From the Guardian's comment section

-
15
There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.
There is an element of truth in this for both Corbyn and May. Neither of them have the confidence of their own vision to drive forward this impasse.
May is beholden to the extreme elements of her party as unleashed by Cameron, together with the intransigent DUP. Her entire premiership has been bogged down by two issues; Cameron's Referendum result and her previous role. The legacy of her time at the Home Office lingers on every street of the UK and has tainted her successors precipitously. Her interpretation of the Referendum mandate in an attempt to appease the same elements that Cameron sought to cow has now utterly overwhelmed government.
Corbyn was plucked from the obscurity of the reactionary wing of the PLP to challenge the pseudo-Tory line up of the leadership campaign thrust on the party by Milliband. More accustomed to protest than planning, he faced a similar challenge to May: attempting to unite a fractured party haunted by the legacy of a past leader. Also like May, his leadership has been marred by attempts to unseat him. His ambiguity in public pronouncements on the relationship between Britain and the EU has steadily undermined his ability to respond coherently to legacy issues as well. So attempts to speak to the complexity of the Middle East situation have been cast in an altogether sinister light, further hampered by the actions of a portion of the party itself.
Both 'leaders' find themselves pulled rather than propelling. Britain's station in the world grows ever lower. The spectre of catastrophic climate change grows ever larger and any ability to respond requiring a concerted international response is hampered on this nation's part by its leadership's obsession with a single issue. Britain continues to be an unequal society with botched social security reforms, overwhelmed social care services, fragmented education services, a creaking healthcare system, an under-resourced and undermanned police and armed service, an economy limping forward, precarious employment and housing, .... All of which is largely ignored in this impasse.
More than anything else, May and Corbyn's interpretation of the local election result as a call by the electorate to 'sort out Brexit' insults the electorate further. Yes, like many I personally am fed up with Brexit. More than anything though I am angered by the reductionist approach of both of these politicians. I am fed up because Brexit has sucked the life out of British politics, damaged an already fragile democratic trust, unleashed xenophobic and populist forces that further damage communities and pulled attention away from a host of urgent issues that already threaten precipitously. I am disgusted at the way in which 'honourable members' have squandered their mandate on a single issue when there are more important things to deal with.

Author's permission sought.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Ah, but what about Belgium?"

-
Image
Belgium only produced a set of figures where all care home deaths were presumed to be Covid-related To compare like-for-like, this equates most closely to the UK Excess deaths figures. So I have added the "Belgium scale" to the comparison of Covid Deaths per million people across European nations  As before, the X-axis is not meaningful - the datapoints are spread out only to prevent the labels from overlapping
Read more

Extinction Rebellion on Tom Swarbrick's LBC show

-
Yesterday, one of the topics on Tom Swarbrick's show on LBC was the Extinction Rebellion protests in London. The Deputy Editor of Spiked spoke about them on the show. Tom also spoke about plastics. Both Tom and the Spiked correspondent’s view of Extinction Rebellion (ER) seemed to be that 1) ER don’t have policies (other than calling for a climate emergency), and also 2) ER have policies which are too extreme. Quite obviously, only one of those points can be true - they either have policies or they don’t. Their complaint really seemed to to be that their policies are not insignificant enough to be palatable. i.e. ER are focussed on changes which are significant enough to have an adequate effect. For the past 35 years[1], the West has gradually moved from climate change being a fringe concern, to climate change being an acknowledged political concern, to implementing changes small enough to be palatable.  We have not yet moved to making changes large enough to be adequate. And...
Read more

Climate Change - some comparisons

-
Ice Ages are bad - especially if you live in Europe. The Ice Sheet can reach all the way down to Africa. But the difference between an Ice Age and now? 4degC (7degF). It took 10,000 years to get from the last Ice Age to the 1950s, i.e. change the global temp by 4degC. It’s taken 70 years to change the climate by over 1degC. We’re changing the climate 2,750 faster than old Mother Nature does. So, if an Ice Age that coats all of Europe in ice is only 4degC away in one direction, then what sort of world is 4degC away in the other direction? Another way to think about it:  10degC (18degF) is the difference between Alaska and Florida. Another way to think about it: humans are used to thinking in terms of linear change. Make a little change, have a little effect. Tap the accelerator gently, the car moves a bit quicker. Floor it, and the car goes much faster. Same with tapping the brakes, and stomping on the brakes. But climate is a bit different. If we do a bit of climate...
Read more