I really hope the scandal around Downing Street throwing raucous parties while the rest of the country suffered under a strict lockdown is the final straw that breaks the back of Johnson’s government. At the very least he’s being extraordinarily dishonourable by going on TV and lying through his teeth to the country about it while bringing in fresh restrictions to keep his hypocrisy out of the news (and fortunately failing) rather than resigning as soon as the scandal broke. He’s presided over an accelerating slide into authoritarianism and oligarchy and will no doubt be remembered as one of the worst Prime Ministers to hold the office.
When the politicians, media outlets, top civil servants, and other people in the corridors of power are drawn from the same Eton to Oxbridge to power pipeline you end up with a proper British Bulldog of a political culture: a creature so heavily inbred it can’t even breath properly.
The cynic in me says that the EU wouldn’t have been able to do much about this anyway, the impression I get from episodes like the Greek debt crisis is that the EU as a political establishment has a similar strain of the disease Westminster has: the idea it’s healthy and natural for a powerful socio-political clique to piss in the eyes of the plebs and tell them it’s raining regardless of the humanitarian consequences. This paternalistic, hierarchical view of society is the source of so much banal evil in the world I think.
The cure in my opinion is to break these cliques up by getting a far wider diversity of human experience into politics, my local MP is a former physics teacher for instance and I have nothing but respect for her especially compared to the line-up of the corrupt on the front benches. We can’t expect the cadre of ex-Etonians who’ve had every advantage society has to offer to even understand the plight of the ordinary person much less empathise and use their power to do something about it.
When the politicians, media outlets, top civil servants, and other people in the corridors of power are drawn from the same Eton to Oxbridge to power pipeline you end up with a proper British Bulldog of a political culture: a creature so heavily inbred it can’t even breath properly.