Turning Points

David Lammy put this out on Twitter yesterday:

“It is a tragedy that in the middle of a crisis where government competence has never been more important, we have the most incompetent government of modern times.” (David Lammy)

I feel a bit uncomfortable labelling this government incompetent. Not because I think it’s inaccurate, far from it. He makes a very valid point. But because I think it offers the government a way out. Incompetence is something they can deal with, in theory at least. They might one day nail a decent test, track and trace system, or get to roll out a nationwide vaccination programme. Most probably, they will dispel this image of incompetence simply by replacing Johnson with Sunak before the next election.

Being incompetent is something you can fix. But being ideologically on the wrong side of history could be fatal. And with so many of the hurdles they’ve fallen at in recent months, from grading exams to free school meals, it feels increasingly like they are just the wrong party, in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Like many, I watched wearily last week while government ministers took it in turns to defend themselves in response to Marcus Rashford’s brilliant Free School Meals campaign. The risible defence that their approach would better target resources at those who were most in need would have more credibility had the Tories shown any inclination to support those most in need up to this point. But everything about how the Conservatives have handled being in power since 2010 has suggested a callous indifference to the needs of the most vulnerable in our society. As reliance on food banks rose, any decent government might have regarded this as a failing of their responsibility to provide a safety net that ensured that people have enough to eat. But this government practically celebrated them - sending out to them a stream of Tory MPs gurning for the camera. And now with FSM, the message to those struggling to put food on their kids’ plates, in this case, is clear and consistent. Good luck, you’re on your own.

This is not the message 2020 needs to hear. It’s not the message any year needs to hear, but there’s something about moments of national, global disruptive events that brings out our need for a different message.

Johnson senses this. He would be foolish not to, given what’s happening to his polling figures. This is why he is reported to be waiting on the results of next week’s American election before deciding whether or not to pursue a hard-line no-deal Brexit. A Trump win, and Johnson will feel that “history was going his way”. As a biographer of Churchill, Johnson might see echoes of the 1940s in his current situation.

Churchill’s landslide defeat in the 1945 election came despite his popularity as a leader who had just led Britain to victory in WWII. But he had underestimated the extent to which people wanted to take the opportunity to start afresh, to take a different course.

“After World War I, many people had wanted a return to life as it had been – but after World War II, most people wanted a complete break with the past.” (Wyburn-Powell)

The sweep of left wing reforms outlined in the Beveridge report a few years previously had captured the public imagination, and Attlee’s aligning himself with these proposals was key to his electoral success.

Indeed many of the left’s greatest achievements of the 20th Century were subsequently introduced by the post-war Attlee government. The founding of the NHS immediately after the war is probably the most famous of these. Less discussed perhaps is the introduction of comprehensive social welfare through National Insurance (1946), the widespread nationalisation of utilities (1948), and the Children Act (1948), which was the first time the state assumed ultimate responsibility for those who couldn’t be looked after by their parents, including those with Special Educational Needs.

It was under the coalition government in 1944 that the Education Act saw Free School Meals comprehensively rolled out to the whole country. This in fact had more to do with pragmatics than with benevolence. To defeat the final Nazi push through Northern Europe required a monumental effort of national unity. Free school meals were introduced for all simply because so many women were now being asked to work full time, from morning till night, to support the war effort.

Munitions Factory, Kent, April 1943

When a country needs its people to pull together, effective leaders will use the tools at their disposal to make sure this happens, not blame its people if it doesn't. If it happens, it won't be through meaningless slogans, or empty words pasted on a billboard or mumbled in a press conference, but through meaningful legislation that binds our needs together with structures of state support that ensure that no-one feels left out. Through national policies that unite regions, rather than local ones that are seemingly designed to sow division.

And things can swing quite quickly after a crisis. Something as disruptive to our psyche as a global war or pandemic forces us to re-imagine not just our relationship with all the people and systems around us, and to re-imagine the role of the overarching structures that govern them. When all the norms of conventional wisdom are thrown out of the window, we start wondering what else might be possible.

We’ve learned this year what else can happen during such an event. A light is shone on all the previously hidden workers who suddenly become key to ensuring that everything doesn’t just grind to a horrific halt. Delivery drivers, nurses, teachers, food growers, cleaners… so much happens invisibly that we take it all for granted, until something happens that means we don’t.

They can also bring to the fore the plight of the most vulnerable in society, people who tend to be overlooked in an unregulated free-market capitalist society that only sees value in people from whom value can be extracted. The right cannot convincingly help those most in need during a pandemic, because of the way they have consistently failed to do so during the good times. The kids who depend on school lunches and go hungry during the holidays - normally they don’t matter much. It’s not like they vote, or pay taxes. But when Covid hit, and people stumbled, blinking, out into the streets, our eyes quickly adjusted to the new landscape and we immediately started looking for the lonely, the hungry, the trapped.

Jacinda Ardern

Left wing leaders seem to be faring well at the moment. We have seen it in Jacinda Ardern’s glorious success in New Zealand. But we also see it in the approval ratings of other leaders like Merkel and Trudeau, rising stars like Katrín Jakobsdóttir of Iceland, shining brightly next to the dim, fading strongmen on the right, whose blustering demagoguery sounds increasingly at odds with the prevailing mood of these times.

So the pendulum might be swinging to the left, and this week might represent something of a turning point. After Tuesday, we will be able to say a lot more.

I have always been fascinated by the American elections. Ever since binge watching five series of the West Wing with my mother when I was about 16. Staying up in 2000, in a crowded kitchen of my first year halls of residence, watching Florida unravel. In Nov 2004 I was in Bolivia, headphones in, watching the presidential debates in a tiny internet cafe just round the corner from my youth hostel in downtown La Paz. Come election night, me and some other travellers I was hanging out with managed to find a smoke-filled late night bar that offered cheap beer and CNN. I don’t know why their elections have always held such fascination for me. They always feel surprisingly close and unpredictable. Then there’s the dramatic circus entertainment of all the build up, the unabashed rhetoric that we are too coy to use in this country. And there’s enough distance of course that means I can be enthralled by the show without feeling too personally pained by it in the way that I am by UK politics.

But overall it’s the importance of these elections. And ultimately it doesn’t matter how close it is. Whether it comes down to a few thousand people in Pennsylvania, or a few hundred in Florida. By the end of January only one person will be sitting in the Oval Office. And if Trump has been a symbolic totem for right wing populists around the world, his absence will be felt. Like a stone dropping in a pond, his removal will spread outwards, to Brasilia and to Westminster, Budapest and Manila.

Trump with Rodrigo Duterte in 2017

This feels like an unmissable opportunity to draw a line in the sand and proceed down a different path. To look at all that has happened in the last four years and say ‘this is not how we want things to be from now on’. A rejection of Trump could reverberate around the world as a rejection of all that Trump has stood for. Of course Johnson is waiting until after next week’s results before deciding how to proceed with Brexit. Pursuing a populist agenda could look embarrassingly anachronistic in a post-Trump world.

So yes, the Tories may be incompetent. Their messaging and communication is all over the place, and besides all the decent, competent MPs (not to mention civil servants) have been shamefully driven out by Jonson and Cummings’ Brexit despotism. But put a competent conservative in charge and they still won’t be able to convincingly build the structures we need to help us get through these times together. Because global crises help bring the plight of the most vulnerable out of the shadows and into the light. They help people see the folly of undervaluing those sectors of society on which it turns out we are all, always, utterly dependent. And they help us see that other ways are possible.