No. 111 - A Shotgun Marriage – Or a Huge Experiment in the Organic Restructuring of our Politics?
Dear James,
There was one big winner last Thursday. That winner is called democracy for it is democracy that has allowed the needs of the people of the long neglected North and Midlands to be heard. At last they have the nation’s ear. In many other countries in the world, such a cry of dismay would have been suppressed, sometimes for years, sometimes for generations. But eventually it would have been expressed in bloody revolution. True democracy avoids such outcomes and so I count ourselves lucky. Last Thursday democracy identified the problem. However, what democracy did not do was to give us a solution.
What we actually got was, on the surface of things, a shotgun marriage between the Tory party and angry people of the North. Wow! Didn’t see that one coming! Personally James, I sincerely hope that Boris succeeds. His largesse has been bestowed liberally across the nation, spanning the distance between solving the North-South Divide to getting Brexit Done and his new majority will allow him to enact his every whim. He claims he has taken on the responsibility for ‘healing our nation’. He even claims to be a One Nation Tory. The auguries, however, are not good.
Many hoped that, once elected, he would soften his rhetoric on Brexit, but yesterday Boris announced that he will enact a law to make it illegal for Parliament to extend the Brexit process beyond the end of 2020. Probably a bluff, yet it could also be high stakes stuff. This is the ‘clashing of antlers’ mind. It is Dominic Cummings preparing for a ‘shoot out at the OK coral’. A lovely Christmas present for us all next year?
James, your party’s new playmates and their southern beaus have a lot to learn about each other. Like all marriages, it is in many ways a massive experiment. The news of the non-extension law means that we are already back in the territory of no deal with the chance of WTO terms and job cuts cutting the legs off the new marriage. It’s a bit like a husband revealing to his new partner on their first night together that actually he has a previous conviction for wife beating and, worse, is still married to a lady called low tax, low spending, small government Glenda. Not a good prospect for the future?
But Boris claims he has the solution. With his wild animus he claims that he is creating a brand new Tory Party. Boris is an ‘organic personality’ determined to break up the stale ‘mechanistic’ structure of our current politics. It might work but such organic personas are often dangerous. They break things. But, for the moment, Boris will build. His new party has revealed itself as a spending party. He will invest hugely in the NHS and the infrastructure of the north even though it will take several years to fill the vacancies for nurses and doctors and several decades to deliver new infrastructure. As far as his promises of ‘ambitious’ new deals with the EU and the USA, you can’t have both. Marriages are, for normal people, binary affairs. Hang on in there Carrie!
The biggest question of all however, is whether Boris’s proposals will solve the underlying problems of our nation? Will he solve the locked in psychology of ‘them and us’, the mentality of poverty where a person wakes up every morning with little hope, no self-esteem and no expectations of living a ‘better life’ no matter how they define it? Will he give each and every one of us a ‘dream’ rather than an endless extension of zero hour contracts and social division? Will he solve the problems of ‘poverty in work’? That is the real challenge facing any new government.
So James, whether this is a shotgun marriage or a massive experiment in changing Britain for ever, your honeymoon period will be full of strife. From Brexit to your new ‘marriage’ and the possible break up of the Union, the road is strewn with the debris of centuries of deep seated division of which your current leader is likely, in the long run, to fall foul. I hope I am wrong!
Suffolk is a lovely part of the country James, I am sure you will agree. But your world has changed. Next time you meet your supporters in your comfortable time capsule, you will be required to spare a thought for your new, less privileged partners from the North. A good marriage is about sharing. The question is, how much are you and your party now willing to share?
Kind regards,
BH - Your Concerned Constituent