Tag: British vote

The first time I made the media acquaintance of Boris Johnson, he was far from being on his best form. Indeed, he looked somewhat ridiculous, a clearly overweight, if not decidedly portly figure perched rather precariously on a bicycle which looked too fragile to carry the weight to which it was being subjected. At that time, Boris Johnson, a passionate cyclist was trying to convince the people of London to pick up the healthy habit of navigating the traffic choked streets of their city on a bicycle provided by the city of which he was mayor. Being mayor of the city of London was Johnson’s first major political post . Over the next few years, he not only won three London mayoral elections but was appointed to senior ministerial appointments by two Prime Ministers and topping the lot by becoming Prime Minister in his own right. Not finished with political stardom, Boris as Prime Minister won a general election and in the process gathered in 43% of votes cast; the highest percentage won by any Prime Minister in the long history of electoral contest in Britain. Johnson has aroused my interest as no modern politician, except perhaps Trump who appears to have been cut from the same cloth,  so much so that when he had to resign from his post as British Prime Minister, I celebrated him in an article with the title, ‘The rise and rise of Boris Jobson’, not in tribute but in wonder as to how a man of his obviously deviant character could have climbed the political ladder, indeed any ladder to the dizzy heights which Boris had reached.

Like Cameron, Boris was born with some quite attractive privileges. He happens to be the first and indeed the only British Prime Minister who was born abroad; in the United States of America to be precise. He also spent enough of his childhood in Brussels to have learnt to speak French and acquiring a second language which is not something you associate with the British. Also, against the run of play, Boris had the early experience of living in Europe, the very capital of the European Union  but as his career unfolded, he wasted this opportunity to cultivate an understanding or even appreciation of basic European feelings; preferring instead to live permanently in his restricted little England environment, albeit in his head. A less charitable observer may even describe him as living entirely within his mind which in spite of early exposure to salutary other world experiences, was as close to a closed mind as to make no difference. This would be an apt description of a bigot, misogynistic and racist, all adjectives which at one time or the other have justifiably been hurled at him from different quarters.

Boris was not only privileged by his upbringing, he, like David Cameron had a mind which suggested that it was eminently amenable to cultivation. He won various scholarships to Eton and Oxford and had the application to make sense out of Latin which made him an example of a scholar of the  Classics but he was cynical enough to appreciate the value of the common touch which for him could not be separated from the vulgar. If Brown with all his studiousness could be said to lack people skills, Boris had these in spades and leveraged on these skills to overachieve in the field of politics. He had an instinctive knowledge of what people wanted to hear and made sure to give them only those things. Like Trump, his unlikely look alike, he was a media celebrity who won a whole lot of votes by pandering to the lowest public values. He was a journalist who attached little value to the truth as many other successful politicians have done and will continue to do until we find a way of accessing the real worth of people who from time to time come out to ask us for our votes. Boris Johnson occupied several important public posts during his glittering political career but left no lasting foot prints in any of those positions. It is as if he was just passing through without having been anywhere.

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Perhaps the greatest event in Johnson’s career was Brexit, even if this has been a disaster of huge proportions to other British politicians especially to David Cameron who supervised the original referendum as well as Theresa May who could not get Brexit done. Without Brexit however, it is unlikely that Boris would have got the chance of becoming British Prime Minister. It is doubtful that he wanted to be Prime Minister other than that he fancied to be Prime Minister. His performance during the Covid pandemic supports this contention and the fact that he could not survive the pandemic clinches the argument. The pandemic demanded masterful leadership, something which was beyond his capacity to deliver. His response to the pandemic was slow and indecisive and it is not surprising that the casualties reported from Britain was high, much higher than what was expected from a resource rich country like Britain. It is clear that those resources were not exploited by Johnson to ameliorate the effects of the virus on the people of Britain. It is not unlike Johnson that the seriousness of the situation was completely lost on a man who did not have the capacity of seeing the serious side of any situation. For a start,  he could not be persuaded to respect the simple rules which were designed, reluctantly put in place by his own government to reduce the spread of the virus. Social distancing was anathema to him and masks were just a nuisance which should be discarded on a whim. He went around shaking hands with anyone within his visual range and did not allow the virus to curtail his enjoyment of a good but unnecessary party. As for rules, they were not to stand in the way of his personal enjoyment even when other members of the public were hibernating in various places of restricted confinement, waiting  impatiently for the end of the pandemic. The British, faced with the austerity measures since the Tories came to power in 2010 when Cameron  took over the captainship of the ship of state, were suddenly confronted with the harsh realities of the depleted status of their beloved National Healthcare System as well as other structures through which welfare benefits trickled down to that all important mythical man on that equally mythical street on which he lived.

Long before COVID became an issue, Johnson had his hands full with the matter of Brexit. It was something of poetic justice because even when Brexit was still in its gestation period, Boris had been one of those stoking the fire under its incubator. He was one of those who sold the idea of leaving the European Union in order to achieve an indefinable independence and freedom to exercise the sovereignty which they had supposedly surrendered to the faceless bureaucrats in Brussels. Boris staked his political future on an exit vote in the referendum and must have thought that he had hit a jackpot when, so to say, his number came up in the lottery of the Brexit referendum. When Theresa May appeared to be dithering over getting Brexit done, Boris was one of those demanding that the will of the people, those who had no time for remaining in Europe had to be respected. Under the pressure from many sides including Boris Johnson and other members of the May cabinet, the hapless Prime Minister had to call for an election which she won with very little to spare,  after which she saw the hand writing on the board and threw in the towel, one of those who had stabbed her unmercifully was none other than her Foreign Minister, the golden haired   Boris Johnson who had been calling for bringing an end to British membership of the European Union.

As Prime Minister, Boris tried everything including the use of bullying tactics to get Brexit done but even though he failed in getting good terms for getting out of Europe, he was, in the end undone by the weakness of his character. A liar, philanderer and rule breaker, his inability to respect truth and common decency lost him the support of his own party members of which began to see him as a political liability who was likely to make it impossible for the party to win the next general election. Given this situation, many senior members of his cabinet resigned their posts and having no leg to stand on, Boris had no choice but to resign his position as Prime Minister leaving the way clear for Liz Truss to become the third female Prime Minister of Britain.

The ascension of Truss to the office of British Prime Minister was the stuff of tragedy or comedy, depending on which side of the political divide one stood on. All that need be said about that debacle is that it lasted only forty-nine days and paved the way for Rishi Sunak to become the first ethnic Asian and Buddhist to become the British Prime Minister.

Sunak, the son of Indian immigrants through Kenya and Tanzania was born into a middle class family in which the father was a doctor and mother a community pharmacist who ran her pharmacy in Southampton. No extravagant privileges here but he was brought up in a household which demanded sterling academic achievement, a demand to which the young Sunak responded splendidly. No surprise he got a first  from Oxford where he took the PPE course which has become the field of study for virtually all aspiring British politicians. He rounded up his education with an MBA from  Stanford on a prestigious Fulbright scholarship. He certainly is brighter than most and must have intimidated many people with the power of his intellect. But he failed in the office of Prime Minister because he just could not make the necessary connection with the British public. There are several reasons why he failed. He could have alienated the people because he was young, only forty-two when he became PM, Asian, Buddhist or even a staunch supporter of the unfashionable Southampton FC. All these negative attributes paled into insignificance in the face of his academic prowess and his marriage to a billionaire’s daughter. Anyone richer than the king of England can’t be connected to the king’s subjects and so, he was an outsider looking in but not because his parents were immigrants from East Africa. Allied to these, he represented a group of people, the Conservatives who were seriously out of touch with the British people who in their turn were desperate for a change. Sir Keir Starmer of the Labour Party promised them a change and was swept into power on a land slide.

keir Hardie, the first Labour Party leader joined the work force as early as the age of seven and so, did not have the benefit of formal education. He was born at a time when education was neither free nor compulsory in Britain. In any case, he had to go out into the big bad world to contribute his own quota, small as it had to be to the family finances so that there just was no room for such niceties as education even if it was to be at the primary school level. In any case, what was the use of any level of education to a young man whose destiny was to dig coal until he succumbed to tuberculosis or scoliosis by the age of fifty or less? These antecedents dictated that if he was going to make anything of his life, be had to pull himself up by his own boot straps. That means that he was a self made man in every sense of the word. In addition to these difficulties, he was also brought up in a suite of two rooms which shows quite clearly that he was born with very little and grew up with less. But there was another side to this bent coin. This was at a time when the mine owners and freshly minted industrialists were making money hand over fist from their investments at home and abroad as British companies repatriated literally, mountains of gold and silver from the far flung Empire. It is just that the members of the British working class were being squeezed as ferociously as any British subject in India, Africa and the Caribbean. Indeed, my calculation is that for example, people living in Achebe’s fictional village of Umofia in their time got more out of life than the lowly Scottish miner or the young lady making so called safety matches in some infernal factory in London or Birmingham. Not to talk of those of them who were tied to the mechanised weaving looms in the dark mills of Manchester. With his nonconformist Methodist background and the drudgery in which his life was bound, Hardie was fiercely motivated to bring about a change in the lives of people around him. He was driven by a strong desire to make life better for others, not by waging war on any group or class of people but on the ideas which they gave voice to. Marx was also known in his time as having advised the workers of the world to unite against their oppressors which is why, contrary to popular opinion, Hardie refused to support the participation of British working men in the slaughter of workers from other lands who like their British counterparts were slaving in the service of their own local capitalists. He was therefore opposed to the very idea of British workers being turned into soldiers to be slaughtered on the killing fields of the First World War. To him, it was clear that workers were only sacrificial victims on the altar of rampant capitalism. He would have been extremely distressed had he lived to hear of the rivers of blood which were shed on the Western front during the war. He was spared that by dying in 1915 long before the meat grinder battles which were uselessly fought at Verdun, the Somme, Pachendale and indeed, other battle fields.

Starmer’s antecedents are by no means as humble as Hardie’s but without the foundation for social welfare laid by people like Hardie, the trajectory of Starmer’s life and career would have been much lower than they have been. His parents came from the massive British underclass working solidly at some lowly manufacturing or service job into which their children would have been absorbed in their turn. Starmer escaped this trap which was laid in his path by centuries of tradition when he passed his eleven plus examination and was admitted into a grammar school from where he acquired a solid education which ended at Oxford from where he finished his studies after his first class Law degree from the University of Leeds. His background is therefore quite similar to other post-war British Prime Ministers starting with Ted Heath in the seventies.

Perhaps the most memorable member of this group has been Margaret Thatcher, the green grocer’s daughter who through grit and determination, not to talk of sheer bloody mindedness, hacked her way through to the office of the British Prime Minister, the first female to accomplish this feat.

Following the colour of her political career it was obvious that Thatcher’s constituency did not include the majority underclass from which she herself had risen so spectacularly. As far as she was concerned, anyone with the determination to succeed could do so, prevailing circumstances notwithstanding. Anyone who did not succeed in life had no-one else to blame but themselves. All you needed to get on in life was a job and if you had no job, it was your duty to find one whichever way you could. Her father may have been self employed but her circumstances were no better or worse than they were for Starmer who also climbed out of the underclass in the same way that she did; by the way of the kind of education she received, not because she was born on the right side of the track but because she won a big prize in the genetic lottery which left her with the ability to process school lessons and pass examinations with greater ease than most of her contemporaries. Like Starmer, she was the first in her family to go to a university but whilst Starmer stayed more or less true to his working class roots, Thatcher turned away completely from the class within which she was raised as soon as she had acquired the required polish to do so. She became an archetypical Tory even if she would not have been comfortable in their company at least at the beginning of her political career. But she had a clear penchant for seizing the tide whenever it arose and riding the tide to eventual success. When Heath lost the 1974 election, she sensed his vulnerability and exploited it maximally, riding that tide to become the first female party leader in Britain.

As the leader of Opposition, Thatcher sensed the growing frustration of the country with the antics of the Labour unions and set herself up as the hammer of the unionists and in doing so, convinced majority of voters that she was capable of curbing the powers of the unions and being able to do so, move the country forward. By the end of her first term in office however, it was apparent that her honeymoon with Britons was over and their association was soon to be dissolved. Then again, a saving tide swelled up thousands of miles in the South Atlantic where the Argentine ruling junta annexed a group of islands which the British called Falklands and the Argentines referred to as  Malvinas. Sensing an opportunity and the rising of another helpful tide, Thatcher sent an expeditionary force halfway round the world to chase the Argentines off the islands which had been colonised by less than a few hundred sheep farmers. This war which in reality registered nothing on the Richter scale of war acted to rally the country behind Thatcher and riding on the wave of popularity created, the Conservatives were returned to power at the next elections. Thatcher interpreted this to mean an endorsement of her union bashing policy. The immediate result of this was the long running battle with the coal miners led by Arthur Scargill. When the smoke cleared, the miners had lost the war and thousands of them lost their jobs and a way of life was brought to an abrupt end. Thatcher’s effect on the polity was electrifying as she controlled the economy as no Prime Minister had done before or since. She was one of the first disciples of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of monetary economics which spread the belief that money should not remain in government hands but must be stuffed in the private pockets of those with proven capacity to make money. According to the boys from Chicago, there was nothing in economics which was beyond the capacity of market forces to accomplish or at least brought under control.

Under Thatcher, people were encouraged or even more than that, exhorted in high blown language to make money and of course spend it whichever way they wanted. In  Thatcher’s Britain, it was a case of privatisation gone mad as all previously nationalised companies including those involved in the mining and steel making industries were put up for sale to whoever had the wherewithal to buy them. People were given the option to buy council houses and millionaires were being created as fast as people were being pushed into poverty on the other end of the economic scale. Actually, I paid a couple of visits to Thatcher country at the height of her pomp and glory and came away with the feeling that palpable hunger was stalking the high streets of Britain even as no less palpable wealth was being flaunted by the yuppies, so called young upwardly mobile young persons who had been enriched by Thatchernomics. All those outside looking into Britain could see that the bubble created had no chance of achieving anything close to longevity and so it proved. Part of Thatchernomics dictated the lowering of income tax, a policy which suited the yuppies to the ground at the expense of people who had little disposable income. The loss of government income had to be made up through personal taxes. Matters came to a head with the introduction of the poll tax which was so unpopular that other Tories saw it as a stumbling block to vote gathering. They had no choice but to rebel against their leader. It fell to Geoffrey  Howe, the Foreign Minister and deputy to the Prime Minister to deliver the speech in parliament which parodied the words of Oliver Cromwell who centuries earlier had dismissed parliament with the words, ‘in God’s name, go’. The Prime Minister had been told to go and Margie had to go but not before having held on to power for no less than eleven years, longer than anyone in British history, to be succeeded by John Major as unlikely a successor as anyone could be.

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John Major had a most interesting background for  a politician, not to talk of member of the Conservative Party. His father was at least for part of his life a music performer and he was so unimpressed with school that he left as soon as he possibly could without breaking the law at an age just short of sixteen years with three O level subjects to his credit.  Thereafter he tried his hands at several jobs but found none that was suitable for a boy of his rather limited academic qualifications. It was said that he could not even get a job as a bus conductor on account of his height. Eventually, he settled for being articled in the field of insurance and ended up in the employ of Standard Bank which brought him all the way to Standard Bank in Jos. He worked in Nigeria for a few months before he was involved in a serious motor accident which led to his being transferred back home to Britain for the treatment of his injuries.

As expected, one of his first acts in government was to repeal the poll tax law which had been the undoing of his predecessor in office. After all the excitement of the Thatcher years, Major tried to reduce the heat in the polity especially since Labour Party had a comfortable lead in the polls. To the surprise of many, including Major himself, the Conservatives won a clear majority over the Labour Party under the leadership of Neil Kinnock in the general election following the departure of Margaret Thatcher. Eventually, in 1997 the Labour Party now led by Tony Blair won the general election to bring an end to the eighteen year long rule of the Conservative Party.

To be continued.

Although I did not think that I was coming to an enchanted country, I was not prepared for the ordinariness of my surroundings when I arrived in Britain, Manchester to be precise, to start a postgraduate course in late September 1973. My first impressions about my destination were definitely far from flattering. I arrived at Manchester airport in the late evening of a Saturday when I could not get to town and decided to stay in a nearby hotel until Monday morning. I took a taxi, telling the driver to take me to the nearest hotel. Like taxi drivers all over the world, he saw me for what I was, a stranger and took me on a merry go round in the dark by which time I had run up quite a bill. I suspected that I was being fiddled but was more relieved than anything else when I was deposited at what turned out to be a decent hotel. I had left a hot and steamy Lagos only half a day before to be confronted with a typically chilly late summer Mancunian evening for which I was  prepared neither physically nor psychologically and thus I was introduced to the discomfort of being dumped into a rather efficient refrigerator with winds blowing around my head with sadistic intent. The cold sliced through me like a scalpel in the hands of a confident surgeon and did as much damage as a steak knife wielded by a competent chef. My discomfiture was accentuated by the fact that, the hotel management, ignoring the evidence of any honest thermometer, clung to the fiction that we were still in summer and did not think it fit to provide any heating. The frigidity of my otherwise comfortable room convinced me that my very survival was at stake so I got into bed fully clothed, but found very little comfort even under the thick duvet that was provided to keep out the cold. As I shivered under that duvet, my mind went back twenty-four hours to the warmth of my own bed which was lying unused and uselessly warm far away in Lagos.

Manchester University was and is still is one of the best universities not just in Britain but in the world and so I was proud to have been admitted to such a reputable institution. My first impressions of the university were however rather muted. I had arrived there from a brand new, modern and purpose built university campus at Ife and there simply was no comparison between where I was coming from and where I had arrived at with so much excitement. I had arrived on the premises of the university on Oxford Street early on the Monday morning to find that the university, famous as it was, was just a collection of rather nondescript buildings which appeared to have been flung haphazardly on either side of a short stretch Oxford Street. The Department of Pharmacy which was to be home to me was housed in a building within which John Dalton had worked some one hundred and fifty years before my inauspicious arrival on the same premises. The place screamed history but for elegance, you had to look elsewhere. Inside the old building however, some serious scientific work was going on as I soon found out and joined in. But that morning, I could not help but wonder what I was in for as some friendly young man, knowing how thoroughly confused the disposition of the place  must have been to me, intervened and took me round a maze of twisted corridors, before finally bringing me to the presence of my supervisor who had been expecting me to show up. Looking at my elegant but flimsy suit, my supervisor did nothing more than shake hands with me before sending me with careful instructions to go out shopping for appropriate clothing. For this, he placed me in the company of the only Nigerian student on the premises, the future Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria who knowing the importance of that commission earned my undying gratitude by dropping everything he was doing and took me shopping. That was the first day. On the second day, now suitably clothed, I was in the laboratory to start the work for which I had come more than five thousand kilometres to do.

With the help of friends I had known from Lagos, I settled down quite quickly to life in Manchester and began to take stock of my environment. This was home to those demi-gods who had come all the way to Nigeria and other places all over the world to lay down their law and force feed us with the tenets of their adopted God. For them to have been able to do this, they had to have been special, or so I reasoned at first. Seeing them close up however immediately disabused my mind of any such fanciful notion. Even those of them who were in the university did not show overt signs of mental competence and I wondered how they had managed to do with us what they had done all round the world over several centuries. To tell the truth, I am still wondering how people who were so outstanding in their ordinariness could have held the rest of the world to ransom for such a long time.

The Britain I arrived in in 1973 was a country in crisis. The Conservative government of Edward Heath was locked in bitter struggle with the trade unions for the very soul of the country. War had broken out in the Middle East and the winds of inflation were gathering strength all over the world so that the people found that they did not have money with which to purchase the bare necessities of life. That winter has been described as a winter of discontent as it was characterised by the three day working week, electricity cuts, rubbish piled up in the streets, dustmen having walked out on strike, all accompanied by various other discomforts and annoyances.  No surprise at all that the elections called early in the following year were won handsomely by the Labour Party which was confidently expected to clear up the mess left behind by the retreating Conservatives.

The Conservative Party, the oldest political party in Britain is first and foremost the party of the privileged and in a class ridden society, the natural party of government. Most of its leaders were members of the establishment, determined to protect the interest of the rich who owned all the means of production. They owned large farms, mines, commercial institutions such as banks and insurance companies. In short, they had influence far beyond their number and it was in their interest to restrict the number of people, strictly men of course since women could not be trusted to use any vote conceded to them wisely who could be allowed to vote. Men who did not have property were emasculated and their vote taken from them. In modern parlance, the old Conservative Party firmly occupied space on the political right leaving the Liberal Party to hold on to the centre, with the left conspicuously unoccupied.  In truth however, the Conservatives did not have things all their own way. Over on the continent of Europe beginning from France in 1789, the peasants were serving up bloody stews in the name of revolution, shaking all the ancient regimes to their foundations. In France, the unspeakable happened when king and queen were hurled out and publicly deprived of their royal heads. Except for a brief Napoleonic interlude, France has remained a republic since then.  It was clear to the British ruling class that the waters of the English Channel could not protect them from the revolutionary contagion which was sweeping through Europe and this being the case, they cut their poor some slack so as to protect themselves from the fury of the majority who were constantly on the verge of starvation or in danger of some savage punishment for slight infarctions such as stealing apples, for which they could be banished (transported) to Australia or publicly hanged for stealing a sheep. To put it simply, it was a crime to be poor in Britain some two hundred years ago even though that was the lot of the majority of the people. The first political victory for the poor, if it can be so called, was the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. Before then the poor had no access to the cheaper grains which were available elsewhere because of heavy taxes levied on imported grains. This led to a reduction in food prices allowing the poor to breathe a little. There had been opposition to the repeal of the Corn Laws because they protected the interest of the rich landowners on whose farms the grains were produced. It was in their interest that grain prices remained high, as high as possible to ensure the enhancement of their profits.

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Although the repeal of the Corn Laws brought some relief to the poor, their plight was still on the wrong side of desperate but because they had no representatives in parliament, nothing or at least very little could be done for them. The poor and abandoned majority sometimes tried to redress their grievances by taking to the streets but the resultant riots that erupted were easily put down by the police who ironically were recruited from the same social class as the rioters. In the meantime, the land owners and the employers of labour continued to pay their workers starvation wages on which they could not bring up their children but nobody in authority spared any thought for the poor workers, not to talk of their unfortunate offspring. It is against this background that Marx and Engels published their iconic Communist Manifesto in 1849 in which they called on the workers of the world to unite to free themselves from the oppression of the rich. It was an appropriate time to make this clarion call because as pointed out by Marx, the spectre of communism was at that time haunting Europe and it seemed that the stage was set for the liberation of the poor from the chains of their poverty.

It was around this time that it became apparent to the workers that they had to unite in order to liberate themselves from the fierce and unfeeling clutches of the rich and began to form unions through which they could fight for their rights to live as human beings. By this time, the Industrial Revolution was well on its way and factories producing all kinds of manufactured goods were springing up all over the place. The driving force behind the revolution was coal, as steam power drove everything before it. All over the country, principally in Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, mining communities sprang up and many thousand men were united in their effort to dig up coal from deep mines to bring the black stuff to the surface to be burnt in furnaces and provide power to thousands of those wonderful and powerful machines which drove the revolution which had the world in its grip. Those men were not just moles digging for coal but sentient men who could fight for their right to be treated as human beings. They came together to form unions which were the vehicles for this fight and in time, those unions coalesced under the leadership of Keir Hardy, almost inevitably a Scottish miner, to form the Labour Party. One hundred and fifty odd years on, another Keir, this one surnamed Starmer has emerged to lead the Labour Party to a land slide victory over the Conservatives. He has inflicted such a crushing defeat on the Conservatives that two weeks later, there is talk of an extinction event having overtaken the British Conservative Party, for so long, the party of government in Britain.

To be continued.