The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Uncovering what lies beneath
Isn’t it strange how what seem to be widely differing strands of the news sometimes and suddenly come together to form a weird and worrying pattern?
Here we are, all obsessed with Brexit, which increasingly appears not to be about the rather adult concept of getting on with the neighbours while maintaining our own independent status but, rather, to be coming down to the old-fashioned (dare one say, colonial-lite?) notion of whom it is we as a “great” nation (note the lower case “g”) are prepared to “kow-tow” to. “Not Europe”, trumpets Boris Johnson, in between clarifying his carrots. “Brussels? Never!” blusters a former leader of a failing party whose name will never again be used by me. “You’ll end up speaking German, then?” says a big-name radio presenter to a Swedish interviewee.
Yet at the same time, it’s deemed to be not just acceptable but essential for our leaders now to “kow-tow”, that wonderfully Gilbertian phrase redolent of servility, to Donald Trump or go cap in hand to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Does it never occur to some of these people that gritting their teeth and somehow managing to maintain a civil and civilised relationship with an organisation with which we generally have more in common than not would actually help us to strike better deals elsewhere, mainly because we won’t look so pigging desperate? Obviously not. Common sense and pragmatism aren’t seen as virtues when you’re basically harking back to the days when Britain was, according to 1066 And All That, “Top Nation” and everybody kow-towed to us.
The connections start coming out of the woodwork when you stack this continuing saga alongside the thoroughly seedy revelations about Oxfam aid workers and the “colonialist” attitude of the privileged exploiting the needy and despairing because they can. This scandal is not just about Britain, of course; this is an international problem with an unhealthy shadow of superiority and inferiority hanging over it, added to which there is the knee-jerk reaction of some strands of opinion that disapprove of the idea of foreign aid of any description and are glad of the excuse to give the entire concept a good kicking.
Nobody ever said, to misquote Mae West, that goodness had anything to do with it, much though the generally unwary general public might like to think it does. It’s a mess and if it isn’t, it will certainly do until one comes along.
The difficulty is, I think, that these things are going on all the time under the surface of everyone’s everyday life (think of Jimmy Savile, Barry Bennell and the source of the Metoo movement) and when they eventually burst through, like some kind of malignant magma, to burn their way into our consciousness, they force us to face the fact that the way we think about ourselves in relation to others, now and with the benefit of historical hindsight, will always come back to bite us.
It’s ironic, too, that in this same week, there is talk about the future leadership of the Commonwealth, that postempire league of nations. It isn’t, apparently, automatic that Prince Charles will succeed his mother in the role. As the point of the whole thing was to bind former British colonies together in a more acceptable form than that of all-conquering imperialism, I imagine that the next choice may be put to some kind of vote.
I suppose that could be seen as a slap in the face for the Prince of Wales but while he may be frustrated by his long wait for the job he was born to do at least he knows he’s going to get all the toys eventually. Unlike poor Prince Henrik of Denmark, whose death was announced on Wednesday, who was thoroughly brassed off that marrying a Queen (or a Crown Princess as she then was), didn’t give him the right to be called King. We still have that reverse battle to fight, of course, as there might be more than a few objections to the title of Queen automatically going to the current incumbent-in-waiting.
As to the Commonwealth, although known to be particularly close to the heart of our own, dear Queen, it is not, I suspect, top of the agenda for many others. Although, in this day and age, a gathering of disparate equals in pursuit of the common good does seem like something to aspire to.
In Boris veritas
In the no-so-dim-and-distant past, I seem to recall noting that attitudes towards the beleaguered Theresa May took the form of a phrase often used in my working youth when backs were being watched, cleared and stabbed simultaneously in order to shift blame: “I see what she’s done wrong now”. How apt is that in the context of the changing climate of British politics and its vexed, Brexitty place in the new world order? I do think, however, that when Boris Johnson talks about betrayals and disastrous mistakes, one should at least sit up and take notice, if not take him seriously. After all, who is more intimately acquainted with betrayals and disastrous mistakes than he?
The difficulty is, I think, that these things are going on all the time under the surface of everyone’s everyday life