People are becoming increasingly obsessed with decisions the Johnson Government is making that they don’t agree with. The Westminster response to the Covid Pandemic has seen an increasing number of very poor, freedom-grabbing policies that have become the focus of various anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine passport, anti-government groups that last week culminated in the launch of the #Together campaign.
Sadly, the #Together idea is one that falls into the trap of believing that it is possible to bring everyone together, just by coming up with the right name or most appealing form of words. Unfortunately, it is not.
Regrettably, it seems that the majority of the people who have lined up against the Government and are putting their public platforms to what they believe to be good use, don’t realise that they have a lot in common with the politicians they are admonishing, simply because they look at the issues as they see them in fundamentally the very same way.
Politically on all sides, issues are today being viewed myopically through the lens of the speaker or writers own experience.
There is no allowance for, consideration of or attempt to work with any of the wider issues that feed into everything that is happening. Thought for cause, rather than effect, and any kind of respect for the laws of consequence are barely wafer thin if they ever exist. Everyone is overlooking the very cold, hard reality that even in respect of Covid and the past 18 months, there is a much bigger picture to all of this that must be part of the discussion if any of the solutions that we now need are to be found and are then going to work.
Right now, people on all sides of the debate – if you can call it that – only care about their own ‘world’ view, which more often than not, isn’t worldly in any real way.
Culturally we really have began to inhabit bubbles – and in some cases very insular ones – that are illustrated metaphorically rather well by the ones that exist on social media platforms – that we all like to tell ourselves we sit outside of, whilst we typically don’t even realise, we are firmly placed within them or something very alike.
The Internet age and the rise of smartphone technology has sped up the dehumanisation of relationships with anyone one other than those who are intricately involved in our lives and whose faces we see on a regular basis.
We are quite literally being conditioned not to care about or consider anyone else. Compassion is fast becoming an emotion triggered only by the stories sanctioned for that purpose by the media, rather than being a natural human experience – as it should be whenever events dictate, for those who are directly involved.
Our politicians reflect this cultural malaise only too well. They are undeserving of the reverence that we pay them by default. They are no longer the big beasts or the titans of statesmanship that politicians once were, but this current crop would like us to believe them to be. And as normal people, just like you or I, it is only their dedicated subservience to a broken political system that makes them different, and that difference is that they are happy to be led but are certainly not in any way fit to lead.
We are in the trouble that we are in because as a society we have lost our way. We no longer value all the things in life that really are most important.
So, when it came to the National Crisis that we now know to be the Covid Pandemic, we have an incompetent and inept political class running the Country, without any idea of what they should really do. But because we do revere people in positions of public authority, we have collectively fallen into the trap of believing whatever they do is part of a strategy – because that’s what people in those kinds of positions of power do.
Actually, they don’t.
There is nothing good or well-reasoned about anything this Government does. But if you are one of those who think that all the problems we are facing will end if there are no more lockdowns or if vaccine passports are banned, I’m afraid you really are out of touch with what is really going on and what needs to happen next if we are to ever see any of this put right.
It will take a lot more from us all if the UK is to be returned to being a Country where things work fairly and equitably for everyone in every situation, simply because the public representatives we have are motivated not by careers, self-advancement or self-interest, but by simply doing that which is right.
We will be dammed for as long as we fail to care about and be compassionate about the lives of others and it is only by becoming open to the much wider number of issues facing the public today, that those who disagree with us will begin to understand that we have more in common than we have that divides us, and that we are all fundamentally sat on the same page.
Those in Government and in Parliament will never do this, because their own priorities will always to be gaining power and always keeping their Constituency Seat.
But for those on the outside looking into all of this, the opportunity to become opened to a new way of thinking isn’t just possible, it is in fact the only way that we will remove this rancid political culture from our lives and move this Country forward to being a place where everyone can win.
Adam Tugwell 