Let's not pretend that the departure of Gavin Williamson changes much about the fortunes of the Conservative Party. It might be good to see him go. Many in the armed forces and beyond will, no doubt, be glad to see the back of him. Except they got Penny Mordaunt instead.
And therein lies the issue. The Tory party, and so this government, is utterly bereft of talent. It is instead populated by people who would have little chance of succeeding in any other walk of life. And what they all share in common is the very thing that divides them from each other and those that they govern, which is a common belief that only they and their interests matter.
Williamson, with his charmless, naive arrogance that was based on wholly misplaced confidence in his own competence, and so invincibility, might typify this, but that is the point: the trait is shared across the cabinet and far beyond it within Conservative (and some other political party) ranks.
And this is the malaise within politics. People with ambition, but without a shred of wisdom, nor still a philosophy or a sense of public duty to direct it, now populate many of our political parties, and all of those on the right. But pure self-interest and political aspiration are poor bedfellows. They never combine to create either good policy or sound government because they are compromised from the start by the inherent conflict within them.
The true politician must believe in a cause greater than themselves. But most don't. They are their cause. And just as the belief in the entrepreneur's omnipotence condemns many small businesses to be one person enterprises, so this belief in the politician's self interest as being of paramount concern condemns most modern politics to be about nothing greater than the accumulation of apparent and decidedly transient power by those engaged in the process.
This is a sickening spectacle brought about by the absolute corruption of ethics that neoliberal thinking has created. Gavin Williamson's departure is symptomatic in that context. He was always just another bit-part player, now to be left bitter and complaining in the sidelines, from where he will, no doubt, re-emerge in the Brexit Party sometime soon.
That's why we need to ignore him: the real issue in modern politics is what he represents, and that is the failure of much of the body-politic itself, most especially on the right. And that is at cost to us all.
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What would be nice in any UK ‘Defense’ Minister is a working understanding of the sunk-costs fallacy and a backbone.
Someone (anyone) to pull the plug on the ludicrously wasteful series of white elephants that constitute the bulk of the procurement process.
If you’ve got half an hour or so to spare this long piece on the F-35 is both very revealing and very infuriating. Although from a US point of view it highlights just what a monstrous waste of money it is and how little of it currently works. The guns, the helmets, the missiles, the pilot load, the maintenance systems, the bewilderingly complex and untested software requirements, the tyres, the detectability by low tech passive radar, and on and on and on – almost nothing on it works as intended, but still we’re bunging hundreds of millions of pounds to Lockheed Martin for this junk.
https://warisboring.com/the-f-35-is-a-terrible-fighter-bomber-and-attacker-and-unfit-for-aircraft-carriers/
I agree and the piece you have linked to once again provides detailed evidence of the crapification of so much of American industry ; the scandal emerging from the Boeing 737 Max jet crashes being another such example. The leak of our government’s plan to do a deal with Huawei provides another; the fact is admitted by the Americans that they do not have the technology to produce a 5G network. And they don’t even have a high-speed train……
Nothing to add here.
You’ve summed it up nicely.
Ditto.
Succinct and precise.
Indeed, I would argue that an “absolute corruption of ethics” is neoliberalism’s defining trait.
I think the fall of the Defence Secretary for a failure of Security (itself quite, quite extraordinary); followed by the sacked Minister challenging the PM, protesting his innocence, referring to the decision of a “kangaroo court” and welcoming a police investigation; while the Government refuses to call the police: and Lidington speaks at the Despatch Box of an ‘information breach’ and the Cabinet Office, of a matter of ‘trust and integrity’; but both explanations carefully elide criminality; at the same time as Lidington says it is for the police, not Government to initiate any investigation; but Dominic Grieve (a past Conservative Attorney General) suggests it would be for the Government to refer the matter to the police…….
All these speak to a deeper disintegration not just of this Government; but of the established, conventional rules of Government. Behind these events Dominic Grieve hinted in Parliament was an erosion of cabinet responsibility; and I suspect we should thank Brexit for that. Both the major British political parties must now viscerally fear that their ‘time is up’; a quite justifiable nemesis that would trace back directly to Brexit.
Or, rather perhaps what all of this really shows is that Brexit is deeper than Brexit.
I agree
And behind all that is the logic that there is no such thing as society