Around the world, democracies are in trouble. South Korea has just had a coup run by the president, who intended to overthrow parliamentary democracy, which he said was opposing the will of the state. He decided that his will and that of the state were one and the same. He got it wrong, and within hours he was told that the military coup was over. But we’re seeing the same sorts of crisis developing in governments all around the world.
France no longer has a government. Its three-month-old government collapsed after a vote of no confidence this week.
Germany is facing elections where the far right are expected to do very well, and quite what the outcome will be is certainly unknown.
In the UK, we face a government that is frankly clueless as to what it is going to do, and any number of reboots, relaunches, or anything else that Keir Starmer wants to deny he’s doing, but is nonetheless trying, will not save him from the fate that his government has already destined for itself by not caring.
Good managers are not enough
Governments around the world are managerial in their tone. Michel Barnier, as French Prime Minister, reached the top of politics and became the French Prime Minister because he was a manager, a technocrat, a person who could wheel and deal in the corridors of power, but with little idea of what happened beyond them.
He could negotiate Brexit for the EU with the UK, and hold all the whip cards and do a great job. But when it came to managing a government, he didn’t know what to do.
And he didn’t know what to do for the same reason that Keir Starmer doesn’t know what to do, and the Chancellor of Germany didn’t know what to do, and onwards, because they haven’t been listening and they didn’t care because their primary concern was keeping finance happy.
And finance is not all about people. Finance is about keeping bankers happy, and bankers have always had totally different interests from the people of a country.
What caring looks like
If a government cared, it would, for example, take note of what the SNP has done in its budget last week in Scotland:
- Ending the two-child benefit cap.
- Providing more breakfast clubs for children in schools, to make sure that no child went to school hungry.
- Increasing social security benefits.
- Protecting the NHS and providing it with a bigger budget.
- Making sure that civil servants have enough to live on and don’t have to go to food banks to make up their salaries.
- Reducing the tax bills for people on lower income, but not for people on higher income, to indicate its concern for inequality.
- Investing more in social housing and in climate change.
It is, in other words, showing that it cares.
Those are issues that are high on almost every person’s agenda. And this is key. When John Swinney, a man of little charisma, became leader of the SNP for the second time in the last year, he said that his priority was relieving poverty. In particular, he was concerned about relieving child poverty. The agenda that he set out was one of caring. And caring is fundamentally different from the agenda which is threatening most of the governments that I’ve mentioned, who are all at risk of failing.
The threat from hate
And they all face far-right agendas, which are agendas of indifference and even hate. It’s the hate that we see and hear when politicians talk about the ‘other’ groups in society.
Last week, Richard Tice, Reform’s Deputy Leader, talked about the UK being a Christian state. Now that’s nonsense. Because the UK is not a Christian state. Most people in the UK do not subscribe to a religion. Those who say that they are Christian very rarely go to church. But he used the language deliberately. He was using it to say we are not a Muslim state, or we’re not some other culture. But he was using the language of division, which leads to the language of hatred.
The language of care
The language of care is the opposite of that. It is the language of inclusion, of responsibility, of making sure that everyone can be on the journey that we are all enjoying – we hope – through life. And which many are excluded from by simply having insufficient resources to partake of the life that they should enjoy. So, care is about bringing people into opportunity. The language of hate is about denying people opportunity.
But the language of hate is working. It has brought down, at least in part, the French government. It was a left-right coalition that brought it down. But the far right are the people who hope to get power as a consequence.
It is the far right who are hoping to get power in Germany in a way that they haven’t enjoyed since 1945.
It is the same far right, represented by the Conservatives and Reform in the UK, that are hoping to win from Keir Starmer’s failure as a manager to deliver anything that looks like care in this country.
Do we care?
We need politicians who care if democracy is to survive, if our society is to survive, if the divisions that create the stresses in our society are to be healed.
Do we care? I do. It’s pretty much everything I write about. But I’m not convinced that most of our politicians care in the slightest, because they don’t even know what to care about. And that is truly worrying. Our politics has to be about care, or democracy itself is at threat, as are all the people it serves.
