UK: A Nation Divided
Last week I left a Trinidad in the aftermath of a virtual massacre - 24 citizens slaughtered over a single weekend, intolerable even by a population resigned to living in one of the most murderous countries worldwide with some 500 murdered annually and a toll of over 10,000 killed since the attempted coup in 1990.
Starting with a dramatic editorial on the front page of the Sunday Guardian, even our divided people are united in condemnation of successive governments in T&T charged by the Police Commissioner for financially feeding the scourge of guns, gangs, drugs and murder with multi-million dollar contracts to ‘make work’ gang leaders. We’ve got to get to the bottom of this and the nation is watching closely to see if political expedience or statesmanship wins the day.
We arrived in London to another divided nation, amidst of a very British existential crisis as the much-reviled Boris Johnson stepped into Number 10 Downing Place as the newly-elected leader of the Conservative party and Prime Minister of the UK.
Half the country here watched in disbelief as Boris trundled along to Buckingham Palace (perhaps a tad late as police disbanded a blockade of green peace protestors barring his way), on to the Queen’s drawing-room where her Majesty was required constitutionally to invite him to form a new government.
The UK is having its bizarre Alice in Wonderland moment so extreme that even the sagacious liberal UK Guardian has turned tabloid, and shouty.
Hurtling vitriol like an inconsolable jilted lover would acid, UK Guardian columnist John Crace accused Prime Minister Johnson of having ‘lied and backstabbed’, damned his “cabinet of sh--s charlatans and shysters,” in which “having been previously sacked for lying was almost a precondition.” His piece was subtly titled, “This was the moment for which he had lied and backstabbed.”
Curioser and curioser indeed. The man who didn’t want Brexit (David Cameron) started the referendum and the people who didn’t know what it was voted for it, did so like a lark and didn’t realise the EU would take them seriously.
Nobody knows how to untangle this intricately knit relationship with Europe: how to shut the door on years of free movement of people, goods and services. The questions are unending, the road map, a quagmire and a maze.
The consolation prize - mirth thankfully supplied in plenty by Boris as it is by Donald, is small compensation for the cavalier injustice they represent.
My favourite is an ad for hair frizz on the front page of today’s Sun. It reads -”Can’t help you lead a country, can control that frizz. Great hair, though.”
We all know technology, travel, refugees and history have made it impossible for the British to be anything other than multicultural.
They went looting, creating an Empire of treasure and cheap labour, meddled in Asia, the Middle-East and West Indies, Africa, pillaged and enslaved people, joined the EU and after the recent worldwide recession turned mean, inwards, ethnocentric, attacking the Poles, wanting passports from West Indians who’ve lived here since the 40s, wanting out of the EU. Now, the once clear Conservatives, Liberals-Democrats and Labour ideologies are dissolving to give way to politics of personality, race and exclusion. Policies we in T&T are familiar with. Policies governed by prejudice and fear of ‘the other’, rather than in the best interest of all.
I suspect the UK has never been as split as it is now demonstrating something we in T&T have always known, the failure of the Westminster system to govern democratically through elected representatives.
There and here, a Westminster democratic comes down to a small cabinet of chosen men and women cherry-picked by their leader backed in parliament with a majority, who decree Monarch-like on all aspects of governance from health, education, and security to jobs, infrastructure and institutions.
This is why it has been possible for successive governments in T&T to feed the monster of gang warfare and stuff it with multi-million dollar contracts as it grew too threatening for governance.
The world is increasingly being defined by a new politics and the ideal is no longer dialogue but a zero-sum game that we associate with the cold war, a battle between races and classes, privileged and the poor.
That’s why once again, I think of last week’s Sunday Guardian editorial with gratitude, I laud those Green Peace protestors in London who wanted to stop Boris Johnson from going to the palace to be invited to form a government.
We must keep pushing back - leaders, civic citizens, lobbyists, media, to take the world forward, even as it is being shredded to bits by fascist thugs, terrorists and boys’ clubs.