Xmas Cheer

The theme of governments being in power for the sake of power is not a new one. From my point of view, it's an obvious 1984 influence and it crops up again and again in my writing.





You can tell it's near Christmas by the increase in media items of no real consequence that no one is particularly interested in. For example, Cherie Blair's recent financial faux pas (which, near as I can tell, seems to revolve around allowing a friend of questionable honesty to do some financial dealings on her behalf) has entirely failed to rouse a huge amount of interest outside of the media. Pretty much everyone I've talked to about it couldn't give the remotest beginnings of a shit. Yet if you read the papers you'd think it was a scandal on a par with finding that John Prescott buggers and sacrifices a live ostrich every night.

To a certain extent, the fuss is the fault of the Labour party itself. It was originally elected on a wave of public antipathy towards the Conservative party and the attendant sleaze allegations against it. To fully capitalise on that, Labour cast itself as a group of men and women so ethically pure that they wouldn't be out of place in the Vatican. The problem is, now that they're the entrenched government and now that the full glare of the media has been applied to pretty much every dealing of every Labour party member and all of their relatives. Naturally enough, we're finding that the government really wouldn't be out of place in the Vatican. Unfortunately, as it seems that 1 in every 3 paedophiles and pederasts is a Catholic priest, that is no longer such a grand boast.

So then, we're finding out that our government and their families are not perfect models of integrity. Is anybody actually surprised? I mean look at the Conservative government; it seemed to consist entirely of people whose facade of normality was so studied and false that we were expected to believe that not one of them had ever acted in a weak, foolish, and altogether human way. No, all of these men and women were infallible! And, unsurprisingly, that facade didn't stand up to scrutiny. Did that lead to the realisation that it is unreasonable of us to expect perfection in our politicians? Did it create an atmosphere similar to that of France, where politicians seem to get a mistress or toyboy as a part of their job description? Of course not. It led to us electing a bunch of people who made equally unreasonable claims to perfection, but who simply hadn't been caught out yet.

There are a couple of standard get out clauses exercised by most people (myself especially) at this point, one of the favourites being "They're all the same so there's no point in voting. The same kind of bastards will always get in". Well, yes they will. For as long as we allow ourselves to be distracted by the meaningless popularity contest that is politics in the UK they will anyway. How many people know anything about any political parties other than the Conservatives or Labour? Come to think of it, how many people even know whom their local MP is? Essentially, when it comes to election time we decide who we think looks the most 'normal' out of the politicians who appear on our TV. Then (assuming we can all be bothered to drag our fat arses off the sofa) we vote for them. And yes, we get people who are imperfect (some more than others). If our media actually did their job and bothered to find out about their ability as politicians, rather than how many affairs they've had, or how many dodgy friends they've got; and if we deigned to care about such trivialities like "Who are the best people to govern the country?" then chances are we'd be spared this false high-ground haughtiness that the press indulge in the instant a scandal is required to boost newspaper sales. What right has anyone got to say, "They're all the same" when very few know what the fuck any of them are like in the first place?

At which point did leadership stop being about ability and start being about popularity? Or has it always been like this? Can anyone seriously imagine that Dubya would be in office if we lived in a meritocracy? He's a bumbling idiot who got where he is by money and luck. In our own government, only Gordon Brown springs to mind as a politician who's ability to do the job is adequate to justify him being there. There was a while when I thought the tide may have been turning against those who ruminate scandal for scandal's sake; by the end of Clinton's time as US president, everyone with more than 2 brain cells to rub together was sick to death of hearing about his poor taste in women. Yet the only effect that the long running saga had was to give Clinton a peculiar sort of legitimacy; all of his other (many) errors and failures, as well as most of his successes were pushed to the back of our collective minds. We don't really remember that he ordered bombs launched at suspected Al-Quaida camps, or that he so nearly brought peace to Israel. We only remember a smear of sperm on a cheap dress. So it's impossible (or at least, so difficult as to be nearly impossible) to say whether he was a good leader or a bad one (Happily the only scandals that have thus far surrounded Dubya concern corruption on such a huge scale that one feels rather more justified in complaining about him).

The faint whiff of scandal surrounding the Blairs is being magnified so that it has become a stench, yet they have acted little differently from someone getting a sacked British Gas Engineer to fit their boiler on the cheap. Or asking a struck off solicitor to give legal advice. Or asking a friend to bring back rather more beer and wine from a trip to France than they otherwise would have. If we're going to have a tabloid feeding frenzy around 10 Downing St, is it really that unrealistic to ask that it's about something like the forests of money that have gone into businessmen’s pockets due to Public-Private partnerships? There are many reasons for us to mistrust our government. Let's not get distracted by a rapidly growing molehill of a scandal.

Still, Merry Christmas eh?