To foreign observers, this is surely one of the most confusing weeks in British politics. A Prime Minister is found to have broken his own laws laws which introduced the tightest restrictions on personal liberty ever enacted in the nations modern, peacetime history.
Within recent memory, citizens of this curious democracy have been fined for everything from organising funerals to drinking coffee in a public park. Notoriously, some even received fines for gathering to protest a womans murder for sexual gratification, an act committed by a policeman who arrested her under this same regime.
The man who approved these laws is found to have broken them himself. He himself joins the ranks of the fined. Yet he remains in the highest political office, thumping his chest with talk of military success in a foreign war. And here is the strangest aspect. A significant minority of this mans fellow citizens 30 per cent says a YouGov poll; 32 per cent says Opinium are satisfied with this outcome.
For those of us who are outraged, the outrage comes easy. Our social media timelines fill with anecdotes from friends who watched loved ones die over FaceTime. To those who interpreted lockdown rules strictly, the phrase taken for fools has never felt so apt. Did a ruling group really tell us to lock ourselves in total isolation, while they continued their lives as normal?
But if we are to understand what is going on in Westminster, we need to grapple with the perspective of people prepared to give Boris Johnson a pass. And why, irrespective of the problem of plausible challengers, the Tory party still thinks he can get away with it.
Part of the answer lies in the weeks other stories of political malaise. A tax-hiking Chancellor is found to benefit from the non-domiciled status of his wife, a tax-minimising status usually granted to those who do not live in the UK or visit for more than 90 days a year but in this case, claimed by a woman with a residence in Downing Street. They turn out to be making simultaneous claims for legal purposes of a fixed and settled intention to settle in India, and of a fixed and settled intention to live in the US. He stays in post.
A sitting MP is found guilty of sexually assaulting a minor. Another MP calls this a dreadful miscarriage of justice in which the true victim is a colleague who now faces a nightmare start to his parliamentary career. Later that night, he describes the sexual assault in question as minor on any scale. He eventually retracts and resigns from an All Party Parliamentary Group, but keeps the Tory whip.
Increasingly, it feels like we are living through the slow heat-death that categorises the end of any political hegemony. This could be the last days of New Labour, or even the final years of Henry Truman. (Had Enough?, was the successful Republican slogan when the party recaptured Congress in 1946, after 20 years of Democrat control.) But with political malaise comes voter cynicism. Or as one of Chancellor Rishi Sunaks constituents told the Guardian this week, questioned about local reaction to his wifes tax status: its what they do.
The conviction of Imran Ahmad Khan who may still appeal comes as the latest in a slew of allegations concerning sexual exploitation of power by Tory MPs. But nearly five years after #MeToo, the number of these revelations seem to inspire inertia rather than resistance. The second factor keeping Boris Johnson afloat is a reflexive resentment, in Westminster and without, of the outraged virtuousness of his critics.
Speak to those who excuse him, and youll hear mockery of critical journalists; suspicion of their motives; sceptical questions about whether his political opponents or indeed anyone stuck to lockdown regulations themselves.
One of the noxious effects of Partygate is that it has reopened raw divides in families and friendships over lockdown compliance. Now Johnson and his teams attempt to bog us down in the detail of exactly how serious his breach was or wasnt have again become the prism through which those mutual recriminations are filtered.
But those of us who are indeed angry should heed of populisms disdain for virtue. In Mike Bartletts engaging new play The 47th, a caricature of Donald Trump greets the liberal audience at Londons Old Vic by mocking their hate for him: Its special hate, it makes you pure. Political hate, especially by those who consider themselves superior, is always unappealing.
A third factor helping Johnson is the breakdown of national trust in the Met Police force itself.
A fourth is a question of simple partisanship. As Ive highlighted elsewhere, the authors of last years key read on political polarisation, Poles Apart, identify a factor they call affective polarisation in short, youre more likely to believe criminal allegations made against opponents than those made against politicians whose affiliation you share. They draw on data by the academics Samara Klar and Alexandra McCoy, who demonstrate this phenomenon with particular reference to allegations of sexual misconduct. (A charitable reading of Crispin Blunt, who defended Imran Ahmad Khan so loudly this week, is that he is suffering from an extreme case.)
But such polarisation is now entrenched in Britain, even when it comes to basic questions around rule of law. In September 2020, YouGov polled voters on Boris Johnsons plans to break international law in a very limited and specific way in order to renege on the EU Withdrawal agreement. Forty-seven per cent of the total sample found it unacceptable. But 52 per cent per cent of those who had voted Tory at the 2019 election were fine with it; only 25 per cent were opposed.
As a nation, when we cannot expect basic adherence by our government to the rule of law, we have a problem. This is true whether were talking about international treaties, or the PMs personal behaviour. This is why Crispin Blunts intervention on Monday also matters. When a politician declares that as a former justice minister he rejects a court verdict a moment which surely sent shivers up the spine of any other victim considering a complaint against an MP we get a glimpse of what the state might look like if we cease to apply the law of the land to our political representatives.
This political crisis started not with parties, but with Johnsons attempt to let his colleague Owen Patterson evade punishment for breaching lobbying regulations. We owe it to the country to remove a Prime Minister who undermines the law of the land and the codes of political conduct. Butour display ofhigh moral outrage, andofpublic disdain for his character, will only rally his defenders.
Read more from the original source:
Partygate is not just about politics we are watching the slow erosion of democracy in the UK - iNews
