Here are some observations from someone with a degree in political, social and economic history. I’m not coming at this from left or right, and I’m not wishing to offend anyone; I am just making observations. I’ll start by saying that facts are facts, but opinions are only valid if based on provable facts; otherwise they are merely assertions at best, prejudice or bigotry at worst.
Satirical cartoons have a long and valid history going back to the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer, the engravings of Hogarth and the scrawlings of Gerald Scarfe. Of course they were originally designed for the illiterate; but so were pub signs and barber poles. Perhaps political cartoons are still mostly for the politically illiterate. In which case I will upset no one in that category because they won’t bother reading this.
Portraying a lettuce as a Liz Truss, or Pinocchio as a Starmer, or a Boris Johnson (whose nose wouldn’t fit on the screen), or a Trump (whose nose would circumnavigate the planet) may raise a smile, but it doesn’t raise the level of political debate. However, political debate is only apposite for those who have the intelligence and the knowledge to be able to pursue it.
So that is the first problem with democracy – the fact that the vast majority of those who have the vote are lacking in the knowledge and objectivity to use it properly, if they bother to use it at all.
The second problem is the basic nature of humanity. This one is an assertion not a fact, but evidence leads me to believe that approximately 30% of humanity is innately good, 20% is innately evil and the middle 50% will go either way depending on what they can gain from it, or what they are led to believe.
When teaching history at A-level, IB and university entrance the first thing I always stressed was that the truth does not really matter, it’s what you can make people believe that governs their actions. I’m sure I don’t need to point out all the examples of this: from the scapegoating of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany and in much of Europe long before that, to the demonisation of migrants and asylum seekers today. Joseph Goebbels’ contention was: tell big lies and tell them often, and enough people will believe them. Who is doing that today? You don’t even have to look across the Atlantic or towards Moscow to the obvious candidates to find a contemporary example. If you can turn enough of the population against a minority you can control them to your own ends. The innate selfishness of humanity makes it an easy exercise.
One of the most stupid things I have heard said in recent times is “I don’t give a sh*t about history”. History doesn’t just tell you about the past, it also predicts the future. This is because the unwisely named species, homo sapiens, has not significantly changed since it evolved about 1 million years ago. As a species we’re still driven by the same motivations of survival, greed and advantage taking. We are not more innately intelligent than we were then, we are merely able to draw on the accumulation of knowledge, theorisations and technology. Constructs, whether they be intellectual, such as religion, or physical, such as tools and weaponry, can make an impact for good but are also often used for evil.
Before I return to our parlous political status in UK I will throw out a few random historical observations to support my conclusions.
Migration has driven the whole of human history. No nation will ever be able to stop it, the best it can do is control it for its own advantage. Homo sapiens is the product of a second migration out of Africa from about 100,000 years ago. We certainly interbred with Neanderthals and then probably outcompeted them into extinction. There were no humans in what is now Great Britain during the last ice age which ended about 10,000 years ago. Everyone living in Britain is descended from a migrant. I’m sure the Beaker People sat around campfires bemoaning the arrival of the Celts; as did the Celts the arrival of the Romans; as did the Romans the arrival of Anglo-Saxons; as did Anglo-Saxons the arrival of the Vikings; as did Vikings the arrival of the Normans. None of them could stop migration, or sometimes conquest, and we are all the genetic product in some proportion of those migrants, and of others more recently – Jews, Huguenots (probably including the Farage family), slaves directly imported from Tudor times, or descendants of Afro-Caribbeans invited over to cover post war labour shortages and Central Asians to work in the cotton mills now derelict in north-west England, etc.
Although Malthus was proved wrong in his estimation of the capacity of Britain to sustain a larger population in the 1830’s it is true that there has to be a limit. We are all feeling the pressures of the fairly rapid increase in population in the past two decades. It’s possible to argue that this pressure is not the result of the larger population per se, merely the inability of the current economy of the UK to cope with it. We have chosen not to invest in extra infrastructure and in the services required to maintain the standard of living we have come to expect. Instead we have seen a massive disparity of wealth between the super rich and the working majority. Up to a point their discontent has been bought off by benefits or by cheap distracting technologies (Playstations, Netflix and cell phones). As the Romans found out with bread and circuses: that only works for so long. Then you need to channel that discontent away from those who should really be held responsible. The Argentinian junta did it by attacking the Falklands. In Britain we bought a little time by selling off the family silver (privatisations, encouraging oil sheik and Russian oligarch investment, foreign owned “British” utilities, Chinese nuclear power stations) then we did it with the great scam of Brexit. Not a scam? Well you tell me how your life is so much better after Brexit than it was before.
But we were a great nation once right? Not really – we were a pre-eminent nation once. A pre-eminence based on good fortune and, primarily, exploitation. Exploitation is not always a bad word. The early exploitation that made this nation powerful includes the mere fact that it is an island and therefore less susceptible to disruptive invasion, rather than gradual migration. When we were invaded by Romans (who exploited tin, lead and grain) and by Normans (who exploited Anglo-Saxon learning and culture) both created an infrastructure that the native population was able to exploit to its own advantage as well. During the early modern era we were able to exploit the seas around us. Fishing of course, but mostly the ability to trade: which led to the slave trade (the exploitation of other human beings) and later the opium trade (the exploitation of Chinese goods without having to pay gold and silver for them). The creation of empire enabled the exploitation of the natural resources and products of overseas territories, to the massive disruption and a long-term legacy of conflict in those areas. Not that we were morally any worse at this than other European nations.
Then we learned to exploit Britain’s own natural resources more effectively – water power, coal and iron for example. Most of those apparently great British inventions (steam engines etc) were actually adaptations and improvements of earlier developments by ancient Greek inventors, Roman engineers and Arab mathematicians. We were the first major industrial nation, thanks to the exploitation of those resources and the exploitation of slave plantations in the Caribbean, and small children working in coal mines and cotton mills. Free trade and the great “invisible hand of the economy”; but Adam Smith did not write down the first rule of capitalism: money is more important than the lives of people. John Locke did not write down the first rule of liberalism: that the ultimate freedom is the freedom to dominate and exploit those weaker than yourself.
Now Britain has run out of things to usefully exploit. We are falling back into the status of a third rate nation. Successive governments, since probably the last successful British government of Palmerston in 1865, have not been able to stop the inexorable movement of economic power around the globe – Germany, USA and now China. Not least because power and pre-eminence invites challenge. All empires ultimately fall through Imperial overstretch or complacency, revolution and dissatisfaction from within.
Starting with the unnecessary war of 1914-18 (unnecessary in the sense that it was a dynastic war of imperialism against nationalism which could possibly have been limited by common sense diplomacy) and ending with the necessary war of 1939-45 (necessary in the sense that it was a war against true evil, but possibly unnecessary had there been a greater determination to stop Hitler in the Rhineland rather than in Poland). So we should be stopping Putin in Ukraine instead of waiting until he needs stopping in Poland too. If you think Churchill’s wartime government was more successful than Palmerston I would like to suggest that firstly Britain did not stand alone against Germany after the fall of France because we had a massive, though sometimes reluctant, empire behind us; secondly it was really Russian blood and American money that won the war, with the assistance of the fact that all leaders made mistakes but Hitler’s were the most self-destructive.
To repeat my point: Britain is a nation in relative decline and successive governments have done little to stop that decline from becoming an absolute decline. In the last 150 years the Tories have held power alone, or been in a Tory led coalition, for 94 years; the Liberals have held power or dominated the WW1 coalition for 28 years ; Labour has been in power for 31 years. By all means apportion blame appropriately, but it was the 1906 Liberal budget that created the first UK OAP and National Insurance schemes; it was the 1945 Labour government that created the Welfare State - both of which the Tories opposed. It was the Thatcher government that de-nationalised and sold off council houses without replacing them. It was the Cameron government that started hammering a few more nails in the coffin lid with the Brexit referendum.
You can follow false gods if you like, but whether they are Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage or George Galloway, they’re not going to save us. Nothing will, short of a massive world reset – and who wants world war three, another pandemic or a water world caused by climate change?
Meanwhile I try to live by 3 E’s: Equality of opportunity, Equity of reward and Empathy (a word which should not be confused with the word “sympathy”. Empathy is about being able to understand different points of view even if you don’t agree with them, and to be able to put yourself in the position of others around you). So rather than dismissing points of view I disagree with by means of ridicule or violence, I would rather try to make a rational and reasonable argument instead.
I try to make decisions on the basis of what is morally correct rather than what is convenient for me. That’s not being sanctimonious, that’s because if the whole world was selfish, society could not exist at all.
A final thought: you cannot drive a car legally without passing the driving test. These days you cannot adopt a rescue dog without scrutiny. Yet you can have children without any qualification in parenting and you can vote without any awareness or understanding of society, economics, politics and history.
I invite those who disagree with me to do so on the basis of provable fact rather than prejudice or emotion.
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