It entirely depends where you’re coming from
As I type I’m sitting at my computer in the small hours with the BBC television coverage of first of the live US presidential debates playing in the background and finding it fascinating.
Sometimes my pals and others complain that my views (anti-views?) are extreme, facile or just too cynical for someone who is supposedly billed as a commentator or pundit upon the world of politics. Ironically I’d probably agree with them.
Nevertheless – against the moving wallpaper of what’s going on in the world at the moment (the US presidential election, the Labour Party conference, Brexit, Mrs May’s first months as prime minister, even geo-political matters such as the crisis in Syria) – one thing strikes me again and again.
It’s how people of completely different political leanings – in whatever context – are absolutely convinced not only that their political affiliation (and its policies de jour) are right but that they are the only ones which will improve things for both nation and its people, but also that the equivalent views and policies of ‘the other side’ will lead to nothing but disaster.
And each individual judges the performances of politicians they are exposed to through the prism of their own views.
Here, watching the US presidential debate on the television, I cannot help but regard the Republican candidate as a posturing clown, a borderline lunatic who – by some federal law or another – should have been disqualified from running for political office even before he first conceived the idea of doing it.
It seemed somehow appropriate when, at some point in the past month Nigel Farage was a minor hit upon the stage at one of Mr Trump’s rallies because The Donald comes across to me as just the sort of small-minded, hot-air-full, bigot that props up the bar in some far-off country pub and sounds off against everything.
I’m not saying I’m a Hillary Clinton fan particularly, but in terms of what (as a Brit) I’d regard as ‘presidential material’ between the two, it’s a no-brainer. Clinton may only be an averagely-professional politician for all I know, but Trump presents to the world almost as if he is a fictional character created by a clever satirist – albeit it one that even a clever satirist would send back for re-writing because he’s just too absurd to tick the box that requires great fictional characters to be on the right side of believable.
Whatever is America doing, entertaining Trump as a presidential candidate?
On Sunday and yesterday I watched a succession of political/current affairs programmes on UK television which concentrated upon events happening at the Labour Party Conference – specifically Jeremy Corbyn winning the leadership election for the second time in a year and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell announcing plans for a £10 plus living wage by 2020, attacks upon big business and a £250 billion (or is it £500 billion?) programme of public expenditure on infrastructure (“invest to grow the economy”).
What was came across to me was that, when it came to vox pop interviews amongst the delegates or just general Labour-supporting members – most particularly the ones who had voted for Jeremy Corbyn, or were Momentum members/supporters – was that they viewed everything that has ever happened in the UK through the prism of a let-wing interpretation.
Whether it was the General Strike of 1926, the great Depression of the 1930s, the 1945 Labour Government, the Harold Wilson/Jim Callaghan years, the catastrophic Michael Foot (‘longest suicide note in history’) General Election manifesto of 1983, the Mrs Thatcher period, the Kinnock years, or the periods of John Smith, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, of even David Cameron and the Coalition government of 2010 to 2015, (to listen to all of them) everything that ever occurred, was enacted or was a policy introduced – even the inevitable random outside events that sent anything and everything off course – was a case of ‘Labour good, Tories bad … in the latter case self-interested, determined to ‘crush’ working people, decimate industrial landscapes and local communities, deliberately put millions of working class people on the scrapheap … and so on.
Mind you, over the same period of history, to summarise the attitude of Tory-leaning voters, it’s a tale of completely the opposite. The Labour Party de facto automatically spells economic disaster – runaway inflation, excessive public spending, crackpot policies in every direction – and it is the Tory’s unenviable lot in life, every time they win a General Election, to thereafter have to impose the kind of sensible policies that will restore the nations’ finances, Britain’s reputation in the world and a promise of future prosperity for all.
Given the course of historical facts, how can two groups of people – some in each of them highly intelligent – come to such diametrically-opposed conclusions?
Those of us who aren’t in politics – even if they accept (as I do) that all politicians enter the politics arena with good intentions, hoping to improve things – tend to take the view that some politicians of every political hue (when they get the opportunity) will do some good things some of the time.
However, if you’re a Labour supporter, you can never admit that Tory governments are ever capable of doing anything positive. With die-hard Tory supporters, of course, it’s a case of vice versa.
And yet, out here in the real world, we all know that both sets of supporters are wrong.
The irony, of course, is that – once you’ve declared adherence to any political party, or to any political cult leader (as some are now describing Jeremy Corbyn) – you’re honour-bound, for the next few months or years, to defend everything that it or he does … even when every member of the public (including yourself privately) can see that occasionally their policies or decisions ‘of the moment’ are complete rubbish.
Ah well, that’s life I suppose.