a global threat.
Government in the UK flailed around like a newborn giraffe trying to get to its feet. Brexiteers had persuaded the country to leave the EU and were found out to have no plan how this would be done. Theresa May fired the starting gun on our exit, and then another on an election race in which she stumbled in the clear loser.
The Brexit process has come to show how little time our government, and many people, have for the elected parliament – a strange contradiction for a country wanting to take back control. It hints that modern society is impatient with old-fashioned checks and balances and just wants things done with minimum fuss.
For the residents of Grenfell Tower, they came to see government as a threat and a hindrance. Officials put the flammable panels on the building, and officials failed to respond adequately to the tragic fire that killed 71 people and left many homeless. In the immediate aftermath, it seemed no one knew what to do, a damning verdict on a developed, rich country.
Meanwhile, the most important reform of welfare provision, Universal Credit, which had occupied years of planning and the best brains in Whitehall, was rolled out with cack-handed ineptness. Again, citizens were left wondering how government could let them down or even be so incompetent.
Closer to home, the SNP lost 21 seats in the May election – a result of linking Brexit to independence – and it saw the end of Alex Salmond’s political career (for now). Voters said they didn’t want more big government turmoil, and would like to concentrate on one upheaval at a time. So the Scottish Government went back to its strategy of governing by caution.
There are any number of statistics that show Scotland doing things better/differently to England, but damn few which show Scotland improving against its own record of poverty and low economic growth. Headlines were grabbed by new tax rates, when the real story remains the lack of new ideas to cure our persistent ills.
The tax changes are the consequence of more powers coming to Scotland since the 2014 referendum. The SNP continue to say ‘not enough’ powers but, post-election, were silent on Scotland’s alternatives.
International news was dominated by heads of government and states leading their people into famine and tragedy. Whether it was missile-happy Kim Jong Un figuring he had nothing to lose by picking a fight with America, or Aung San Suu Kyi discovering she had a considerable reputation to lose by doing nothing about the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya by the Myanmar army, government appeared to be the problem.
Zimbabwe finally got rid of a leader who was corrupt and had broken his homeland, but no sooner was Robert Mugabe out of office than another strongman took power and may improve things, but will do so with bloodied hands from a lifetime of thuggery.
You could say of any time in the last 1,000 years that honest folk are led by fools but this old charge is taking on a new significance. Technology is rapidly altering our expectations and how we live, much as robotics will soon put many of us out of a job.
The increase in global wealth means we are rich enough to afford stable societies of leisure, but that is not what our governments talk about.
Public debate is dominated by a sense of threat – IS, North Korea, President Trump, failing services, demographic ‘bombs’ – and politicians who claim to have solutions, often in the form of more government or marginal shifts in tax policy.
This year it felt like we were discussing things which were insubstantial – the latest Trump outrage, guesstimates on Brexit – while struggling to work out what was important.
Two big political issues didn’t occur in government, at all. We got further evidence of the pay gap between men and women, and then a welter of evidence and accusation about the imbalance of power between the sexes.
While both these stories received the appropriate words from political leaders, neither can be said to have been championed, or remained the focus, of any political party or government. Yet both sit at the very core of the human experience today.
Thank you for reading and commenting for the last 12 months – and have a very happy new year.
You could sayofany time in the last 1,000 years that honest folk are led by fools but this old charge is taking on anew significance