Autumn Reflections

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I’ll start this post with a view of turning birch leaves taken in the glade garden a couple of days ago. At the time I was feeling more than a little stressed: the deadline to produce the final edited version of my book on the Fens was rapidly approaching and I was spending every waking moment sifting through drawers of slides and vast arrays of digital pictures. Eventually I got it done – and with a few days to spare. So now I have a little time to reflect, before I get stuck into my next book – about which more later. So I planned to write a quiet piece about falling leaves and autumn hues in a gently mellowing country garden. Until, that is, the political scene suddenly turned crazy – which set me thinking, but on rather different lines.

I began by thinking that living in Britain today was a bit like my youth in the 1960s: society was highly polarised. Youth was rebelling against what they saw was a deeply conservative older generation. With hindsight, we can now appreciate that the war had played a huge part in making older people cherish their Britishness: anything was preferable to what they saw as the chaos across the English Channel. But by the ‘60s that particular sort of Britishness seemed tweedy, stuffy and plain boring. It was also inaccurate: the Continent was, if anything, less chaotic than Britain, where trade unions were becoming increasingly powerful, but in a restrictive and unconstructive way. But we were young and we rebelled – and in the process gave the world some cracking good music.

My thoughts then returned to the present and the political changes that are happening around us. First we have the hard right: the rise of Trump, the alt right and neo-populism. But running a close second there’s the hard left: a Corbynista world, where a top-down authoritarian socialism of the Stalinist/Militant Tendency sort is seen as the cure for all our political and social problems. Trouble is, as any sane person knows, the economy would immediately come crashing down. And then even the nastiest cuts of recent austerity measures would look like minor tweaks, as the coins in our pockets rapidly became worthless. So I think things are a lot worse than in the 1960s – which set me thinking about the 1930s.

And then I had to stop. The parallels between Trump and Mussolini seemed too horribly close. They are dead ringers. Think about it. But I won’t: it’s funny, yes, but ultimately too depressing – and so degrading for our many good friends across the Atlantic.

For the benefit of future readers, who might include an historian or two, the political events that have just transpired are mostly to do with the disastrous Brexit referendum of 2016. Mrs May and her team of politicians and civil servants have just completed negotiations with the European Union. Essentially we have gone for a ‘soft’ Brexit which appears to minimise economic harm, while giving us no input into the way that future EEC laws and regulations are framed. This is more or less what I thought would happen. I don’t see how it could be anything else. I’m slightly inclined to favour a second referendum, but on the other hand I detest political referendums: eight hundred years ago Britain pioneered representative democracy – in the form of the parliamentary system – and we should stay with it. Parliament softens decisions: if it were left to referendums we would soon return to the death penalty, if not to public executions.

So what will happen? I honestly don’t know. Nobody does. But whatever does eventually transpire, we must try to learn from the experience. For a start, we should make our political system more representative. We should think about lowering the voting age. The first-past-the-post system of electing MPs, simply doesn’t work. Living in a highly Tory county (Lincolnshire) I’m effectively disenfranchised. My vote counts for absolutely nothing whatsoever. I also think we should teach more about politics and political history at school. People need to understand the sophistication of the parliamentary system and why they should cherish it. As it is, people take it for granted and don’t really understand how and why it works so well – and that’s despite the current generation of very second-rate politicians. The fact that the likes of Boris, Corbyn and Rees-Mogg can function at all, says a great deal about the flexibility and restraint of the system in which they operate.

Sadly we’re lumbered with the present bleak situation. This week the Prime Minister is travelling to Europe to try and make her deal a bit better for us. I can’t see her succeeding, as I think politicians in Europe are getting very fed-up with the way we have been behaving – and I don’t blame them. But I do respect Mrs May and the way she has behaved with such dignity. I couldn’t have done it, especially after having voted Remain – as both she and I did. I’d long ago have told Boris and Rees-Mogg to do something unpleasant, perhaps with a rotten carrot.

So I think it very important that somehow – and maybe this is a much protracted after-effect of the dreadful Parliamentary ‘Expenses’ scandal of 2009 – we need to start respecting politicians, of all parties, again. One way to achieve this would be to appreciate and admire the parliamentary system in which they have to operate. Then, and only then, we’ll see an end to these horrid and so divisive referendums. Meanwhile, we must all keep our heads down and fingers crossed. It promises to be an uncomfortable Christmas!

 Note for pedants: I’m using referendum as an English, not a Latin word, here.