‘The Triumph of Liberty and Peace over Tyranny’.

Primroses for the confined

“I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody.” -
Mr Johnson at the press conference where he had announced his Government’s ‘Coronavirus Action Plan’ on 3rd March. 

You can watch him saying it here. A week later, on Saturday 8th March, he was at Twickers for the England v Wales rugby game, setting an example of ignoring the coronavirus for the Cheltenham Festival to follow 3 days later. ‘There is growing concern at the decision to run the four-day Festival, which attracted more than 250,000 people, after a number of attendees reported symptoms consistent with the virus’ reports The Guardian.*  At his press conference on 12th March, Mr Johnson claimed that “We’ve done what can be done to contain this disease and this has bought us valuable time.” It's worth recalling that this was nearly 2 months after the World Health Organisation labelled Covid-19 as a “public health emergency of international concern”. Is the British Government really that incompetant?

With Mr Johnson himself in intensive care as I write, one does not want to be hard on him, and we hear the call from Dr Ghebreyesus' of the WHO for people not to use the virus to score political points, but reality does not fit into convenient compartments. This pandemic raises profound political and economic questions. Mr Johnson is but an extreme example, but he got where he is with a thumping majority. We all need to realise more clearly than ever just how very dangerous our lazy disregard for reality is. Is there any hope that a close encounter with death might precipitate a change, in the UK Prime Minister himself, and more importantly, right across our civilisation?

Two long months ago, in all his glory with his shiny new majority, Mr Johnson set out his vision for Brexit Britain. It is worth having another read of his speech* in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. He began by referring to Thornhill’s painted ceiling overhead, which he even touted as England’s answer to Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel! He explained that it is entitled ‘The Triumph of Liberty and Peace over Tyranny’. 300 years later, this slogan seems to have degenerated into ‘the triumph of ideology and the feel-good factor over reality’!

The “gorgeous and slightly bonkers symbolic scene that captures the spirit of the United Kingdom in the early 18th century”, which spoke of the “supreme national self-confidence” which our hero was claiming to be reincarnating, set the tone for the rest of his appalling speech. I have been asking myself for years what it might take to dethrone such an entrenched and pervasive, though thoroughly warped, narrative? Now all of a sudden, the question is becoming immediate and very urgent, as events lay bare the destructive perversity of that narrative at this particular time. That Mr Johnson was so engaged in promoting his Brexit fantasies, at the very time when he was failing dismally to prepare for the pandemic crisis, speaks volumes. The feckless failures to heed the warnings in both cases are certainly of a piece.

Turning to the Brexit issue, that a proper new agreement with the EU might be thrashed out by the end of June is of course out of the question. Does this suit the likes of Mr Raab, who apparently relishes the prospect of crashing out with no deal at the end of this year?  Does their penchant for self-harm know no bounds? The harm that Brexit has done, and which will only become a lot worse when and if the ‘cliff-edge’ event unfolds in its full glory, has been endlessly flagged by experts on all sides. ‘Fake news’, said Johnson and the Ducky, just as they did subsequently about the pandemic. Do we let them away with their lies?

Is Mr Johnson really determined to inflict another completely unnecessary disaster on top of the current one?  The exasperating thing about him is that he is intelligent enough to know, in some corner of his mind at least, that this is plain ‘bonkers’; the frightening thing about Raab is that he appears to have no such doubts. If Johnson were to go down, where would that leave us?  But leaving this aside, and after all we have to pray for the man’s recovery, is there any chance that a close encounter with death might cause him to review his record in this case?

Speeches of his such as that one at Greenwich are such a dollop of b******t that it would take a book to answer them, so I shall just offer a few ‘steers’, since according to Mr Raab, this seems to be the way the U.K. is being run these days.

1)Lesson one from the pandemic:- the human race constitutes a single entity, but despite this totality, physical propinquity counts for a great deal, while the cohesion of this body is only a work in hand, and suffers from a constant tendency to break down.

2)We still do not know how the health crisis will pan out, let alone the economic one. In terms of health, enhanced European cooperation could certainly have improved things, helping to raise the awareness both of scientists and governments (especially the British one) in a more timely fashion; in terms of the economy, it will be indispensible. In the face of the opposition of the Ducky and the UK, this will however be only harder. To claim that somehow the UK will make a bigger contribution by means of a futile attempt to relaunch the British Empire (Commonwealth+free trade area) than by taking its place in Europe is, again, downright bonkers.

3)‘Free Trade’ indeed constitutes a most important facet of the global economy; at Greenwich Johnson said - “It was fantastic at the recent Africa summit to see how many wanted to turn that great family of nations (the Commonwealth) into a free trade zone, even if we have to begin with clumps and groups”. So the Commonwealth is ‘a family of nations’ while Europe is not, and the work is only just beginning half a century after Europe? Which body is more likely to help the world up its game in relation to the threats we face? Any statements that I have come across on the matter from Commonwealth leaders were to the effect that they would much rather relate to a Britain within Europe than one trying to resurrect the British Empire, and as for Ireland and indeed Scotland...!

4) The notion that ‘freedom’ equates with the absence of constraints and laws is spurious, in trade or any other sense. How free were the pirates and buccaneers of 1707? Perhaps Mr Johnson would like to have been one of them, but in fact the particular ‘explosion of global trade’, which he celebrated and professed to champion anew in that ‘charter for Brexit’ of his, was underpinned by the British Empire.  For all the self-identification with those romantic buccaneers, it seems probable that actually he would rather situate himself safely within the Establishment, and would have been, like so many insiders, quite incapable of perceiving how very unfree most of the Empire’s subjects/victims were.

Along with bringing on the end of formal empires, the world wars of the first half of the twentieth century finally generated two huge, as it happens highly pertinent, steps forward: public health services like the NHS in Britain, and the European Union. This century we have two massive economic shocks of a different kind.

Time to be reading books again!

What benign developments may they yet finally produce? What lessons can we already begin to learn?

*https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-speech-in-greenwich-3-february-2020