Monday
Now it’s over, we can talk about the election again. From looking at the words of the successful candidates, my opinion is that MLAs have a mandate from the electorate to pursue:
Oil exploration, with investigations into a sovereign wealth fund
There is surely some small amusement to be had from the popularity of this idea, given that it was the policy pursued by the ‘socialist’ Norwegian government after the discovery of North Sea oil, as opposed to the Conservative government in the UK, who took all the money to fund a reshaping of Britain into the society we see today. In fact this is the first time I’ve really seen anyone in the Islands being implicitly critical of Thatcherism.
Transparency
FIG being open about their processes and decisions is a pipe dream, the literal meaning of which is the deranged fantasies of somebody who has been smoking an opium pipe. However, the electorate were quite clear that they want to know what’s going on with MLAs around the big assembly table. This is the easiest of changes to make, and should surely happen almost immediately.
Tightened restrictions on immigration
This was inevitable I suppose, given that so many candidates spouted Farage-style nonsense. You need more immigration, especially workers skilled in healthcare and education, but that is so far from being a popular view that I can’t think of a single candidate who tried to make the case.
Restrictions on public spending, along with private investment in public services
In my personal opinion this is a catastrophic course to pursue, but you can’t argue with the numbers, and several candidates who spoke openly of their intentions in this area were then elected to the assembly. What’s more, everyone who had previously shown the slightest concern about public investment, inequality and the damage that unchecked industry can cause to the environment was summarily booted out of office. The two who remained were the most hawkish, austerity-friendly MLAs in the last assembly.
Private interests do not invest in public services for giggles, or because they love their fellow man so much. Their very reason for being is to extract profit, and it’s never long before the public who use their services begin to feel that pinch. Up here I live with the results of that policy.
Tuesday
A small personal example of what that is like. Recently I went and bought some painkillers from the pharmacy at Boots. My daughter Theo was with me, buying girl things like, I don’t know, soap and deodorant? Things men don’t need.
But what I did need was a little pain relief. I am falling apart like a vehicle in the Falklands weather, with a freely dislocating finger, a tricky hip, two crap elbows, alternating dodgy shoulders and most recently a knee that has downed tools and swollen to an absurd degree. My right leg looks like a blockage in a sausage making machine. The kids have taken to calling me ‘Sh*t Knee Spears’, which I have to say makes me very proud.
As the pharmacist man gave me the pills he spoke to me, and he looked quite grumpy. The trouble is I am also deaf and I couldn’t make out a single word he was saying. It was like listening to one of the adults in a Charlie Brown cartoon. I glanced at Theo, who was frowning at him in a way only teenage girls can manage, so I definitely wasn’t misreading the grumpiness. At one point he paused, and I tentatively said, “Okay?” but that seemed unsatisfactory so off he went again. When he paused for a second time I said, “Yes?” and that seemed to be what he wanted to hear. As we left I said to Theo, “Couldn’t hear a word. What was he saying?”
“He was saying if you need to control pain you have to see a doctor.”
“Ha!” I said, because that was indeed a good one. I’ve been back in this country for two and a half years and I haven’t seen a doctor. I’ve seen some nurses and paramedics, but it’s hard for me to imagine how bad the emergency would have to be before I could access a GP. Probably bad enough to bypass that stage and go straight to A&E for a 12-hour wait. In the UK now we generally use the American healthcare method – endure and hope it goes away.
And that’s just one part of life up here. Do you really look at the UK, and our energy costs, and the sewage in our water, and the price of further education, and what we pay for prescriptions and dentistry, and think ‘that could never happen here’?
Wednesday
Mr Jeremy Clarkson provides a good illustration of unintended political consequences, and he has been popping up all over the online world in recent weeks.
I wrote about Mr Clarkson’s complaints a month or so ago, but he keeps doing it. His thesis is that British communities have been decimated by the loss of post offices and local shops and village pubs and the like. We have become isolated, individual, spiteful, unfriendly. And of course he’s absolutely right, but rather importantly, for decades now he’s been the poster boy for the exact politics that have made the country what it is.
I don’t doubt that Mr Clarkson’s dismay is genuine. Nor do I think he is an idiot, or a fool. Obviously, objectively, he is nothing of the sort. Yet he has apparently been completely unaware of what he has been supporting, and helping to elect, for the last 40 years. It’s a genuine mystery to me how anyone could think allowing private interests to run rampant could ever produce any other outcome.
Back in the day, my driving instructor had a catchphrase. They all do I think, ranging from ‘Bite point’ to ‘Mirrors’ to ‘Oh Christ no!’ My instructor would always say, “Extend your vision”. It made me smile, imagining he wanted me to activate some Inspector Gadget go-go-gadget eyeballs, but actually he wanted me looking further down the road so I could see what was coming, allowing me time to adjust and react. If you’re doing that effectively then your immediate surroundings are already taken care of.
Jeremy Clarkson represents an entire population who didn’t extend their vision far enough. At least he sees something is now wrong; way too many of us are still prepared to believe, yet again, the lies of the same people who got us here in the first place. It’s immigrants. It’s the EU. It’s socialists. It’s wokies. It’s those others.
Thursday
I have a theory about this kind of voting pattern, which we see play out repeatedly, including the recent Falklands election. I think that Mr Clarkson and voters all over the western world exhibit a profound misreading of what is needed in public service, by attributing merit to success in business.
It’s perfectly understandable for anyone to look at a wealthy individual with a successful business and think, ‘they must have their heads screwed on, they’ve made some good decisions, let’s get them in government and bring that skillset into the public realm’. The problem is, that particular skillset is antithetical to good governance.
Business leaders are very good at certain things. Those things include exploiting market gaps, squeezing resources including employees for maximum profit, ruthless decision-making in pursuit of that goal, an ability to detach themselves from the human cost of their financial success, and a fierce competitive urge to defeat and remove possible rivals. What’s more they are accustomed to strict hierarchies where instructions go unquestioned and their authority is absolute. They have been rewarded for those qualities and instincts their whole lives.
These attributes are useless for public servants. Like most politicians, MLAs aren’t the boss of anyone, most of the time they can’t order anyone to do anything, all their decisions require persuasion and some sort of consensus.
They are questioned and criticised constantly – indeed, I saw that PN shot some rather needling questions at candidates during the campaign, and the loss of temper apparent in some of the responses raised my eyebrows so far they had to be manually repositioned.
Most of all, MLAs are judged not on profits but empathy and supportive measures taken for the good of society as a whole. If there are winners and losers, they are failing in their mission to represent everyone.
This is why I am concerned, and why I am, hopefully, being unnecessarily harsh about an assembly that hasn’t started yet. They will, I hope, prove me wrong. But political analysis is mostly pattern recognition, and I worry because I’ve lived most of my life in Britain, and I’ve seen this pattern before.