The Observer view on a year in which the British public put their leaders to shame

 

The Observer view on a year in which the British public put their leaders to shame

Observer editorial

While most people are at pains to do the right thing in tough times, the same cannot be said for Boris Johnson’s government

 

Sun 26 Dec 2021 06.30 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/26/the-observer-view-on-a-year-in-which-the-british-public-put-their-leaders-to-shame

 

If there is one image from the past year that is certain to make the history books, it is that indelible picture from April of the Queen, Covid-masked and isolated, in a wooden pew of St George’s chapel, Windsor, for the funeral of her husband, Prince Philip. As yesterday’s heartfelt Christmas message confirmed, the monarch, frail though resolute, still consumed by duty, has, as she enters the 70th year of her long reign, never felt so alone.

 

You might argue that, at the end of a torrid year, her nation also finds itself as isolated as at any time during those seven decades. Twelve months on from the Brexit agreement that saw the not-very United Kingdom bid adieu to its nearest neighbours, many more of the fears of Remainers than the hopes of Leavers have begun to be realised. Though the economic evidence has been blurred by the pandemic, it’s already clear enough that departure from the single market has created dramatic and predictable labour shortages and severely disrupted supply chains. Far from the promised ease of “sovereignty”, Britain has in the past year become a country ever more hemmed in and obsessed by its borders, locked into intractable negotiation over the Irish Sea, mired in bureaucracy at the Channel ports, fixated on hostile responses to desperate refugees in rubber dinghies and currently shut out from any free movement to the continent because, as if we didn’t know before, borders have two sides.

 

The roots of that isolation lie in the disease of British – or English – exceptionalism, which brought this government to power. It is that ideology, in which rules are for other people, which also set the stage for the reckless and chaotic initial response to the pandemic and which has defined the judgment of the prime minister right up to the present moment. To say the government he leads has “trust issues” is like suggesting that a kleptomaniac enjoys a shopping trip. That peerless chronicler of her times, Joan Didion, who died on Thursday at the age of 87, once observed (of the moribund and corrupt Reagan administration of 1988) that “most strikingly of all, it was clear that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process”. Looking back over the events of the past year or longer, it is equally hard to understand the actions of Johnson’s government in any other way.

 

One heartening consequence of that transparent venality and laziness, however, has been the determination of the majority of the population to act with greater fellow feeling than their rulers in Westminster. The spirit of localism that had its vivid expressions in Marcus Rashford’s campaign to feed hungry children at the start of the pandemic, and which saw communities pull together to make provision for the vulnerable, has persisted in different ways as the crisis has dragged on. You could see it in the widespread acceptance that, in the absence of clear guidance, this would have to be once again, a restrained festive period. Despite the vocal minority of anti-vaxxers on the streets, and the highly selective “libertarians” dictating government dithering from the back benches, most people have been at pains to do the right thing.

 

We are approaching the new year with understaffed emergency wards filling up and a depressingly familiar sense of uncertainty about the exact scale and nature of the challenges ahead. As Didion also observed: “It is easy to see the beginnings of things and harder to see the ends.” If the past year has revealed anything, however, it is, once and for all, that complex crises cannot be solved by populist slogans; they require rigour and competence and sacrifice, qualities, as we move into 2022, still far more in evidence in Britain’s people than its leaders.