It’s often said that we get the leaders we deserve. In which case, I wonder what particularly deadly offences we must have committed to deserve the ones we have these days. And the people they appoint over us to make our lives harder.
Take the US Supreme Court, for instance. Six of the learned judges on that court just made it easier for States to ban legal abortions, just two days after they struck down a New York law that made it marginally less easy to carry firearms in public. In other words, they decided that protecting the rights of unborn children took precedence over gun control, which might go some way to help protect those already born.
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| Protestors in favour of keeping abortion legal |
And, if you think my use of the word ‘trumps’ there is an inadvertent pun, think again. I know who appointed the judges who produced this lamentable majority. Nothing inadvertent about that pun.
Also, I deliberately said that the decision would make it easier to make abortion illegal. It won’t make it possible to ban abortion. Experience around the world shows that abortion isn’t something you can ban. All you can ban is legal abortion. There will still be abortions, but they will be illegal, and dangerous.
So the abortion decision will cost lives.
Learning from that worldwide experience, however, means accepting evidence. And for many, we live in an age of faith in which evidence counts for nothing. Especially if it comes from other countries.
That’s why large numbers of US voters can’t bring themselves to understand that it’s no coincidence that Britain brought in stringent gun controls in 1996, and hasn’t had a school shooting since.
That’s another refusal of evidence that’s costing lives.
We need better leaders. Which brings me to the subject of the French parliamentary elections. Danielle and I both voted in them. She was born French, and through our marriage, I took out the nationality twenty years ago, as an insurance policy against the British being dumb enough to leave the EU. You can probably imagine how pleased I am I did that now.
What was particularly striking about the French elections is that nearly 54% of the electorate stayed away from the polls. That’s because the options were pretty dire. Voters could go for President Macron’s centrists, whose last five years in power have produced far more disappointment than achievement. Alternatively, there was a hard right, hostile to the EU and frighteningly sympathetic to Vladimir Putin. Or there was a hard left, hostile to the EU and, in its opposition to NATO, depressingly helpful to Vladimir Putin.
It’s perhaps no surprise that a majority of the French population decided that none of the options available was attractive and rejected all of them.
Meanwhile, in Britain we’ve had two by-elections last Thursday.
Tiverton and Honiton produced an astonishing result. A conservative MP with a majority of 24,000 lost the seat to a Liberal Democrat. That’s the biggest ever turnover in a British by-election.
Seven or eight years ago, I got into a lively discussion with a couple of Liberal Democrats about their party’s decision to join a coalition government with the Conservatives. I warned them that the party would be crushed at the next election and it might take a generation for it to recover. They thought it was worth it, just to have some Liberal Democrat influence in government for at least one parliament.
Well, there’s little trace of any Lib Dem beneficial influence on the Conservatives. Twelve years of Tory rule have left public services on life support, and an economy facing desperate times, made worse by the colossal and Tory-engineered error of Brexit. As for the Lib Dems, they were indeed crushed at the next election, going from 57 seats to just eight.
Still, Tiverton and Honiton, and two previous by-election turnovers against the Tories, suggest the Lib Dems may be making a comeback rather earlier than I’d imagined back then.
In part, that’s down to the incompetence and corruption of the Johnson government.
Those were factors in the other by-election, in Wakefield. This was an important gain for Labour, the main Opposition party, which lost so many of its seats in what was once its heartland in the North. That was called the ‘Red Wall’ of seats, which included Wakefield, where it was said that a monkey with a red (Labour) rosette would win. Boris Johnson breached that wall in a string of wins in the 2019 election, under the slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’. It probably doesn’t help him that he spectacularly hasn’t got Brexit done, and what bits he has got done, are delivering none of the benefits promised, and are indeed doing a great deal of harm.
Labour will take heart from winning back Wakefield. It certainly has no chance of ousting the Conservatives if it can’t reverse most or all its losses in the old Red Wall.
There is, however, a subtext in Wakefield. Turnout was just 39.09%. That’s not that unusual for by-elections, but with the Tories failing so badly, Labour ought to have enthused more voters. After all, in Tiverton and Honiton, turnout was 53.1%, which at least represented a majority of registered voters.
In Wakefield, abstention did better than all the actual candidates put together.
It seems that Labour isn’t inspiring anything like the kind of enthusiasm it needs.
If we get the leaders we deserve, then we must have sinned grievously, to be stuck with characters who leave voters so disenchanted. Let’s hope that changes soon, because otherwise we’ll find more powerful figures laying about them, destroying any freedom they feel the rest of us don’t deserve.
If you’re not sure that’s right, but you’re not one of those people who discount evidence as the basis of opinion, then just look at what the US Supreme Court has been doing.
We need to start finding leaders that are honest, principled and competent. But they need something more. They need the spark that gets abstentionists off their couches and back to the polls.
The kind of spark that stops people thinking that the right choice for them is ‘none of the above’.
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