SPEAKING OF THOMAS HOBBES

It would seem that Boris Johnson has attracted the epithet of clown. I have referred to him as such on many an occasion. He has been associated with the attribute by many Guardian columnists. There are other journals who have combined the word with his name and I have heard many of my friends and relatives in the United States describe him as such. President Macron is not the first to notice.

Perhaps it is something in the way he walks or waddles. There is something penguin like about his gait. Be that as it may, he is the very personification of what clowning is about. He is forever seeking a photo opportunity to go on display. He appears to love wearing a hard hat, some smock, apron or other industrial protective apparel, riding and driving some agricultural, road maintenance or warehouse machinery and attempting to operate factory appliances. He loves being around and about, demonstrating his skills at strategic condescension to whatever group is assembled before him. He has of late failed rather spectacularly in front of the CBI. Has he at last been found out?

I was having coffee with a friend yesterday morning and he mentioned the concept of “the privilege of absurdity”.  I thought this sounds like a description of Boris Johnson. He went on (I paraphrase) “It is from Thomas Hobbes Leviathan in which he writes the privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject but man only”.

There is much to ponder in that phrase. Boris Johnson takes full advantage of the privilege although, it is so much part of his character that his state of being is absurdity. He glories in it and then moves on to the next display. Indeed, his ability to blank out his previous behaviour from one second to the next is uncanny. He seems to be forever moving on leaving a completely blank space behind him. He has no past, only present. His view forward is in fact just as blank as his past. It does not matter what he says about the future, as he catches up with it, it is soon past and can be erased. Quite a remarkable feat. It is I suppose ‘living each day as if it were the last’. Woody Allen added the observation “one day you will be right”.

In the meantime, the country suffers from his presence in the job of prime minister. His spur of the moment stratagems is not fit for purpose. Unfortunately there has to be some planning. Without that, the moment to moment reactive method of governance becomes repetitious and so we have a stop and start approach to dealing with the pandemic and its variances. Hence plan B becomes a partial plan B, which is not plan B at all; but, that’s in the past, let us move on. And so it goes…

 

It is difficult to know or predict where one goes from here. The polls indicate a neck and neck preference between the Conservative and Labour Parties at 37%. The Liberal Democrats and greens have been hovering around 9% and 6% respectively for the last year. Plaid Cymru have good support in Wales and keep the Welsh Labour Party afloat in the Welsh Parliament, whilst the Scottish National Party dominate in the Scottish Parliament where they are firmly assisted by the Green Party.

 

What it boils down to is that no single party has any overwhelming support from the British electorate. We have a government that is completely self-serving having been put into place by an electoral system that is totally undemocratic, and the public, for some obscure reason, seems to go along with it. Consequently demonstrations have no effect whatsoever.  Would that demonstrations indicated a dramatic fall in support of any party governing party, should it fail to take notice of discontent, then there might be some changes; however, continuing to vote as we vote in Britain, has little or no effect in actually improving the situation. 

 

How many more times do we have to hear about learning lessons when it comes to child abuse. How many more enquiries does it take to learn lessons about anything. The construction of Grenfell Tower, with its use of dangerously flammable material is nothing new. Fire regulations in the United Kingdom have been useless and appalling in its enforcement. Since I came to this country in 1965 there has been very little in the way of managing fire safety, given the kinds of electric heaters and paraffin heaters I first encountered at the time.  One would have thought the great fire of London had never happened and, it would seem, no lessons have been learned for the last 355 years.

 

I am not suggesting that we go back in time but the British Government between 1942 and 1945 consisted of a coalition of five parties – Conservative, labour, Liberal National, Liberal and National Labour.  The coalition Majority was 604 seats out of 615 or 98% of members of Parliament, with Churchill (Conservative) as Prime Minister, Clement Atlee (Labour) as Deputy Prime Minister. Although the majority of the cabinet were members of the Conservative Party, there were quite a few influential members from the Labour Party (Ernest Bevin - Minister of labour. Stafford Cripps, Herbert Morrison – Home Secretary) and Independents of the National Coalition Party (Richard Casey, Lord Wotton, John Anderson).

Say what you like about these men, but they toughed it out and maintained a strong solidarity which filtered down to the general public. Profiteering and black-marketing went on to be sure, but there was a semblance of integrity about the leadership and the government.

 

One would have thought that the current medical and health crisis would have been the spur for just such a coalition, not only in individual countries, but round the world. But no, what we have is a turn towards separatism and extremism. The debacle of the Trump era is still present. The separatist Brexit fiasco has yet to reach its full catastrophic effect. Gangsters of the likes of Putin and Lukashenko seem to thrive. The internet is awash with hackers, scammers and deviants. Our current Government has little or no integrity of any kind. Having “got Brexit done” with a deal they lauded at the time, they are now trying to extricate themselves from a mess they created by failing to uphold the rule of law, blaming others and dishonouring the reputation of a country that could at one time claim to be almost unimpeachable, so far as the rest of the world was concerned. That is clearly no longer, and far from, the case.

 

There is an excellent piece in the Guardian by Sylvie Bermann, French ambassador to the UK from 2014 to 2017, entitled It is impossible to work seriously with Boris Johnson’s government:

(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/04/it-is-impossible-to-work-seriously-with-boris-johnsons-government) It’s a short comment but worth a read.

 

Boris Johnson has made a habit of shitting on his own doorstep, and is unlikely to ever learn any lesson. He does not read and digest, he skims and moves on. If ever anyone fulfilled the concept of privilege of the absurd, he’s it.

 

My apologies to Thomas Hobbes for tinkering with his concept as stated in Leviathan, but I’m sure he wont mind. He died 342 years ago today.

 

Hobbes 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679