I have long felt that politics should bring hope. It's why I believe in the causes I do. Equality, peace, truth and sustainability are fundamental to hope, but they are a hard sell to many. Martin Luther King Jr dreamed, famously. Most politicians don't.
So I think the flip side has an important role to play in any politics. That's Freedom From Fear (and yes, I acknowledge the similarity to Nye Bevan's In Place of Fear, but think Freedom more powerful).
I see a lot of fear in the world. Of failing at school, in the work place, and in relationships. I see fear of unemployment and the resulting misery of poverty. There is far too much fear of homelessness, or at least inadequate and expensive housing. I see fear of ill health and old age. And many suffer from fear of the future and environmental failure. I see fear resulting from inequality as people feel trapped where they are. I see fear of others and difference - so graphically illustrated in the fear of the immigrant. And I see the fear of those who suffer being cast as unwanted migrants. There is fear of being considered a drain on society - whether because of claiming benefits or working for the state. And I believe that much of this fear is deliberately generated by world where a few want many to live in fear as a means of control.
The Guardian has two articles on this theme this morning. One is by Larry Elliott. He argues that:
Labour needs the debate over the next 18 months to be about the NHS, care for the elderly, the shortage of housing, falling living standards, the shortage of skills and rising child poverty. Areas, in other words, where it feels more comfortable.
But comfort is not enough. It has to be bold. Larry says that means Labour has to:
defend what it got right more vigorously than it has done, admitting what it got wrong with less reluctance and coming up with some proposals for tackling Britain's chronic problems — poverty, under-investment, falling living standards among them — that don't look cramped and defensive.
It should start with a manifesto for the young: tackling the housing crisis through building rather than mortgage subsidies and youth unemployment through national insurance cuts for employers that take on the under-25s and a 10-year programme to boost skills.
It's a start, but it's a timid start. The important thing about it though is that is recognises that the Tory / UKIP fear agenda on the EU and immigration should not be centre stage and that Labour's job is to move the agenda to hope.
That though requires something that Gary Younge has written about in a powerful and moving article describing the actions of a women who talked a potential mass school killer into surrendering himself to the police. Read the article itself, please: I want to concentrate on some if his conclusions. As he puts it:
Our politics, particularly in an age of terror, austerity and growing inequality, is predicated on the basis that people are basically venal, selfish, dishonest and untrustworthy. The poor are assumed not to be looking for work but cheating on welfare; foreigners are assumed to be taking something from a culture rather than contributing something to it; public sector workers, like Tuff, are assumed not to be devoted to public service but a drain on our taxes. The disabled are assumed to be well. When we look at others, the default position in much of western political culture is not to see ourselves in them but to see a threat.
There's a great deal in there that a lot in Labour are going to have to re-learn if they are to deliver Freedom From Fear. Liam Byrne is nowhere near understanding almost any of what Younge has written.
The second point is one that has not been raised in the Guardian for a long time, and I am glad Younge, who acknowledges his lack of religious faith in the article, had the courage to recognise that the Antoinette Tuff, who did the talking to the potential gunman, attributed her courage to her religious faith. As he has written:
It has become fashionable, particularly among those who think themselves progressive in Europe, to disparage not just faith but the faithful (with particular disdain reserved for Islam). All too often mistaking incivility for satire, those who set themselves up as the arbiters of reason present religion as the source of the world's problems and the religious as its unquestioning dupes.
Emerging from a decade that pitted George Bush against Osama bin Laden to deadly effect, we should not be too surprised. People have done terrible things in the name of religion. From Pol Pot to the reign of terror following the French revolution, they have also done terrible things in the name of reason.
Leaving aside for a moment where ridiculing the religious leaves the contributions of Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King, Trevor Huddleston, Bruce Kent, Harriet Tubman, Muhammad Ali, Gandhi and Malcolm X: where does it leave Tuff? A sucker or a saviour?
We can't all be that heroic. But we all deserve a political culture that assumes the best of us rather than pandering to the worst, and the space to find our best selves free from contempt, so long as we don't harm anyone else on the way.
I have no idea if Tuff would have acted as she did with or without her faith. And nor has anyone else, Tuff included. The fact was she did attribute it to her faith. Whatever someone else might think she believed it changed her behaviour. It temporarily at least gave her Freedom From Fear.
Now don't get me wrong: I acknowledge I have a faith but exercise it in one of the most liberal religious groups that now exists. I do not expect faith from anyone, and never seek to convert to whatever I believe in on this issue. My point is different, and so is Younge's, I think. And it's in his last line.
We should have politics that assumes the best of us - all of us, and not just the mythical 'hard working family' which excludes most in society.
We should have freedom to find our best selves.
We should be free from the harm of others.
That's the politics we need. There's not a lot of it available right now.
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I have been pondering the question of why the 1 percent are treating the 99 percent as if they are all terrorists that have to be spied on and coerced into some sort of submission. It rather begs the question of just who is doing the terrorising and why are they so afraid of us! I dont have any reason to explain why the attitude of the police toward the people they should be serving and protecting seems to become so violent and bullying but suspect it it down to fear.
Chris – the irony is that fear breeds fear. The one percent are paranoid so send the bullying signals downwards and in the end everyone becomes a bully thinking that if they oppress the one a rung below them their chance of survival and crumbs from the heaving table of the 1% are increased. This was documented in the Concentration Camps.
To amplify what Richard says -I think the ‘timely’ arrival of Evolutionary psychology in the late 70’s has strengthened simplistic cultural images of the human as a survival machine which has fed into the greed is good of the 80’s which led to fat cats, bankers’ bonuses and the celebrity culture. AS a secondary school teacher up to the year 2000 I noticed how fear was spreading amongst the young and how low self esteem was becoming a bigger and bigger issue for them. If you don’t play the neo lib game you will be branded a failure and ostracized. In short this is fascism, we have it now.
Like Richard I’m a Quaker and personally believe that we are dealing with forces that are psychologically very destructive in our culture. In the past it might have been called ‘evil’ and early Quakers (mid 17th Century) would have regarded what is going on as the Antichrist . It doesn’t matter what patina of words you put on it – anything that alienates us from each other and thrives on insecurity and fear destroys what is best in us. I became a Quaker because the Quaker insight into the Gospel message spoke to me: that we are at our best when we share our fears and vulnerabilities and it is through this that we become strong – as one 17th Century Quaker put it: ‘Strength in Weakness Manifest.’ Everything in our political climate today is about thuggery, rapine and vicious indifference. On bad days I lose hope, on good ones I feel the best in us will triumph.
Richard – many thanks for this. As a teacher I always told my pupils that education is about freedom. And I don’t mean the palsied simulacrum that the crack-pot Right, from Thatcher/Joseph/Kenneth Baker to our new Grand Panjandrum, the egregious Gove (another one, in the words of Dennis Skinner, who is “educated beyond his intelligence”) is always banging on about.
No, the freedom I mean is the learner’s right to think for themselves, to not to have to rely on the teacher, like Moses from the Mount, but to be allowed to draw their own conclusions. Above all, I’d tell them that the teacher’s job is to make himself or herself redundant, because the pupil has gained the maturity to come to their own judgements. Rather as Jesus is reported as saying “A disciple is not above his teacher, but every one when he is fully taught will be like his teacher” (Luke 6, verse 40)
In that light, the teacher’s role is very much like the parent’s role – as you so eloquently demonstrated in your post about cars and hares, with its wonderful evocation of real training in independence for your son.
And we also need politicians like that – not lick spittle fear-mongers and worshippers and devotees of that purportedly all-powerful Moloch, the “free market” (if only it were – but a market needs to be FAIR to be truly free), but those in the mould of FDR and Aneurin Bevan on the Left, and of Joseph Chamberlain, Disraeli, and, at his best, Winston Churchill on the Right – the abiding unifying theme of whose politics was indeed that of hope, and of possibility.
Above all, there’s was a politics of trust – trust they received, because they earned it, and trust bestowed on the electorate, who were not presumed to be creatures of Hobbesian incivility, but worthy – trustworthy – partners in a project for the betterment of all and the common good. In a word, they allowed people to fulfil your hope that “We should have freedom to find our best selves.”
Frankly, most of our current politicians wouldn’t recognize true disinterestedness and devotion to serving the common good if it reaerd up and bit them on the backside. To paraphrase Bertold Brecht’s famous poem “The Solution” [“Die Lösung”] (c. 1953), which reads:
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had flyers distributed in Stalin Way that said
That the People had frivolously
Thrown away the Government’s Confidence
And that they could only regain it
Through Redoubled Work. But wouldn’t it be
Simpler if the Government
Simply dissolved the People
And elected another?
Might we not consider dissolving our current palsied political class, and creating a new one?
Well said Andrew – what I find so pathological and disturbing about our culture today is the sheer lack of give and generosity amongst those who are most able to give it. It seems that generosity is most present amongst the less well off as research into charitable giving shows (see: http://www.fundraising.co.uk/taxonomy/term/2423/all).
I even recently noted a claim for 0.05p listed in my M.P’s expenses for stationary!
Given that he is a wealthy man and rentier activity brings him an enormous weekly income this is beyond any form of human reason. Your reference to Brecht is apposite – the people have largely been dissolved!
We will never achieve a better quality of life while we keep on emphasising growth.
All 3 parties put growth as their first objective & hold up for emulation “the hard working, aspiring family”.
Aspiring to what ? A bigger house, a newer car, a second home ?
Those things aren’t positive. They are, in fact, utterly negative & utterly unchristian (other religions that decry material possessions are also available).
No-one, realistically, is going to dare to look at those “hard working, aspirational families” & say, “you aren’t the solution, you are, in fact, the problem”.
So it all just gets worse & worse & worse.
Richard does his best but, really, we need a new St Augustine or Thomas Aquinas.
And I am, I can confirm, no saint