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Recall for a few minutes,
if you will, the occasions on which you have found yourself brought to
extremes of anger when watching a political debate, or a panel-type
discussion. Is your anger not especially aroused when the rival speakers
fail or refuse to engage with one another? When each, instead, sticks to
his or her own script, own party line, own predetermined formula? The
panel chairman sometimes can do us all a service by insisting that all
participants talk to the same point. The interviewers who are disliked
and feared by politicians are precisely those who will not allow their
guests to ramble, or evade or answer a different question, or use any of
the dodges which persons under questioning try to employ.
On a stage, or on a TV
screen we can therefore sometimes be protected by a chairman against
cynical and untruthful or irrelevant bluster, and the discussion might
arrive at some informative conclusion.
Unfortunately the day to
day practice of politics has no such structure and no such chair-based
controller. Political speakers are beyond all control except fear of
actions for defamation. Short of that they can lie, suppress, evade,
distort, invent and impute to their hearts’ content. No wonder the
satirists are doing so well, and deserve to do so well. Sometimes, when
all these little dishonesties are briefly set aside, plain silliness can
often take over.
"It’s time to move
on", for instance, is a currently common cry from some statesman
who has done something conspicuously destructive or disgraceful,
reminding us all over again that the plea to let bygones be bygones
comes most frequently from those whose guilt or error or folly is most
obvious. It was Winston Churchill who best responded to this line of
argument. When he was criticised for his campaign against the appeasers
of the 1930s, he answered that the purpose of recrimination about the
past was to enforce effective action in the future.
Then there is the "I’m
not a quitter" line. If this was said by someone enduring great
stress and great hardship, but who was nonetheless held to his post by a
sense of obligation, it would deserve and receive our approval.
Politicians, however, have brought the phrase into ridicule because they
have used it to justify holding on to office in the middle of a disaster
which they have themselves brought about. They refuse to quit even
though their countrymen, far from pleading with them to stay, are
praying and calling for their swift departure. President Nixon and Prime
Minister Major were two distinguished users of the tactic.
The most damaging
contributions to public life, however; are not those more manifest
manipulation but rather those politicians in Scotland who are going to
fight the coming election on an English agenda. What does Labour
constantly tell us? The only things that really matters., and really
concern the Scottish people, are jobs, health, education and, in its
broadest sense, the environment. Jobs are justly to be seen as being
determined by Westminster, but all the others are in the domain of the
Scottish Parliament which is not up for election. So Scottish voters are
asked to vote Labour because of what Labour will do for English
education, English health, English environment — all issues on which
Scottish Members, if at all persons of honour, should not be voting at
all. But Labour will refuse to own up to the nonsensical nature of what
lies ahead, and if they refuse to engage in relevant debate with us we
can do nothing to compel them. We can only hope that some satirist will
notice and expose them.
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