The Sqabble Market

THE SQUABBLE MARKET

Markets have changed since I was young. I can remember when the stallholders had many different, useful and important goods laid out for our consideration. Nowadays they all seem to have the same mass-produced plastic articles to sell. These may be tarted up and displayed in different ways, but there is really little to choose between them.

Much the same seems to be true of this election. The two main parties have set out their stalls. The stallholders are loudly slagging off the others’ wares, calling them dangerously mendacious recipes for disaster but their wares are so similar that, as often as not, they appear to have been pinching each other’s policies, calling them their own and crying “foul” and “opportunist” as they do so.

The customers are dutifully wandering through this. The noise is awful because the stallholders shout at them, commanding them, on their duty as citizens and their loyalty to the Party-they-believe-in, to vote for them. The customers seem bemused, even showing signs of that dreaded condition: apathy.

They have reason.

There no longer seem to be any great political Causes to support. The bosses do not grind the faces of the proletariat any more, or not much anyway. The Left Wing has long since turned right and the Right Wing left. Those doctrinaire terms no longer have any meaning and just get in the way of people trying to find out which of the policies on offer is the most sensible, or, perhaps more often, which of them speaks loudest to their own desire for goodies - because it has become fairly obvious that this is what the main Parties' computer-programmes were written for.

Of course there are tasks to be faced and decisions to be made about the housekeeping of the nation. These could be sensibly discussed and decided in Parliament by the sensible and interested people that we have appointed to sit there and do it. In fact for quite a lot of their time most of them try to do just that. It is just a pity that once every few years, when they “go to the country”, the parliamentary groupings, the Parties, seem to lose their reason and go for each other like mad dogs. In that atmosphere it is well nigh impossible for a voter to gauge the true value of any of the policies that are being so forcefully hawked, because the sales-pitch is concerned solely with vote-collecting. So it’s hardly surprising that many people simply turn away and say, if anything: “A plague on both your houses.” or perhaps: “Stuff the nattering! What’s in it for me?.”

So, all right, election-time hyperbole is a fact of life. We have to put up with it. But, in the absence of any clear distinction between the main Parties’ policies, where does it leave those of us who would like the country to be sensibly governed?

There is a strong temptation to fall back on personalia, to choose the Party whose leaders we like and, above all, trust.

It is not all that easy to like Michael Howard, partly because he has in the past been involved in some unpopular legislation and partly because he just isn’t a tremendously sympathetic character. But lately he has been working very hard at being pleasant and friendly and doing it in a very genuine and admirable way. Also he has around him some very sensible-sounding associates, most of whom do quite often answer questions.

On the other hand it is very hard not to like Tony Blair, because he is such an open-sounding and plausible chap, utterly sincere and convincing; genuinely so because he obviously believes utterly and sincerely that what he says is true. To be less than charmed by him one has to put what he says into a sort of mental box and open it again later. (That can be an interesting exercise!) Also, having been in office for some years, Tony Blair has, as they say, ‘form’. His government claims to have a record of resounding successes in all fields, but in the experience of ordinary people, out here in the world, these haven’t lived up to his extravagant claims and people are understandably baleful about them. His associates almost never answer questions, preferring to throw up a fog of impenetrable statistics. Tony himself is clearly impatient and irritated by being reminded that he once took the country into an illegal war on what he must have known was a sort of lie – promoting a suspicion to a certainty in order to force the hand of Parliament. He has stated that he personally knew (passionately) what had to be done and that as Prime Minister it was his personal duty, come what may, to see that it got done. That is a very revealing and relevant assertion, worthy of careful consideration, because it shows that if we were to be careless enough to be charmed into re-electing him, his reign would not suddenly become a democracy but would continue to be what he has made it: a plausible spin-upholstered autocracy. Useful things might happen during his reign, but they would happen at his unquestionable whim, and always, over it all, would hang the risk that his personal passion might, quite easily and sincerely, drop us into another Iraq-type fiasco. To re-elect him would simply not be safe.

The third Party, the Liberal Democrat Party, has openly rejected the idea of joining in the slanging-match and has simply invited the electorate to inspect its policies and decide whether or not they are sensible. Its leader, Charles Kennedy, is a nice ordinary man who allows the Party’s policies to speak for themselves. For this he and it have been dismissed by both main Parties as being dull and politically uninspiring, as well as irrelevant because they say the Liberal Democrat Party hasn’t a large enough core of loyal committed voters to form a government.

The latter is probably true at present, but it doesn’t alter the fact that if it were to win enough seats, the Liberal Democrat Party could hold the balance between the two dinosaur Parties, bring them to heel, and stop either of them having such a large majority that it could follow Tony’s lead and, marginalising Parliament and the democratic process, push through whatever legislation it fancies.

But there is much more to the Liberal Democrats than that. The Party’s potential lies not so much in what it is but in what it is not. Firstly, it is not comitted to buying votes by promising goodies. Secondly, it has not hesitated to assert that a fair standard of living and services would have to be paid for, not by intricately foisted stealth-taxes but by honest taxation, fairly and equitably imposed. Thirdly, it has shown that it is not implacably wedded to a predetermined policy but is open-minded, willing and eager to engage in rational discussion. In past-political terms this sort of attitude would be regarded as electoral suicide, and, while self-interest and complacency remain the determining factors in elections, this may continue to be the case. But the most important thing for both us and the Liberal Democrats to remember is that this will not continue to be the case. Self-interest and complacency are, as they say, ‘not sustainable’ - simply because the world has changed, or rather, it has at last become clear that its resources are finite.

So today the potential success of the Liberal Democrat Party is rooted in its continuing, in the face of electoral expediency, to be honest and realistic. The over-arching fact, obvious, inescapable, but politically inconvenient, is that the future of the world depends upon its people swiftly coming to recognise that it cannot continue to enjoy its present and ever-increasing profligacy without literally committing suicide.

Both main Parties pay lip-service to the need to ‘care for the environment’, but it stays low on their priorities because their constituency is based on a commitment to providing indulgences. Tony Blair has clearly, if somewhat absurdly, made his Party’s priorities clear. He has declared that there is no greater issue before us than the state of the environment, but has added that: “. . the reality is that you’re never going to tackle global warming by cutting economic growth.” So there you have it. Which of his many versions of reality he was referring to is not clear, but it seems to have been the ‘electoral reality’ of political self-interest. The fact that there won’t be any such thing as economic growth if global warming continues seems to have eluded him.

The Liberal Democrat Party is the only large Party that could, without loss of honesty or betrayal of its utterance, gird its courage to the sticking-point and squarely face the true but terrible reality that, from now on, true self-interest can only be served by preserving and fairly apportioning the fast diminshing resources of the planet.

This is not simply a matter of our recommending ourselves to set an example to others by becoming limply green. It is more a call to war. Not a call to arms but to a war against politically expedient falsehood, a war against the death of the world, a war against the greedy scrambling, screaming pandemonium, starvation and hi-tech destruction that would inevitably be brought on by the nations’ grabbing at and struggling over the remains of the world’s resources.

These are strong words, resounding and disturbing, simply asking to be dismissed as emotive and naïve. But they describe a reality that, although it has long been diligently marginalised, has nevertheless been coming up behind us for quite a number of years.

However, what has now become clear is that the next four years, the next Parliamentary Session, will be crucial to the future of planet, simply because during that time China will rise, looking for and scooping up its fair share of smelly goodies. Then the shortages and the effects of the pollutions will inevitably surface and begin seriously to bite. That will bring the human race face to face with what will perhaps be its last chance to show whether or not it is capable of survival, capable of turning away from the squabble-market and learning to live together in peace and mutual respect on this small, highly endangered orb.

Tony Blair is right. In reality there is no greater issue that faces the world than the decay of the environment. But unfortunately his reality is adjustable to suit his purposes. What we and the world need now is the clear sight and courage of an honest Party, one which is not afraid to tell the people the truth. The truth which becomes, and will continue to become, daily more obvious.

Do I need to tell you its name?

Oliver Postgate 26.4.2005

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