The Deference Disease is epidemic in the UK. Following energetic social measures last century, DD became less virulent after WWI and significantly after WWII but seems to have gone crazy this century. New, aggressive variants have invaded all organs; the media, politics and wider society.
No, it’s not just the ridiculousness of a royal family and all the feudal nonsense
that entails. 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 prospects 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-even-are-those- celebrities who’ve bared
their dull souls, shallow personalities and baby bumps/new partners/near-death
experiences/new kitchens in a magazine. No. It’s all of the above and x1000.
The BBC, bloated with deference and an idealised out of date
notion of tradition is running scared of losing its licence fee and gave no
push back when two Tories were put in charge of our supposedly independent public
broadcaster. And, predictably that particular strain of social illness – one we
associate with banana republics, has spread as the government are now
interfering in Chanel 4. Dictating who can and cannot serve on the board - The Guardian
The recent conclusion of the all-party Public Accounts Committee
was 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 down the sewer of cronyism.
But negative public reaction is barely registerable.
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 – is always the response. Cummings – albeit
gone now – did not have to resign over his infamous dash to Durham.
Not only has Boris Johnson gotten away with being a racist, corrupt,
misogynistic liar - he was elected PM after these things were publically known about
him. He has behaved with bare faced contempt for any standards of decency or
restraint – 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 go 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 with very little.
The sad case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe surfaces
occasionally but my scanning of the main media outlets failed to find
significant, effective, critical editorial comment to the fact that the length
and depth of her misery can 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 person carelessly 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 – as
I keep saying - that might have worked in 1381 – WHY IS IT STILL?
While this Deference Disease is rotting Britain 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), the catastrophically useless (remember Graylings
£13m+ contract for ferries given to the company with no ferries?) 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,
down, down - in disbelief.
*
Remember to click the link and check out