Our political gods must stop asking for voters’ blind faith (
detail) Especially when the devil is in the
WHERE it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat. The words of the 19th Century Liberal politician John Morley sum up almost every political conundrum, position and problem we now face.
From Boris Johnson to Nicola Sturgeon, Brexiteer to Remainer, Unionist to Nationalist, we are offered ‘sun gods’ to believe in but not asked to look at details of their faiths they decline to deal with.
I am by inclination and conviction both a Remainer and a Unionist. I ‘cried me a latte’ over Brexit. But the details of staying in the EU can be uncomfortable to examine.
The plans of Jean-Claude Juncker to move ahead with the creation of a United States of Europe are difficult to reconcile with national identity or devolution.
The eurozone – despite recent relative stability – is unstable. The euro does not work for all members and a number of banks, particularly in Italy, are on the brink.
Scotland remains a long way from recovering from the collapse of the Royal Bank of Scotland and others almost a decade ago. We are not in a position to endure another such storm. With that in mind, belief in the EU really is an act of faith.
Yet when offered the Brexiteers’ Union flag to worship – or the Saltire for those Scottish nationalists who voted leave – I don’t find myself exclaiming ‘credo’ either.
Old Etonians Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, in mock Churchillian tones, offer us a Brexit that hints at a return to the global British domination of the 19th Century. Yet what they are offering is something almost diametrically opposed to the British approach in those days of yore.
Let’s start with Europe. It is true that imperial Britain mostly liked to stay out of European affairs – although like a Corleone they kept being pulled back in.
Britain didn’t want to run Europe but it didn’t want anyone else to, either. Every now and then we would intervene to make sure no one country was dominant.
Now the British plan seems to be to put a ‘no entry’ sign on Europe. This effectively means the EU will turn into a Franco-German empire. Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron seem to have a united vision of how they want to run – and dominate – the continent. Britain hasn’t allowed anyone to do that since the days of Asterix.
Instead, we will look East. There is sense in that because economic power is shifting to Asia. A wellheeled middle class is rising globally – to almost four billion in the next few years – and the majority of them will be in China.
They will want to buy the kind of goods that we in the UK are good at making. But examine the detail. In the grand old days of empire, when Britain traded with China, we did so as a country both technologically and militarily more advanced. Now, the opposite is true.
The glory we look back to is a period that China refers to as a ‘century of humiliation’. Any free trade deal with China is likely to be marked by our humiliation.
Brexiteers may rail against the red tape of the EU, but the red flag of China would impose more conditions on British trade than any Strasbourg bureaucrat would dare to. Look at last week’s 19th congress of China’s Communist Party. President Xi Jinping asserted China’s place as the predominant world power and his belief that Communist rule brought more prosperity and stability than democracy ever could. The detail of a free trade deal with China – outside the EU – really could look criminal.
ASSERTING free trade and nationalism rarely works when you examine it. We in Scotland recently spent a week venerating a bridge that – for all the thousands of Scots who worked on it – was essentially designed and engineered by European and American engineers and built with Chinese steel.
Last week, the First Minister demanded we celebrate the world’s first floating wind farm in the North Sea as another Scottish achievement. It was built and is owned by Norwegians. Not one blade of a turbine was built here.
Yet we are called to worship. Nicola Sturgeon even had a twist in her trademark selfie – getting others to take pictures of her taking pictures of Norwegian technology.
She seems to answer any question on the state of the nation by smiling and saying, ‘L’état, c’est moi’.
And the Nationalist worship she sees as our duty still comes without any explanation of fundamental laws, such as what Scotland would do with its deficit, or why leaving our biggest single market in the UK would make sense to rejoin the EU, or currency. Indeed, that last point seems to have become like a game of pea-under-the-shell for the SNP. It started guessing the euro, then sterling, now the answer must be under the third shell – a separate Scots currency.
For Unionists like me, there is little detail about the future, particularly in the flux of Brexit.
No one is building or arguing a modern case for the Union. It is as though, relieved at victory in 2014, our leaders are resting on the nation’s distaste for another referendum. But enemy guns falling silent doesn’t mean the war is over. The Nationalist sun will rise again.
In the meantime, Brexit is like a bad crime thriller where you work out whodunnit early and only keep reading to learn how it was done.
There will be a deal that is in the interests of both Britain and the EU – the only suspense is how we get there and how Theresa May sells it as true Brexit to believers.
But this is an age when politicians, fearful and contemptuous of the electorate, offer false gods to worship. They are fearful because of voters’ volatility and contemptuous because sometimes we fall for paint on the side of a bus.
The real difficulty for them is that, whatever we are asked to worship, people end up living the detail. If our leaders don’t start dealing in that then, while they might get away with it for a while, our politics will melt in the sun.
ANAS Sarwar and Richard Leonard took part last week in the only televised debate of Scottish Labour’s unending leadership contest. It revealed a few things, notably how much contempt the men have for each other. This may not be unusual in leadership battles, but for it to be so visible was. Whoever wins, the party cannot afford another feud. This contest could have been a turning point – instead it looks like another turn of the screw for Labour.