No. 203 - A Gentle Riposte to your Response.

Dear James,

I’m afraid you entirely missed the point of my last letter to you. Firstly, I am not continuing to fight a referendum where the decision has been made. I am not a Brexit denier. Brexit has happened. Neither am I gloomy. I am happy that the vaccine rollout has gone so well – courtesy of a joint Anglo—Irish team in a jv with an Italian company and in cooperation with our excellent NHS and its staff. And I have every reason to celebrate the genius of the British people and know they will get through no matter what. What I am gloomy about is the state of your government, its incompetence, its sleaze, its absence of any clear moral compass and its behind the scenes attempts to undermine trust in the pillars of liberal democracy and good government established so painstakingly over so many decades and centuries.

Your reply to my letter clearly suggested that, in the light of the vaccine bounce, I should move on and focus on the things we should be proud of! You mean the attack on judicial review? You mean the damage being done to the Union by Boris’s reckless breaking of promises and international law? You mean the slashing of the overseas aid budget, the creation of a border in the Irish Sea despite Boris’s promises never to do such a thing and the abandonment of your old buddies in the DUP? You mean the attempt to tear up the Irish Protocol solemnly agreed with the EU? You mean the attempt to hobble our right to protest, the attempt to suppress voters with totally unnecessary voter-id requirements and, to add insult to injury, the re-naming of the ‘re-nationalised’ railways as the ‘Great British Railways’ which means just a new coat of paint on 50 year old rolling stock! But doesn’t the latter sum up the Tory strategy across the board? Wrapping failure in the Union Jack and hoping that with a quick flourish of the magician’s wrist, a white rabbit may emerge to vast applause from a delighted audience?  Unfortunately, the world is not like that James and I’m afraid that our current conjurer-in-chief wouldn’t even get past the first interview with the Magic Circle! 

You really ought to read letters more carefully James rather than just ‘interpret’ them through your own deep blue tinted glasses. My last letter attempted to demonstrate to you that, in the short term, deep cultures are as hard to change as changing your blood group but in the end they do change with the generations. Your government is trying to reverse the tide. Boris is our very latest version of King Cnut. As I said in my previous mail, deep culture can sometimes be changed in specific contexts by ‘special people’. I cited Aneurin Bevan. Boris sees himself as so special that he can break any law, cross any line of probity, invert any value to his own advantage. But in reality, Boris is only special in his idiosyncratic, childlike simplicity. He bursts through paper walls on his JCB like a naughty child on a runaway tricycle. The poor man doesn’t have the attention span or the grasp of detail necessary to see through his vacuous dream world. Neither does he have behind him ministers of the calibre necessary to do such things on his behalf. Hancock, Patel, Williamson, Jenrick, Cloverely, Shapps and Eustace are good at looking like ministers but are poor stand-ins or for the real thing. Last Friday Eustace caved in and, with his agreement to zero tariffs on beef, sold our farmers down the Australian river despite countless promises to the contrary. 

James, yours is a government that is good at sound bites and ‘good bloke’ imagery but nothing much else. It promises one thing and does another. Boris, to use the public school vernacular, is a bounder. With his ideas of ‘freeports’ being set up around the country taking resources away from non-favoured areas, he seems intent on setting up a ‘statist ‘government along the lines of Gaullism. I am old enough to remember what happens when politicians ‘choose’ where to invest taxpayer’s money! British Leyland ring a bell? 

James, while you are quite possibly not a bad local MP, possibly also quite a nice guy in your private moments, (I know a few people whom you have helped), I’m afraid that at the Westminster level your voting record shows that you are a pond skater – a surface skimmer. You go with the wind just to save your job. All I’m trying to do James, is to help you to find some ‘depth’ in your political life, to make you into a multi-dimensional human being, instead of a one-dimensional party placeman. 

Not much to ask I know. But there’s no harm in trying?

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent.