‘Maytime, playtime, God has given the Maytime’, goes the refrain of the old children’s hymn. At the moment, we’re having some god-given May time in November, and there are some decidedly malevolent forces in the playground.
It’s a thoroughly weird time is May time. Just this week, another oddity of this unnatural climate was the government’s declaration that it will appeal against the High Court’s decision in favour of Parliament alone determining when to trigger the sacred Article 50.
How strange. It’s one thing for the government (considered here to mean May, T., the three Brexiteers and assorted dutiful hangers-on) to reflect on whether they could bypass Parliament, as a matter of political game-playing – to which their attitude seemed to be ‘Yes, absolutely, if we can get away with it’. It’s quite another to suggest they should bypass Parliament as a matter of entitlement or some kind of righteous imperative, which seems to be the substance of this brazen appeal.
What kind of ‘should’ is it anyway? It’s clearly not a moral one. It can only be because the government wants to act without hindrance, and that they feel Parliament will get in the way. Discussion in the chamber would bring things into the open and raise various options and pros and cons – as if that would be an abrogation of what Parliament is there for. It seems that only May, T., and friends can be trusted with the will of the people, not Parliament.
Which calls into question the position of May, T. For example, is she a ‘strong’ prime minister in any sense, or a ‘weak’ one, and how do we tell? Let’s leave aside for now the question of whether it’s good to have a strong leader – something that leadership cultists always promote but on which a historical perspective suggests extreme caution – and whether a PM is entitled to push through their own personal views (on, um, education, say) as policy. Let’s also keep to one side the embarrassing matter of her not being elected as leader at all. It’s more to do with how she stands in relation to her own party. What does she believe in? Is she driving or is she being driven?
As a background we have the Conservatives behaving as if they are the executive arm of Ukip and overtaken by a new-found fear of offending the ‘will of the people’ – with the ‘people’ in question being rather narrowly defined. At the same time, they pretend to a parallel Ukippian wariness of being identified with ‘the’ Elite, meaning any group, real or imagined, deemed to be an all-powerful, all-purpose conspiratorial enemy that is responsible for everything the ‘people’ don’t like about their lives. (As if anybody could regard the Conservatives themselves as representing the Elite, incidentally – good heavens, what a suggestion!)
It’s an old scapegoating trick, of course, with a fearsome history. It’s of resurgent significance in the West, and definitely the flavour of our time in Britain. Elites of various kinds have long been targeted by both right and left, but it’s the right that is most obsessed at the moment. Any disagreements with the ‘people’s’ view (in Britain this currently means relentless hatred of the EU and a demand for instant Brexit) – indeed any reasoning of any kind – are met with spittle-flecked screaming about the Elite, and out come the pitchforks and flaming torches. Anybody can find themselves assigned to Elite status merely for having a different view from, say, the ones vomited daily by Britain’s more squalid tabloids. This in itself is a reminder of how bizarre this Elite game has become when the right-wing press, a grotesquely self-important and overweening lobby in the hands of a tiny number of privileged ultra-rich, can claim to be defending the people against the Elite. It would be laughable if it were not potentially so dangerous.
And May, T.? If, as it seems, the Conservatives have undergone one of their periodic re-imaginings – as always with perpetual entitlement to power in mind – and have effectively absorbed all but the neo-Nazi end of Ukip (well, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt), how and where does she fit in? Whatever the answer, and in spite of the current Mail May time love-in, she doesn’t emerge as strong. Instead, she offers little beyond commending the newly discovered will of a subset of the people, and appears unwilling to say anything that could offend her appointers and controllers. She is not acting as a safe moderate, even if she wants to be. (And who can say who the ‘real’ May is, or even whether there is one?) She is entirely in thrall to the substantial right in her party and the poisonous tabloid elite (with a contemptously small ‘e’).
About most things, most of the time, she appears to want to say as little as possible. The idea seems to be that silence will be taken as inscrutability and inscrutability will pass for wisdom. It doesn’t work.