Fergus Finlay: We used to produce political giants — look at what's running the world now
Like Of Us The Is Sunak: Johnson Greed Rishi What Has Politics Britain Shown And Boris
If you’re happy to believe what may be just Boris Johnson’s latest whopper, he had 102 nominations for the leadership of the Tory party before he decided to pull out.
You know what that means? A major political party, currently providing the government of one of the world’s oldest democracies, flirted with the idea of putting a clown, a liar, and a cheat (all the same person!) back into the highest office in the land, a few short weeks after he was unceremoniously booted out of it in utter disgrace.
The thought that they could contemplate it is enough. The fact that Britain is changing prime minister for the third time in two years without any recourse to the people is surely a demonstration that there is something deeply rotten in British democracy.
And I’m guessing we will discover in the next few days that Rishi Sunak has already done deals with the far right of his party to secure his “election”.
And, of course, it’s not just Britain. There is still the very real prospect that Donald Trump could run and win again in the States.
There is now a far-right government in Italy and in Hungary. Unthinkably, there is a far-right government in Sweden, perhaps the spiritual home of social democracy. We came very close recently to a far-right government in France — and they haven’t gone away.
And here? We are probably a couple of years away from a general election, but all the signs are that Sinn Féin will emerge from that election with a strong, and maybe overwhelming, mandate from the Irish people.
I don’t want to get involved in the most recent controversies surrounding “republicanism”.
I don’t yet know enough about the various allegations floating around about Sinn Féin’s alleged use of libel threats to silence critics to write intelligently about it.
And I believe that the controversy about the Irish women’s soccer team singing “Up the Ra” went on far too long.
It was a silly unthinking mistake on their part, made because they were simply too full of happiness and excitement. They are clearly not apologists for any branch of the Provos.
Neither am I. If they do secure the mandate that looks likely, they’ll do it without my vote.
They can change an awful lot between now and a general election, to look like a government in waiting that can be trusted with the economy and all that stuff.
But there are two things they can’t change.
They can’t change the fact that they still consistently refuse to confront the past. They still honour people and events that have brought misery and shame to this country.
They still martyrise people who maimed and murdered others. If I could paraphrase something my old boss Dick Spring once said, they happily talk about people who murdered for Ireland in the same breath as people who died for Ireland.
But even over and above that, I’ve never had a reason to believe that Sinn Féin believes in the same sort of democracy that I do.
The Government of Ireland derives its mandate from the people of Ireland and the Irish Constitution, and nothing else. I would never — could never — vote for a party that I believed was being told what to do by a secret army council.
That’s a threat we will face here in due course — and I have no doubt a lot will be written about it between now and then.
But the world faces a huge ideological threat now. We’ve seen enough in recent weeks in Britain to know the power of the politics of greed, and the politics of othering. We’ve seen it in the States and in too many of the countries of Europe already.
Greed is one thing, but politics that builds its strength by fomenting fear and distrust of the other is evil, corrupt and dangerous.
Be afraid of foreigners becomes be afraid of black people and morphs into be afraid of anyone who is gay or trans or different in any way. Anyone who is not us.
That kind of politics masquerades in current parlance as “culture wars”. It’s actually a significant step on the road to fascism, one of whose key “techniques” is always to make an enemy of the other. That’s where persecution begins.
And it’s not an exaggeration to say that there are thousands of people, in Britain, France, Italy, Sweden, the US and elsewhere — maybe even here, who knows? — flirting with fascism.
The only coherent ideology that can confront all of that in the modern world is social democracy. And it’s asleep.
Social democracy is sometimes seen as a sort of convenient halfway house between socialism and capitalism.
It’s not. It’s a way of thinking politically that is prepared to live with a civilised market, but insists on justice, equality (or at least the elimination of inequality) and community solidarity as core principles and values underpinning the real freedom of people to live their lives in dignity.
I said earlier that there used to be giants. In my time men like Willi Brandt and Olaf Palme were world-renowned architects of peace as well as extraordinary reformers.
A slew of men and women who led the Labour movement in Britain built the welfare state and a health system that was the envy of the world. Social democrats built the two great charters of human rights in Europe and the world.
Without social democracy, women’s rights wouldn’t exist.
Education beyond the basics would be seen as a privilege. Social democracy tore down tenements and built houses neighbourhoods and towns.
It was clear-eyed about the “free market” — recognising it as a place where people might exercise choice, but never relying on it to deliver basic rights.
We are hell-bent, it seems, on commoditising everything from health to education to housing. We are powerless in the face of people who, for instance, want to fly refugees to Rwanda.
I looked at Keir Starmer being interviewed over the weekend, and what I saw seemed to me to be a decent, fair-minded, solid citizen.
But I could detect very little fire in the belly, very little passion to right what’s wrong. And I have to say I long to see some of that.
And here too. If I were younger, I’d be out campaigning every day for social democracy to bind up its internal wounds in Ireland, for a new programme to be written that people could rally around, for a new set of social and economic rights to challenge the system with.
It’s not too late for social democracy to fight back. But first, it must awake from its slumber.