By John Henwood
LABOUR lied. Why the surprise? It is what political parties seeking election do. Anyone who has been a student of politics for more than five minutes knew Labour’s claim that it would fix things by growing the economy was baloney. Then, when immediately after winning, they said that things were much worse than expected, the scales began to fall from the eyes of those taken in by impossible promises.
It was all part of a carefully contrived strategy and now we are seeing it played out. New and increased taxes are on the way. Wait for the Budget on the 30th of this month to learn how economically damaging Labour’s plans will be. And the deceit was completely unnecessary. Most of the electorate was utterly fed up with a Conservative government which had long lost any sense of direction. Labour’s manifesto could have said, “We will try to do better than the last lot” and they would have still won at a canter.
It was not long before allegations of sleaze, so often a Labour jibe at the Conservatives, began to emerge when it became known that Dick Decent, aka Sir Keir Starmer, had accepted a private box at Arsenal and allowed himself to be dressed in expensive suits by Lord Alli, a multi-millionaire Labour supporter, of whose ultra-luxury apartment the Labour leader has enjoyed free use. Some shiny new Labour MPs as well as Labour’s principal paymasters, the trade unions, are deeply uncomfortable with the cut in pensioners’ winter fuel support. One, Rosie Duffield, has already resigned from the party, telling Starmer that he lacked leadership qualities and stating that “revelations of [his] hypocrisy have been staggering”.
Disingenuous politics have always been with us to a greater or lesser degree. In the UK they plunged to a new nadir of reckless, impossible-to-deliver promises with Boris Johnson’s campaign to take the United Kingdom out of the European Union. He lied about the money that would flow into the NHS if we left the EU and made impossible claims about the freedoms that would follow. He fooled enough of the people for enough of the time to propel him to leadership. And what did Britain get? The worst Prime Minister (unless you include Neville Chamberlain) since the splendid orator, but hopeless leader, Arthur Balfour. Boris left the Conservatives in a complete mess which even a competent leader (not that there was one available) would have had little prospect of cleaning up. Indeed, post-Boris the party just kept digging the hole into which they inevitably fell.
If it was Johnson who took telling porky pies to a new level in British politics, what of Donald Trump’s presidency? The truth for him was what he said it was; the fact-checker team at The Washington Post catalogued 30,573 false or misleading claims during his four-year term in office – an average of 21 a day. He was world champion of disinformation and distortion and those who spoke truth to power were told they were the purveyors of fake news. Remarkably he is still at it and (this does not bear thinking about) on 5 November it may propel him back into the White House.
Back in the UK, a change, they say, is as good as a rest, but the honeymoon normally enjoyed by new governments was very short lived. If they continue as they have started, Labour may prove even worse than the last lot, but it usually takes a couple of terms for the electorate to decide it has had enough.
What are the lessons for politics in our little corner of the world? Goodness knows our system of government is far from perfect (am I being too generous?) but even at its ugliest it does not plumb the depths of UK or US politics. The common factor with them is the two-party system. Yes, I know about the Lib Dems and Reform and the Monster Raving Loonies, but, in the end, it always comes down to the big two.
Despite the misguided efforts of some to form new parties here before the 2022 election, only the existing one, Reform Jersey, emerged successful. However, we do not have the crude adversarial politics of the UK because there isn’t another party for Reform to challenge. Instead, ten party members face 39 others, some of whom agree with some of their policies, so there really is no group to pick a fight with. Indeed, the present Chief Minister went out of his way to reduce conflict by inviting three leftist Reform members into his cabinet. Don’t hold your breath, but it seems to be working.
It has always been my view that party politics, in the normally accepted sense, is a hearts-and-minds thing; it will not come about here unless and until the people want it and there was virtually no support for any of the centre/right coalitions last time round. Jersey has, over the years, had many parties; groups of like-minded individuals coming together to achieve an objective. However, in practically all cases the achievement of the objective (or the failure to achieve it) has led to the dissolution of the party. To succeed in the long term a party must be united by a common purpose, a unified political philosophy. Those who tried in 2022 to cobble together parties without shared core principles probably set back the cause of party politics for some years.
Can the centre hold? Can we continue to enjoy largely independent politics trying, however imperfectly, to work towards the best interests of all? Let us hope so, because the alternative can be seen in the current UK and US examples: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
-
Born and educated in Jersey, John Henwood decided work was not the best way to spend his time, so he went into television. By 1998 it seems he had done just enough to catch the eye of whoever decides these things and was appointed MBE for services to broadcasting and the community. Ever since then he has been trying to justify the award.
