Richard Shaw on | Boris

What happens when you stop and observe things as a layman?

Just using your normal powers of observation? 
Special knowledge can both enhance and interfere with this, especially if it happens too soon.  It’s best to start with your own observations and questions first, only looking for the answers thereafter.  For if the answers come before the question is fully formed, we tend to get more opinion than observation.

So how was it when David Cameron went to other European leaders in the period leading up to the Referendum in 2016? 
Let’s ignore the historical context in the Conservative Party, out of which this exercise also came, and just start our inquiry there.

As I recall, David Cameron went to Europe looking for ‘improvements’ to the terms of our membership but not so that the EU itself would work better for every member State’s interests, 
just ours.  I wonder whether this wasn’t a wrong approach and a missed opportunity, and an approach also likely to raise defensiveness and resentment right at the start. 
Not a good place then from which to begin your negotiations. 

And of course whatever was achieved was too little to persuade us of the benefits of staying in, and so we had Brexit. 
And the rest we’re only too familiar with.

But what I still want to tease out from this are two things in particular. 
One is the need for reform of the EU which was then being felt by growing numbers across Europe and the other is the personal part played by Boris Johnson in what then ensued.

To look first at the need for reform.  It could be said that what was needed at this stage was to quell the disquiet arising in many places about a loss of national sovereignty to an EU with ever more Federal aspirations.  The opportunity could then have been taken to challenge this overweening ambition and to ask, even in a Europe which works better as a collective whole,
if it may be possible for each individual State to feel its ability to express itself has been enhanced not diminished. 

There are tensions and competing aims here but the resolving of these things should not be beyond the wit of Man where there is goodwill (and practical need).

But somehow it didn’t work in that way.  If it had if we could have had genuine reform, agreement and progress on a pan European scale. 
But was this ever really canvassed?
Instead the focus remained on us, or what we wanted out of it, and more wrestling than dancing.

How does this relate to our situation at home, what do we want, or need? 
More of a sense that our voice is being heard, that we can express ourselves as a person with a particular point of view and feel this is being listened to and fully articulated into whatever decisions or programmes then emerge out of the corresponding process? 
This is what the different states of Europe may have wanted too. 

But are either of us getting that? What are the factors which militate against it, whether here or in the EU? What is this resistance to progress, when the need for it is all around us?

On to the stage thus set for the Referendum in 2016 enter ‘the Brexiteers’ (a chauvinistic term borrowed from the French) and principal amongst them Boris Johnson.  From the very firing of the gun to start the Brexit campaign, he and others set about persuading us of the strength of their case for leaving, rather more than giving us the less weighted information we might need to make up our own minds.  And of course, on the Remain side it was the same. 

So the whole thing was binary from the start, not just in terms of the final decision to be arrived at but also how we got to that point and one wonders what kind of exercise in democracy this was?  It felt like we were simply being mobilised towards someone else’s cause.

And of course BJ himself had only arrived at the decision to bat for the ‘out’ side at the end of a process of deliberation in which he had set down the case for each option. 
Perhaps it would have been helpful if he had serviced more the need for us all to do the same.

And why did BJ make the choice he did: to reflect the balance of the argument or for other reasons to do with opportunity and political advancement?

What we have had as a result of all of this is a lot of agitation and it is an agitation which for the last three and a half years has dominated our lives. 
The one who, as a personality, has been the one most associated with this from the start, now continues to be the one who promises to ‘get the job done’ and restore peace to our lives. 
But he is the one who, more than anyone else has been responsible for disturbing the peace in the first place and getting us at one another’s throats!

What has this exercise really been about and for whose benefit? 
Whatever ‘wrong’ it may have highlighted and sought to correct in terms of our membership of the EU,
it has brought with it division and deepening division and prolonged division and now offers to ‘resolve’ this in ways that will continue to divide us and will achieve its ends,
it seems to me, by the use of a very blunt instrument.

Is this person worthy of our endorsement? 
He may have some choice phrases, but to what end is he using them?

Change does need to come about, both in Europe and at home, but is obscured by the clamour this very same person manages to bring to it.
He is the one who now seeks to deepen his own influence as Prime Minister. 
Can we expect that he will do anything other than continue to bring division, or a peace purchased at the expense of what is really needed?
Is he the person who has come to perpetuate the past and drown out the still quiet voice of the future, because he stands for the view that
‘the people’ are to be mobilised for one’s own end; not theirs?

And when the people are being asked to endorse something he offers, they just might want to be aware of this.

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At the same time, and as a corollary to this, I want to try to be optimistic.

The social demographic has come to be expressed in terms of the Tories and Labour with shades between that.

But these are collectives and are becoming increasingly outdated as another element makes its way on to the scene. This is the voice of the individual who wants to be heard and accepted as such. The individual will make use of collectives up to a point but essentially wants to express themselves fully whilst being aware of the importance of relationship and community context to this.  So here we have a new element: the rise of the individual seeking relationship and a community that also represents its growing status.

A political system based on the old understandings and objectives, with its dualities, is going to struggle to fully adapt to that. 
Ultimately it is not going to be able to do so.  And that is where we are now are and where the emerging trend is.  We need increasingly to adapt to it.

The Tories and Labour who stand opposed to one another can only to a degree accommodate this new development. 
Their forms are inherently not suited to it.  New forms are needed which can help to accommodate and articulate it.

A stage in this transition will require that the capitalist and socialist views find ways of recognizing each other and working together better for general and mutual benefit. 
They must learn to cooperate, out of shared objectives, to find this mutual benefit. 

In a sense I think we all know the truth of this. 
We just need to do more now to bring it about. 

I’m not sure how far Boris and all he represents can facilitate this.
It seems rather to be opposed to it and to want to reinvigorate the past.

And yet Boris also has broad appeal, not least because he is flawed as well as, in his own way, brilliant.

More than anything, however, he is an individual and therefore aligned to what this very movement I am describing is about.
I hope that increasingly he can find a connection with that.
It will mean leaving behind however some of these more binary approaches.

It’s time for us to go further towards the future and on its own terms, not so much by trying to do so by perpetuating the past.

Richard Shaw

10/12/19