Lightweights not up to the job of guiding us through coming crises

The bits where bodily hair was gradually shed, foreheads and noses appeared, and, finally we became bipeds sporting protective cloth against the weather.

What we are witnessing now in the world of politics is a sort of evolutionary reversal. The process where strong, competent, wise leaders across the globe have reverted to behaviour which would have shamed those primates from whence we sprang.

In my adult life I’ve witnessed the rise of many bright men and feisty clever women, and not just in those tribes where I’ve plighted my electoral troth over the years.

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While you might have admired the clever wiles of a Harold Wilson, the intellectual heft of an Anthony Crosland, Roy Jenkins or Denis Healey at UK level, and the empathetic politics of a Barbara Castle or a Shirley Williams, it’s also fair to note that big hitters like Dominic Grieve, Alan Clarke, and, earlier, Iain McLeod and Rab Butler were players you could respect whilst disagreeing with their choices.

We’ve not been shortchanged in Scotland either, and I’d argue that the likes of Donald Dewar and John Smith were gifted politicians as were opponents like Malcolm Rifkind and David Steel. On the distaff side Winnie Ewing and Margo MacDonald won the ultimate kudos of being able to campaign using only their Christian names. (Yes, yes I know Boris did too, but there’s always an oddball exception and balls don’t come much odder than Johnson.)

And now? Tell me this, and tell me true, does anyone really believe that the duo ambling round the constituencies whilst their country hastens to the dogs are people of stature? Liz Truss with all the charisma of one of these old I speak your weight machines (rather you didn’t, thanks) and Rishi Sunak, whose grasp of everyday reality for most of the electorate is on the anorexic side of slender.

If you thought the barrel had been well and truly scraped with the advent of the blond serial killer of the truth, I fear we ain’t seen nothing yet. It is alleged, by those who knew him well, that Boris’s ability to charm was matched only by his lack of appetite for detail and graft. And now, if the bookies are right, we face the prospect of someone more stupid and charmless with it. 

In case you forgot, easily done I grant you, the Truss person is still, allegedly, the foreign secretary. Occupant of the grandest premises in Whitehall and what we might regard as the chief diplomat. Yet a woman who also thought it a bit of a giggle to tell her hustings audience that the jury was still out on whether France’s President Macron was friend or foe. Stupid and dangerous are often two sides of the same coin. 

Worse still, we are likely in for two years of playground economics, comprehensive disregard for international law, and simplistic slogans as the weaponry of choice to address problems of unparalleled complexity. Paddle free in shit creek. (No longer just an edgy metaphor, thanks to current sewage dispersal practices.)

Those deluded Conservatives who evince sellers’ regret and want Johnson back, are suffering from highly selective amnesia. They also recognise, however, that the twosome with which they’ve landed themselves, are not so much a recipe for a brave new world, as a quickfire route to electoral demise.

PROFOUNDLY depressing as all this is, we might reflect that evolutionary reversal is not just a UK phenomenon. The nation which elected Barack Obama found itself handing the crown to Donald Trump. Meanwhile what was once a relatively mainstream right wing Republican party has fallen to a loose coalition of wacky conspiracy theorists and lickspittle politicians.

The country which thought to broker mutual understanding with the West under Mikhail Gorbachev, now finds itself with that increasingly loose cannon Vladimir Putin. And who can now remember that Viktor Orban, Putin’s Hungarian cheerleader, was once the voice of progressive liberalism? Or that Turkey’s Recep Tyyip Erdogan was originally seen as the voice of electoral modernism rather than the chap whose hobby is jailing any and every dissident? 

In some other jurisdictions, the road to political power is paved with corruption and the illicit accumulation of personal wealth. Whilst in Australia, a well developed first world nation, the previous PM has just been found to have awarded himself additional power over five of his own ministries. Without thinking to mention it. Nor did we hear a peep from that mobile anachronism the Governor General.

It’s natural however to concern ourselves most with what is happening in our own back yard. And what is happening is that at a time of maximum peril we will be landed with a team of nonentities who hardly boast enough brain cells to rub together.  You might remember that one of Johnson’s first acts was to purge his party of nearly two dozen of what was termed one nation conservatives. Otherwise known as the least loopy lot.

It left him with a cabinet whose only claim to fame was that they had aligned themselves with the arch Brexiteers – you know, those folk who couldn’t detect a Brexit bonus even if they got a shot of the James Webb Space telescope. The latter can apparently detect planets 700 light years away, but even that major league operator would be pushed to find something which exists only in the “mind” of a Rees-Mogg or a Farage.

So whither Scotland in the midst of this self inflicted bourach? Increasingly I wonder just how much ordure we need to get dumped on our heads before get mad enough to make a realistic bid for freedom. Obviously there’s a time to ca’ canny and a time to be bold. Seems to me the current situation is crying out for a bit of audacity. A recognition that up with this shambles we will no longer put. 

The energy situation is a case in point. Here we are sitting on a vast resource thanks to renewables, enough for our own needs with plenty left to export. But thanks to an arrangement long unfit for purpose we are still being insanely charged to link up to the grid, whilst our cousins in the deep south of England are being paid to join it. What manner of madness is this?

Ofgem bosses wring their hands and claim to be helpless to protect the consumer they were, ahem, set up to protect. Some of the major league companies have bank balances so stuffed with recent profits that they’re buying back their own shares. In order to make more money.

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And the loudest voices in the land are not those who scurry around looking for the keys to Number 10, but people like money saving expert Martin Lewis. The other day he said he’d been  accused of catastophising with his prophesies of onrushing doom. That’s because we’re facing a full blown catastrophe, he said.

On another current controversy, one commentator opined that if we lived in France and watched water company bosses trousering millions for overseeing raw sewage dumping and rampant shareholder dividends, while saying they couldn’t afford the necessary infrastructure upgrade, there would be a mass dumping of the same stuff outside parliament. Audacious. Bold. Effective. Satisfying.

Happily Scottish Water is still in public hands, though not entirely innocent on the dumping front.  Yet the direction of travel in England, most certainly under a Prime Minister Truss, will be increased privatisation, increased profiteering, and a continuing disinclination to take advice from anyone who may just actually have studied the problems to hand.

Rampant arrogance, allied to rampant ambition is a very dangerous cocktail. Time we supped in our own pub.