Years ago I worked on a few projects with a guy who was criticised as intransigent. I liked him, got on well with him and never joined in the criticism, but he was certainly intransigent. He was usually right but not always and it led him into positions where there was no exit unless he compromised. But he wouldn’t do that. A huge pity I thought.
Now we have a coronavirus mess where the government insists on playing the central edict game, apparently to the bitter end whatever the cost. Crude intransigence is a basic human weakness even in governments. The only way to cover it up is to exaggerate, pretend and bluster, bluster, bluster but sooner or later too many people see the shambles for what it is.
Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson have this in common - intransigence. Jeremy is intransigent in a situation where he should not have been and almost everyone knew it apart from Jeremy and a few die-hard supporters. But he was intransigent, still is and still the mess he made hasn’t been cleared up.
Boris seems to think he can get away with his version of intransigence. Yet his version has caused an immense amount of damage and probably many untimely deaths with more to come. Maybe his humiliation is yet to come but I wouldn’t put money on it for a number of reasons.
The intransigence exhibited by Boris seems to be based on a longer term goal of establishing the Tories in the only viable political position – a global woke fantasy land where voters just do as they are told because many want to anyway. The old political games are dead and the Tories must play the new game while they still have the chance - this seems to be the message.
Hence the intransigence and the reliance on second-rate advisers during the coronavirus debacle. Of course the advisers are second-rate - rational flexibility is not on the agenda. Of course the virus response is rigidly centralised - rigid centralisation is the new political normal. Hence the intransigence.
4 comments:
I wish there was something wrong with your analysis. It's very depressing
I think the main problem here is what you rightly term "the central edict game" itself. If the government is not seen to be in charge of everything, all the time, people start to wonder what it's there for. As soon as power is relinquished, it's very hard to get it back. Allowing people to make their own choices regarding their own health is just too difficult for politicians.
Normally, this works quite well. They issue advice about how much to drink, and say what medical treatments can be funded, and nothing rocks the boat. This time, they took on a virus, and lost.
The same applies to Corbyn. He's got some daft set of opinions derived from Marx which involved him hating Israel and praising the UK's enemies. If he actually admits he's wrong, then what is the point of him?
To be fair to Boris, given the nature of politics, it’s hard not to paint yourself into a corner when you’re trying to avoid being stabbed in the back.
As an aside, the spouse made an interesting point this morning, having recently taken part in a series of Zoom discussions for the first time. He disliked the experience because he felt that remote meetings give little opportunity to ‘read the room’ or sense how participants are responding to what is being said. As a department head (now retired), he remembers using unspoken cues all the time to monitor the mood of the meeting and, where necessary, encourage the more reticent to raise a valid point or objection.
We are still animal enough to respond instinctively to body language, breathing and subvocal comment from someone in the same room; does remote meeting - or even social distancing - encourage inflexibility by depriving us of this feedback?
Graeme - it is depressing but the Conservative government response is certainly not conservative. This aspect is difficult to stomach because where does that leave conservative voters?
Sam - "If the government is not seen to be in charge of everything, all the time..."
Maybe PR mania is one of the culprits. Nothing can be done quietly in the background so we now see the result - decades of encroachment into daily life. "This is what we are doing for you," has to be the basic PR message and perhaps this is the inevitable ratchet.
Macheath - I was involved in quite a few remote meetings which were introduced for cost reasons. They seemed to work quite well even though some of the unspoken cues were lost. In my experience face to face was double-edged in comparison. It could often steer meetings towards a consensus which conceded far too much to comfort zones.
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