Martin Rowson – As I please
Now and again, in moments of calm as well as crisis, it can be quite productive to pause and ask yourself precisely why it is you hold the opinions that you do. This applies to politics as much as anything else, and it’s a useful corrective to the ever-present danger of getting set in your ways. The pretentious or the desperate refer to this process as “renewal” or frame it within the context of a “relaunch”, a word which always conjures up in my mind the idea of trying to relaunch the Titanic. Anyway, recently I’ve been filling the odd empty moment, when otherwise I’d be drawing or cooking or staring out of a train window, wondering what exactly it is that colours my politics.
If you’ve managed to read this far, don’t be alarmed. I’m not about to burden you with a harrowing description of my own road to Damascus, that moment which seems to have ambushed a bunch of former lefties when they hit middle age and sent them lurching rightwards. Unlike all those Cohens and Hitchenses and Aaronovitches, no political blood vessel has burst behind my eyes and made me suddenly recognise the perfidy, hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of my former comrades.
Because I tend to see almost all human interaction as an endless series of contingencies and compromises, I was well aware of all that already, quite irrespective of the wise words I was told decades ago by an old school teacher of mine, about sticking to your principles. Who is better, he asked me, the SS officer who sticks to his principles and continues murdering Jews, or the SS officer who abandons them and stops?
That said, my half-hearted self-examination led me to conclude that I have principles, which I might even call convictions, and these in turn colour my politics.
What I think is that my principles lack the high-mindedness our political leaders would like us to embrace so we won’t, by association, stink up their own notions of the sanctity (and sanctimoniousness) of their statesmanship. It’s like tribalism, which is always denounced by desiccated political commentators because of its inherent irrationality. This also ignores the fact that tribalism provides the bedrock for almost all politics, and that the tribe is a far better, more dynamic and mutually-supportive template for society than, say, the family, which in its turn has always been talked up by both church and state because it’s the largest social unit they can ever hope to control.
But returning to my own base political motives, I’ve long recognised what I’m for is mostly defined by what I’m against. In other words, I’ll never vote Tory because, quite simply, I can’t stand the bastards; the same goes for “new” Labour. But it’s only recently that I’ve finally worked out what it is that I really, really don’t like when I see it in other people, and react against to the extent that it defines what I think. And it’s complacency.
By that, I don’t simply mean the self-destructive state of mind that besets governments too long in office, and makes them think they can get away with anything. True, a tragic kind of complacency infected Gordon Brown’s administration from the start, because it thought it could trade forever on our gratitude that he wasn’t Tony Blair and the hopelessness of a terminally-complacent Conservative Party. That’s what led idiots like Douglas Alexander to brief non-stop about an autumn election, merely as a short-term tactic to wrong-foot Cameron’s Tories, who instead finally sloughed off 15 years of complacency and got their act together. It also inspired Brown to invite Thatcher into Downing Street, a squalid exercise in redundant triangulation and, again, the shortest of short-term tactics to discomfort Cameron, with no apparent thought given to the offence it would cause among both her victims and everyone else whose sympathies, instinctively and humanly, lie with those victims and not with disconnected politicians playing stupid games.
And that’s what I truly dislike about complacency: its blithe indifference to the lives of others. It doesn’t matter whether its dressed up as principle, be it the Money Supply or Humanitarian Interventionism: the complacency lies in the underpinning assumption that destroyed communities and dead Iraqis don’t matter. This goes across the board, from the Tories’ hardwired complacency that the comfort of the few matters more than the discomfort of the many, or “new” Labour’s complacency that its natural supporters no longer mattered a jot compared to the promise of power. Or, for that matter, the truly complacent assumption that, even though you have no detectable policies, you have the right to power simply because you went to Eton. Compared to all that, however tribalist, negative and irrational their source, I think a politics based on the idea that other people matter is actually rather noble.
