Beergate: Sir Keir Starmer insists he did not breach lockdown rules
The Labour leader was pictured drinking a beer and eating a curry with colleagues in Durham during the Hartlepool by-election last year, when COVID restrictions meant indoor mixing between households was banned.
To my mind this is an example of something important about the political classes. They accuse the other lot of having done something wrong while knowing they have done the same thing. It's not a comment on this particular bit of tedium, but the wider problem of how the political classes are clearly uninterested in trust.
Politically trust should be a vote winner but the political classes make little sustained effort to acquire and keep hold of it. In other words, they don't seem to value trust. Maybe trust isn't a vote winner - it's not how most voters are persuaded to vote this way or that.
7 comments:
You can make an argument that one of the features of adversarial debates (British law and political systems) is that your side winning means that the other side loses. You don't need the trust of your supporters in such a relationship only their distrust in the other side.
There are positive features of adversarial traditions too, and traditional 'respect' tended to avoid excesses. Now it's 'by any means necessary'.
He's a Human Rights Lawyer (though he seems unsure what "he" means) and therefore intrinsically untrustworthy.
He's also prolier than thou, having described his father as a toolmaker. Yup; the old boy owned the factory.
And he backed Corbyn, Remain, and any other anti-British options he could find; always, for example, demanding more stringent lockdowns.
Starmer is a four-letter word. And the rest are probably worse.
(We are now so old we no longer "know someone in the Cabinet". But we do know the mother of someone in the Shadow Cabinet. The daughter is prolier than thou too.)
Yes, I think there are different types of trust in play in our system. There is the lowest form, predictability. "You can trust the Tories/Labour to line their own pockets...", etc. Then there is whether they can be trusted to deliver what they say they will deliver in their manifesto. That's a long shot, but probably quite important in electoral terms. That's been strained recently, as nobody really believed Boris would go as green as he has, and few people believe he can sustain it in terms of delivery. Then there is just general trustworthiness; the idea that we can expect fairness and integrity and honourable conduct. Not a chance there, I'm afraid.
One falls to considering why 'trustworthiness, integrity and honourable conduct', is so lacking? Is it a particular problem today? Was it always the case, but has been revealed more widely due to our modern communication systems?
I can think of numerous incidences of poor conduct historically and in my own life, say fifty or more years ago but is the occurrence rate greater today? I just can't tell.
DJ - that's the problem, winning elections is by any means necessary. Yet they are not even fighting for worthy causes.
dearieme - yes Starmer is a four-letter word and as you say he has backed any anti-British options he could find. More of a threat than Boris.
Sam - and even the words "fairness and integrity and honourable conduct" now sound old fashioned.
Tammly - I'm inclined to think it was always the case, or it has been for a very long time and modern communication is bringing it into the open. What we see as fairness, integrity and honourable conduct has changed too which complicates it.
None of the present mob is as bent as Lloyd George, surely?
dearieme - probably not, although I think Blair was an indicator that we are not as far above it as we ought to be.
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