The Deference Disease is epidemic in the UK. It is also ever present. It was damped down a little after WWI and significantly after WWII but has gone crazy this century. New, less easily recognised but aggressive variants have invaded all organs; the media, politics and wider society.
No, it’s not just the ridiculousness of the royal family – I
mean their very existence. It’s not just the different standards so clearly
applied to people depending on where we see them in the stultifying social
strata. It’s not just the starkly differing life chances that still depend on
which school you attended and it’s not just that your chances of living a long
healthy life directly follows what class you were born into. It isn’t even the
worshipful status afforded to the who-the-hell-even-is-that celebrities who bare their dull souls,
shallow personalities and baby bump/new partner/near-death experience/new kitchen/new eye shadow 'news' in magazines No. It’s all of the above x1000.
The recent conclusion of the all-party Public Accounts Committee
is that Johnson’s test-and-trace programme – was a complete failure by any
measure related to affecting the outcome of the pandemic. It cost £37 billion and was run by life peer
Dido Harding, someone with no relevant expertise/experience but married to a
Tory. So, x37 what Theresa May paid the DUP to keep her in power and enough –
if spent wisely – to have lifted many families in the UK out of poverty.
Flushed.
But negative public reaction is barely registerable.
Is it because the figure is so huge, the waste so vast?
Maybe. I would argue that a similar outcome delivered by a Labour or SNP
administration would have been torn to shreds by an enraged public led by a
howling press and media. Why do Brits – and especially the English, accept
things from those at the top of the social pile that they would not from those
lower down? It has to be the Deference Disease. Partly – they are just expected
to behave like that and let’s face it – much of life these days is about
managing expectations.
Early on in the pandemic Dominic Cummings famously and in
pantomime villain fashion broke the belated lockdown rules set by his own boss
– oh and – briefly had a young eugenicist embedded in government. ‘Nothing to
see here’ was Johnson’s response. Cummings – albeit gone now – did not have to
resign over his infamous dash to Durham. On the other hand – when it was
discovered that Nicola Sturgeon was found to be standing at a funeral without a
face mask (had she been sitting this would not have been a breach of rules) the
press were all over it. So it seems a couple hundred miles is equivalent to 3
feet if one is within the Tory inner circle and the other is without.
Not only has Boris Johnson gotten away with being a racist,
misogynistic liar - he was elected PM after these things were publically known
about him. He has behaved corruptly – buying water cannon to use on the credulous
Londoners who elected him mayor. More recently, when the mad idea of a bridge
from Scotland to Ireland re-surfaced (presumably the millions of pounds in
feasibility will to Tory mates a la the PPE contracts) I scanned the press for
reference to his previous bridge scandal – The Garden Bridge – and came up
empty handed.
The sad case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is in the news
again but my scanning of the main papers failed to find critical editorial
comment to the fact that the length and depth of her misery can – in part – be
laid at the door of the current incumbent of no.10. Boris Johnson did one of
his infamous ‘gaffs’ (that is what you call it when a privileged bloke fucks up
someone else’s life) when he was foreign secretary in 2017 – (no I’m, not talking about singing
colonial ditties in an ex-British colony or racially insulting Barack Obama) claiming,
wrongly, that NZ-R was ‘teaching journalism’. This statement was used in court
against her and he was forced to apologise – though that did her no good. None
of that was a barrier to his moving on up to the highest political office in
the UK with significant support from areas previously decimated economically
and socially by a predecessor of his Margaret Thatcher. I mean I know Corbyn
was unelectable but jeez...
How does this work? (That is not a rhetorical question; if
you know tell me…)
Yes – I know that whenever the peasants get restless – the
toffs just start screeching and scare-mongering about foreigners and – here’s a
flag to wave – and oh look – here’s someone wearing dressing up clothes and a
crown – how marvellous. But dear god –
that might have worked in 1381 – WHY IS IT STILL?
While this Deference Disease is damaging us from within –
preventing the real talent from rising and ensuring that we are governed by the
half-baked (Raab), the witless (Williamson) and the gormless (Gove) the
talentless bullies (Patel) etc etc etc– that is not the worst of it.
When we look ‘up’ and see incompetence and politically and
socially incestuous behaviour choking our progress in the world it is a
depressing sight. However, we are missing the fact that – for a while now – the
rest of the world has not been looking up to Britain. It’s been staring down -
in disbelief.
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Do check out My BOOKS and there are free youtube videos of ALL the comedy poems in Fun Poems for Children published last year.