Given his record in office Johnson ought to be grateful he's only facing calls for his resignation and not arrest and prosecution, but resign he most assuredly should. But why? If Johnson goes, the Tories are still in power. His possible successors, whether the current frontrunners or some other horror are going to carry on with the same policies. They will oversee tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and even more incidences of long-term illness, and like Johnson are going to try their damnedest to ensure our people pay the cost of their failures. Is calling for the Prime Minister's resignation a waste of time?
No. The class character of the Tories must be kept in mind, as well as the limitations of calling for a change of personnel. But pressing the resignation button is politically useful if the timing is right. First, when the majority of the public - according to recent polling - think Johnson should stand down, it offers a door through which wider political arguments can step through. For instance, because Johnson's lying about his Christmas parties matters because he's thumbing his nose at sacrifices everyone else had to make, other aspects of the government's handling of the crisis - the deaths, the corruption, which remain largely abstract for most - are open to being looked at afresh. As well as who is making this call.
The second is the importance of the unwritten moral codes and their effects on ministerial behaviour. This is a bit like asking "what do you think of parliamentary standards?" and the reply coming back "They sound like a good idea." Easy to scoff at, but Johnson has played fast and loose with the Ministerial Code since coming to office and has repeatedly protected his lackeys from accountability, in outside of parliament. It's only when the media heat on one of Johnson's subordinates has got too much that they've been let go, as was the case with Matt Hancock. Forcing Johnson's resignation establishes the importance of probity in public life after its erosion over decades.
This doesn't mean governments of the past were honourable and gentlemanly affairs, but the strength of the unwritten rules then ensured there were costs attached to decisions, blunders, and getting caught with one's hand in the till. In other words, standards of decency and constraints make it more difficult for ministers to bulldoze through without regard to the law, conflicts of interest, and their oft-noted hypocrisies. With a Tory government for whom corruption is second nature, an affirmation of standards through a Johnson resignation opens up scrutiny of their recent record, raise expectations about the conduct of senior politicians, and might stay the hand of Johnson's successor when it comes to future murky deeds.
This doesn't mean abandoning class politics or class analysis for the constitutional fetishisms characteristics of "good Tories" and their liberal retinues, but making it more difficult for bourgeois politicians to act in their naked class interest without suffering political pain for it. This is why calling for and getting Johnson's resignation is important - it moves politics in our direction by just a little bit.
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«making it more difficult for bourgeois politicians to act in their naked class interest without suffering political pain for it. This is why calling for and getting Johnson's resignation is important - it moves politics in our direction by just a little bit»
ReplyDeleteMost of the country and the Conservative party both would be better off if he resigned, but there is a question of priorities: it is really a priority for the "left" to jump on the bandwagon of a factional fight within the right adding noise to a pervasive campaign that fills media time and attention, when there are far more important matters for the public attention, urgent ones like the policing bill and COVID-19 strategy, and longer term ones like house cost inflation?
Obviously Starmer and New Labour don't dare to disagree on policing, COVID-19 strategy, house cost inflation as they pursue "soft" thatcherite voters, but is that the "left"?
An indirect proof: "The Guardian" is a reliable weathervane of what the "whig" globalist hard right cares about, and it has been publishing several "two minutes of hate" anti-Johnson pieces per day, as in the glory days of the anti-Corbyn character assassination campaign, putting very much in the background political issues that actually matter, playing the "Westmistner bubble" personalities game in top form.
Their transparent purpose is to save Starmer's skin in North Shropshire, but even so Will Hutton did not get the talking-points memo and wrote “To topple Johnson, now it’s time for all good progressives to come to the aid of... the Lib Dems”.
If Corbyn has presided over a shitstorm as serious as what the Tories have presided over then the secret services would have bumped him off by now. Or the voters would have demanded his demise.
ReplyDeleteAny successor to Bojo the clown would have to be pro Brexit and probably even worse on Covid than Boris has been, but then we would be comforted that he wasn't an hyprocrite, or at least the left would be.
This is because most of the general public have flouted Covid rules to staggering levels, in this regard the Tories are really down the kids!
«If Corbyn has presided over a shitstorm as serious as what the Tories have presided over»
ReplyDeleteIf Corbyn had managed, in by-elections against a government like this, to vaporize the Labour vote in Chesham from 11,374 in 2017 to 622 in 2021, or to halve it in Bexley, or to lose Hartlepool to the Conservatives, he would have been burned at the stake on TV by the PLP, rather than a mere "chicken coup".
Davey also had mostly terrible by-election results, but at least because of a fluke (local LibDems to the right of the Conservatives on property) in Chesham he got lucky and the LibDems won one.
NB, I don't think that leaders can win or lose elections; those usually depend on context, and leaders have a small effect; Tony Blair did not win 3 elections, or Cameron in 2010 and 2015.
My guess is that many politicians and journalists mistake national politics for student society politics, whether at Eton or Oxford: in student society politics there is usually almost no interest at stake for voters, and little for candidates except prestige, so winning student society elections depends largely on personality and the support of cliques and electoral campaigns pretty much reduce to arguing the toss about this or that abstract principle or catchy detail, and getting your mates to bother voting. Voters (and "sponsors") in national elections instead care very much about their interests. Another blogger wrote perceptively:
http://davidboyle.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-critical-importance-of-doing-things.html>
“You have to read between the lines about this, but it appears that Theresa May’s objection to George Osborne, who she sacked as Chancellor, was partly that she felt he and his Etonian colleagues treated politics too like a game – a game of symbolism and positioning.”
Probably the same for Tony Blair, and despite their different backgrounds, for Keir Starmer.
«winning student society elections depends largely on personality and the support of cliques and electoral campaigns pretty much reduce to arguing the toss about this or that abstract principle or catchy detail»
ReplyDeleteOr fooling people that you support their abstract principles or fooling them about catchy details, usual quote:
https://scramnews.com/boris-johnson-pretended-left-wing-university-elections/
«"In 1986, [Johnson] ran for the presidency of the [Oxford] Union [...] the Union was sufficiently left-wing for it to be inconceivable for a Tory to be elected as president. Boris concealed his Conservative affiliation and let it be widely understood that he was a Social Democrat. [...] Boris got himself elected as president of the Oxford Union in Trinity Term.”»
That is pretty much the "centrist" approach to national elections too, and I continue to think that Starmer learned from the best here ;-).
In effect the cargo cultism of "centrists", the conceit that a “a game of symbolism and positioning” where putting a posh looking barrister as leader endorsing thatcherite policies to "soft" thatcherite voters automatically results in 20% poll leads like in 1997, has been thoroughly tested to destruction in the past 2 years. Obviously there were other factors at play in 1997 than that “game of symbolism and positioning” by Tony Blair.
Even the current “game of symbolism and positioning” of a huge right-wing "two minutes of hate" campaign against Johnson rather than his party and politics, has had small poll effects, and they are likely to be temporary.
«My guess is that many politicians and journalists mistake national politics for student society politics, whether at Eton or Oxford: in student society politics there is usually almost no interest at stake for voters»
ReplyDeleteA related quote I like is from G Mikes "How to be an alien", a humorous book from the 1950s about english culture, as to "compromise oriented" english politics:
“The Labour party is a fair compromise between Socialism and Bureaucracy; the Beveridge Plan is a fair compromise between being and not being a Socialist at the same time; the Liberal Party is a fair compromise between the Beveridge Plan and Toryism; the Independent Labour Party is a fair compromise between Independent Labour and a political party; the Tory-reformers are a fair compromise between revolutionary conservatism and retrograde progress;
and the whole British political life is a huge and non-compromising fight between compromising Conservatives and compromising Socialists.”
Could almost be repeated today, except for the “and compromising Socialists”, it is more “and compromising [anti-socialist Liberals however disguised]".
ReplyDeleteYou know how most of us become so set in our political views that it's all but impossible to change one another's minds? I'm finding Phil's arguments quite convincing, particularly that if we don't call for Johnson to go it legitimises the lies, criminality, corruption, cronyism, etc, etc,.
But I still worry that if the Con party deposes Johnson that will enable them to replace him with someone even worse [Steve Baker, Priti Patel] and / or that with a complicit media they'll be able to wipe the slate of recent Johnson 'misdemeanors'.
I'd be really grateful if you'd address these concerns please.