Kakistocracy!

"So much for the golden future I can't even start. I've had every promise broken, there's anger in my heart" - Breaking the Law, Judas Priest

A kakistocracy, as described by Wikipedia, is "a system of government that is run by the worst, least qualified, and/or most unscrupulous citizens". It's a term that was coined in the seventeenth century by Paul Gosnold in "A sermon Preached at the Publique Fast the ninth day of Aug. 1644 at St. Maries" and though the term has been around for nearly four hundred years it has taken Boris Johnson's government of cronies, toadies, and grubby opportunists to really define what a kakistocracy would look like in real life.

How much hot air should we waste on the absolute shower of shit that are currently running/ruining the United Kingdom and polluting even the most trivial of conversations? Why should I waste time issuing these impotent yelps, these screams into the abyss, when every word of criticism, every fact proven, every lie revealed, every backhander exposed seems to strengthen their position? In a conversation with a close family member, one of many who voted for Johnson, she remarked that "they're all the same" - a belief Johnson and his fellow travellers are more than happy to spread in the hope we somehow imagine this is politics as normal - as if to say that, yeah Johnson's bent, corrupt, negligent, incompetent, vain, bullying, and cruel but so are all the others so really he's not so bad. Why would I even bother to try and argue the case that this is not politics as normal? That this is something much worse?

It's a question I've wrestled with myself. I guess I do it to try to save my sanity. It's hard to stay sane when you live in a country where there are a significant number of people who still, after all the evidence so far, think Boris Johnson and his cabinet of crooks and cronies are somehow a force for good. I'm writing this because the situation gets me down, it's had me, in the past, questioning staying in the country and, even, staying alive, and by writing this I hope to make some kind of sense of what seems to make no sense. I'm sharing it because I hope, and think, there are many others out there like me who feel the same.

I seriously doubt it will make any difference to what happens but if it changes one person's mind or brings one person some comfort then I feel I will have done some good. Could Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Priti Patel, Gavin Williamson, or Dominic Cummings put their hand on their heart and tell themselves they've ever done the same thing? They could tell us - sure, lying is their forte, but could they tell themselves. I really don't think so. I genuinely believe they are making the country a more unstable and more dangerous place and every week, every day, sometimes it feels like every hour, they underline that, italicise it, and write it out in block capitals. 

Earlier this year I wrote twenty-five Isolation blogs (count 'em) about lockdown, government responses to Covid, our response to Covid, our response to each other's responses to Covid, and the strange, strange times we were living through. That series began, and ended, with hope that humanity would win out and, indeed, lockdown brought me closer to many family members and friends than I had thought possible. But, now, with a second vaguely defined lockdown on the horizon, things are, remarkably, even less certain. Boris Johnson's gang have got their Mojo back and they're determined that whatever goes wrong this time they're not to blame. We are. You are. I am. 

Anybody but them. It's not that the new lockdown rules (pubs to close at 10pm, people not to meet in groups larger than six) are wrong. They're not ideal but they're at least something. It's that the application of them was delivered by Johnson with an admonishment that we'd been the naughty ones, going out to work, restaurants, and pubs during a pandemic, when, in fact, his own government had encouraged us to do just that. In some instances, for example using their mouthpiece The Telegraph, we'd almost been cajoled, bullied even, into doing so. Told it was our moral duty not to 'cower' at home and to get out there and get the economy up and running. Don't kill gran - but, more importantly than that, don't let Pret go into administration.

There was no mention of some of the leading rule breakers like Dominic Cummings and Johnson's own father, Stanley - a man the world will come to wish never lost his virginity. Just a vague threat to call in the army on anyone who's meeting up in large groups than for any other reason than to make money or to shoot grouse.

But how seriously can we take a government who threatens to have us arrested for breaking the law only a couple of weeks after the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Brandon Lewis boasted in the Houses of Parliament that the Conservative Party intended to break international law in "a very limited and specific way"? Are we allowed to follow the example of our governors and break their laws in a very limited and specific way. What if I meet up with less than six people all week but just break the law on Saturdays? Is that ok? Peter Sutcliffe may have murdered thirteen women but to the best of my knowledge during his lorry driving days he was never booked once for speeding. Technically he was only breaking the law in a very limited and specific way.

A law's not a law if you're allowed to break it. I'm not going to break the laws regarding Covid safety measures and neither should you but the point is the people who should be most bound by law of all should be those who set it. If they can't even abide to their own laws regarding legal documents they negotiated, agreed to, and even campaigned and won an eighty seat majority on the back of then surely they should face the consequences. Allowing powerful people to break laws while holding the rest of us to them is the measure of an autocratic state which, so far, Britain is not.

Is reneging on a deal we've signed a good way of advertising ourselves as a trusted player to potential future partners? Is Michael Gove's vague and woolly announcement regarding some sort of lorry passport system for visiting Kent not an admission that the sunlit uplands of Brexit him and his associates sold the country are in fact a huge traffic jam with lorry drivers paid to sit in them while the country's businesses lose money hand over fist? Have we been sold a puppy?

It looks like we have. But it won't matter. Because it was never about delivering what was promised. It was never about telling the truth. It was never about sorting out problems. It was always about creating more problems. EU membership was of concern to virtually nobody in the country five years ago but it's been juiced into such a hot potato issue that now, more than four years after the referendum, it's still dividing families. 

The confusion and destruction reaped by Johnson and Cummings since the referendum isn't some accidental side product of Brexit or Johnson's premiership. It's not an unfortunate addendum to the policy. It is the policy in (almost) its entirety. When Nadhim Zahawi appears on Question Time and lies that the government are carrying out 240,000 antigen tests a day (the real figure is a third of that) it's not because he's negligent or because he's incompetent. It's because he doesn't care. Him and his party don't care about you, your family, or your life. They care only about your votes and your money.

 

Larger than life characters (a phrase which can always be replaced, pithily, with the word cunts) like Johnson, Gavin Williamson, and Jacob Rees-Mogg (who's been carping about us carping about the government of late in yet another attempt to distract us from the main story) dominate the narrative and poison the debate to such a degree that we find ourselves talking like them and about them. A family member described 2020 as being 'mugged off' by Covid, using the exact same bellicose language that has failed Johnson and his party so badly while those, like Angela Merkel and Jacinda Adern, who treated Covid as a health problem rather than a chance for macho posturing achieved far far better results.

While we argue, still, about how dangerous Covid is and the effectiveness of masks, test and trace apps (for which, astonishingly, Serco - fucking Serco - seem to have got involved) the government are left free to remove civil servants and experts from their positions or to demotivate them so much they walk out. New appointments aren't given due to expertise or knowledge in the field required but are made on the basis of fealty to the Johnson project or to those who have made large donations to the Tory party. 

In the case of Dido Harding - both. The ultimate (so far) definition of this corrupted quid pro quo system is Harding's appointment. The Guardian's excellent John Crace has taken to referring to Harding as Typhoid Dido and in a typically wonderfully witty piece he skewered her unsuitability for her current position as Head of the NHS Test and Trace programme. Was she, he wondered, appointed because "she had been chief executive of TalkTalk when it suffered a massive data breach" or could it have been that "she had been on the board of the Jockey Club that gave the go-ahead to the Cheltenham festival" that is believed to have acted as a major super spreading event back in March?

Crace wondered if her rise could, by any chance, be because "she had been in charge of NHS test and trace, a service in which many employees made just two calls a month" and even set up a mouse movers club to remind each other to move their mouse occasionally to give the illusion they were still at their desk and not watching Netflix. Or, Crace concluded, could she have been promoted because "she was a Tory peer, married to a Tory MP" and, thus, was unlikely to say anything that would impact badly on Johnson and his ongoing culture war project of division?

I think we all know the answer. At least with all these donors getting more bang for their buck we should be able to afford the estimated £100,000,000,000 that will be needed to run the promised and much vaunted Operation Moonshot (who the fuck comes up with these names?) that the government has claimed will carry out ten million tests per day by 2021. 

With the government having serially failed in all their targets so far since Covid began it seems unlikely that the promotion of another serial failure in Dido Harding will mean this will be achieved but that won't matter. By then they'll have dreamed up another wizard wheeze, found a new enemy, and opened up another window in the ongoing culture war that serves them so well. Worse still, we'll fucking let them do it.

Despite my grumpy tone I'm in a pretty good mood at the moment. I restarted work back in an office (for the first time in six years) a fortnight ago and so far, with a few minor misgivings, it's going better than I thought. I miss having time for daytime walks and chats and writing more blogs but it's keeping a roof over my head and putting food on the table and, a few months back, that was not guaranteed. With a future no deal Brexit, working for a company that imports many components from the Netherlands, I can't be certain of job security beyond the new year but even that puts me in a better position than many people up and down the country - if not Dido Harding.

More happy news comes with the fact that the TADS and Capital Ring walks are up and running again (although from now on, for the foreseeable future, the pubs and curries will be done by 10pm at the latest - which is fair enough). TADS have been to Wales and Salisbury and are off to North Weald Bassett in eight days and the Capital Ring has taken us from Streatham to Richmond and on to Greenford and will resume tomorrow morning with a walk that will take us from Greenford to Hendon via Harrow on the Hill. I'm really looking forward to it and even though it looks like there will be just three or four of us I've been thinking that if more than six people do turn up for a TADS or an LbF walk can I charge them a nominal fee, 10p say, so that it becomes work rather than leisure and is therefore legitimised? Or can I pay them, even less - 2p, so that they become my employees for the day? Or can we carry guns and turn it into a grouse shoot!

That's the crazy world of Tory we live in. Covid's a real and ongoing danger but I fear the Tory danger will both exacerbate and outlive the Covid danger and that's why in this occasional series of blogs I'll be writing more about that than Covid per se. The lie we're being told and sold, the one that says we somehow deserve this lot we have in power, that nobody else would have done or would be doing any better, is just that - a lie. A dangerous, mendacious one that will, if not fact checked, poison the debate for generations. We Brits, like everyone else in the world, deserve better from our leaders than division, untruths, and taking the blame for their mistakes. We deserve much much better than a kakistocracy.