WHERE ON EARTH ARE WE GOING?

I’m increasingly confused. We’ve a government with a big majority who said Brexit would benefit us. To be fair we expected neither a pandemic or a war in Europe but I’m sitting here today wondering if anyone has (or had) a clue as to how to manage our affairs. I also wonder if they really care. No strategy. No values. Not a clue. And that is the problem with the insularity of Britain right now.

One of the greatest US Presidents might have been Robert Kennedy – he was assassinated in 1968 so we never found out. He said:

“The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.”

 

I don’t think  our current Prime Minister capable of such thoughts. 

As I watched the Trooping the Colour spectacle on TV the camera picked out a forlorn couple - Carrie and her husband in the crowd. That was a surprise because the nationalistic oom-pah-pah  - and that sense of “aren’t we in Britain good at this?” should have surely thrilled them. Perhaps they were reflecting that their escapade would soon be over and this soured their day.

 

No one has a clue because there is no plan and never was just a strategy apart from “Get Brexit Done”. I’m beginning to wonder if in the cold light of 2022 the inevitability of this mightn’t be beginning to untangle. In five years’ time the  4 ½ million of 11 – 16 olds will all have the vote added to the 5 ½ million of 17 to 24 year olds and we then have a very different looking electorate. It doesn’t feel like the Conservatives have much chance when that happens.

 

Evidence. In Australia the right wing Liberals have just lost an election turfed out by a coalition of what’s called the Teal vote (“teal” from the colour blueish green – Conservative fiscal policies plus a vigorous green agenda and many of the candidates are women). It’s a new start.

We are in an era of real change – figures like Putin, Trump and Johnson seem weirdly out of step with the new younger voters who are largely liberally minded, cosmopolitan, experimental, friends of change and very opinionated. They feel in the UK, and elsewhere, as remote  from the Brexit campaign and the Jubilee celebrations as anyone could be. 

Robert Kennedy, again, and wasn’t he terrific?

“There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.

The past is another country as LP Hartley wrote in his novel “The Go-Between”, interesting but not always instructive. The world now is full of people in America, France, Spain, Germany, China, India and Australia with whom I feel I have more in common with than, say, almost anyone in the current cabinet. 

I like my country – the climate, the architecture, our sense of humour and the food. The food? So much better than it used to be because of much greater foreign influence. 

 

So where are we going? If we follow the instincts of the younger generation I suspect we’ll end up as a better, more civilised, more tolerant place. A country with open borders again. A country that enjoys itself more and stops looking over its shoulder at the threat from foreigners.

 

Back to Kennedy again:

“The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.”

 

Yes. I’ll buy that.

STOP RE-WRITING HISTORY

During the lockdown a lot’s been written about sleep. Until recently I’ve done rather a lot of it without thinking about it. But now I’m sleeping less well with uneasy dreams full of historic regret. It’s all rather bizarre. I re-live innings I played in cricket and lament that rash shot I made 50 years ago or a presentation I made which I spoilt by making a casual remark which like an ink blot interrupted the clean flow or an argument that I shouldn’t have had. I wake up feeling guilty and tired.

Talking of historic regret I see university applications for History are in marked decline. I  understand why. There’s an increasing trend shifting from analysis and balance to blame. 

The first line of L.P. Hartley’s novel “The Go Between” (and later a film) was

“The past was a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

In my childhood there were no computers, calculators, hardly any TVs or household appliances. Children were regularly beaten at school and at home. Capital punishment was accepted as a norm for murder. We had amateurs and professionals in sport. Woman were second class. It was awful in retrospect but then it was just how things were. Doubtless in 50 years people will look back at 2021 and say it was terrible that so few women held top jobs and how lacking in diversity we were or will some freakish change of thinking lead us to be living in Gilead and The Handmaid’s Tale?

A Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham University, Kehinde Andrews, made himself rather unpopular with some people by describing Winston Churchill as a 'white supremacist' in a debate at Churchill College, Cambridge and saying modern Britain is 'based on racism'.  He also thinks the British Empire was 'far worse than the Nazis'.

Rather than frothing at mouth and dismissing what he’d said as nonsense, I thought he made some interesting points albeit in a slightly unfocused, hysterical way. The trouble with demagogues is I’ve never been able to take them seriously except in one respect. They set a poor example to the young in excluding the possibility of rational debate.

I found that moment in 2016 when the American Quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, first took the knee moving and extraordinary. Since then it’s become a little tiresome because it’s now become ritualistic not symbolic. 

If you don’t do it you’re accused of being “a silently complicit racist” which is rather silly. But not as silly as seeing people like Keir Starmer doing it.

The history of humankind is a mess. Should we demand reparation from Denmark, Norway and Sweden for damage the Vikings did to Britain in the 8th century? The Lindisfarne Raid of 793 was particularly nasty. Alcuin the scholar who worked with Charlemagne described how the ground was “spattered with the blood of the priests of God”. Or the French for the appalling way they treated us after the Battle of Hasting. Or the impudent Dutch for seizing the throne in 1689.

Some very nasty things happened in the past. We can’t change that. What we can do is study them and ensure we are cured of the instincts and practices that led to Lindisfarne (mind you, it might be interesting to take the Norwegians, Swedes and Danes to the European Court just to see the expressions on their faces.)

The history of the world is exciting. It’s crammed with progress;  full of good and bad things. If all we focus on are the bad things we are looking at and learning only half the story.