It could be a new board game called ‘Govern that!’ set in a democratic but bankrupt country facing an ever more uncertain world. Each player is Prime Minister. But who will stay in power?
The players must first decide what will be their game plan. There are three choices. 1) One Nation: General health of the nation. 2) Golden Division: Government by demonization and division 3) Power for power’s sake: using all means necessary to keep it. Nothing else matters.
The first is a generalist approach steeped in compromise but trying to hold people together. The second works by setting groups against each other, with the PM as arbiter between the warring factions and their begging bowls. The third thinks only of power for a particular elite. This may mean dismantling some democratic principles – or indeed all of them.
Set against their policy pursuits are the various ‘culture cards’ on the board. With each go, the player must pick one up and deal with it. These cards include, ‘A culture of complaint’, ‘A culture of entitlement’ ‘A culture of echo chambers’ ‘A culture of vested interests’ and ‘A culture of binary thinking’.
The winner is the first one to get their policy agenda round the board, even if has had to change along the way. And I forgot to say, you’re allowed two broken promises. Points vary: the One-Nation adventure, because its more challenging, scores seven; the Golden Division scores four and the Power for Power’s sake scores one. But if Power for Power’s sake is the first home, then one is the winning score, so who cares? One in the hand trumps seven in the bush.
I do wonder if we have become ungovernable. The main reason I say that is that the ‘culture cards’ allow for so little sane conversation. It’s just not possible anymore. The winter fuel payments are a case in point. The lunacy of offering all pensioners – many of whom are among the most financially secure in the country – a winter fuel payment is self-evident. ‘Pensioner’ does not mean poor; far from it. As a pensioner myself, I was delighted to have it removed, as many pensioners were. But an acquaintance of mine was furious. She bristled with rage and entitlement – though she has just bought a second house in Spain, so the extra three hundred pounds should help with the curtains and the celebratory bottle of bubbly.
It wasn’t handled well by the government, because for some pensioners, it’s a life line. The present government struggles to handle a milk jug. But there was little sane conversation about the matter amid the confected outrage. Instead, we had complaint, entitlement, vested interest and binary thinking and the brutal crucifixion of nuance. A sensible idea is turned into a moral outrage.
It is hard to govern when everyone has a complaint, when no one has enough, when entitlement rules and everyone has a condition or position or a label which must be respected. I’m reminded of John F Kennedy’s line: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you; but what you can do for your country!’ He spoke those words in his inaugural speech in 1961. But it seems like centuries ago; almost mediaeval . No aspiring politician would dare say that now. They’d be promising you the earth because that’s what you deserve.
And that will be the easy lie at the next General Election and we’ll take it to our hearts. We won’t have the sane discussion about the need for income tax to rise to pay for the public services we crave. We prefer the insane demand of ‘money for everyone and paid for by no one.’ A lying politician is the child of a stupid electorate.
One answer to all this is an autocracy, where absolute power is held by the head of state; and where your voice in this story will be a distant memory. You’ll just have to buckle down and do and be what you’re told. The echo chambers of social media will be denied you. And only the government and the state-controlled media are allowed binary thinking. Life is clearly a great deal simpler in an autocracy as, among others, those in China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, several Arab states, Eritrea, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Belarus and increasingly (via particular transactions) Israel and the USA, will tell you. There’s nothing like a strong man in charge. They sort everything out. It’s all a bit binary, yes; and always repressive and murderous. But at least it’s clear.
I’m with Churchill, though, who in a House of Commons speech in 1947, declared: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.’ Yet if we wish for a one-nation democracy – and it’s relatively new idea in world history – we’re going to need a shift of some sort, some communal awakening. But are we, like the climate, too far gone? I can hear in my head the final verse of TS Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
And the fatal whimper for democracy is about something not being fair, about me not being heard, about my dreams not coming true, about me not having enough. We turn on the politicians, our substitute parents, to provide happiness because we have no idea how to do it for ourselves. ‘It’s them out there who need to do something! I’m furious, I am!’
A re-working of Eliot’s final line might read,
For this is the way our democracy ends, not with a bang but a me.
Jesus, who lived in an autocracy, offers no political blue print, though the tone is set when he invites us to do for others what we want them to do for us. It sounds a bit ‘one-nation’ to me. And there is some direction for future governance when he states it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. Perhaps those with the broadest shoulders should support public services?
But he also says the poor are always with us which brings a dose of reality to the debate. The world is fundamentally unfair on so many levels, and will always be so. No government will or can change that. So Jesus invites resilience, invites us to consider the lilies of the field and be less anxious. We won’t wait for Herod to help us. And here is the hint of emotional, social and spiritual resource the Institute for Fiscal Studies does not speak of. There are many sorts of wealth.
Are we now ungovernable? Time will tell. But democracy is a conversation just as autocracy is a silence. And half-knowing but whole-hearted, I believe the conversation is worth its place on this earth.
‘Govern that!’ We throw the dice…
