Politicians are meant to serve the people, but the reality seems to be that they serve themselves first, their parties second and lastly, some of the people.
Arguably the biggest problem with politics is the political parties. There have been many people down the years who have suggested that political parties should be banned, but that just doesn’t work as a concept.
As frustrating as most parties are, they’re a naturally occurring phenomenon in the political landscape. Birds of a feather flock together and it’s understandable why politicians with similar views should group together.
The problem lies with political parties becoming a living thing with those at the heart of them blinded to reality and seeing the parties as being the most important thing.
Following the Brexit vote in the UK, I heard more than one Conservative politician say that the government had to get Brexit completed or it would be the end of the Conservative party.
That’s not motivation or justification for doing anything that affects all of the 67 million or so people in the UK. Politicians should only do things that are in the best interest of the people. The needs of political parties shouldn’t even be a minor consideration in any decision-making process that affects the people.
Even when parties are filled with members who are intent on serving the electorate, they’re still a bad idea, with the leadership exerting pressure on members to support the party line rather than act and vote on policies in the way that they believe aligns with and best serves their constituents.
In the modern political landscape though, there seem to be far too many politicians who see their position as a career move that they leverage as much as possible for their own personal benefit.
Groups of these people can drive parties strongly in specific and often extreme directions, even further separating those parties from serving all the people and focusing on just serving some of the people.
We’re not going to rid ourselves of political parties, but there is one very simple change that we can make to the role of politicians that would significantly undermine the power of parties and make it easier for individual politicians to do the right thing for those they serve.
We’ll look at that later when we focus more on the role politics and politicians play in maintaining the position and power of those at the top of our societies’ pyramids.
Parties Automatically Divide Us, Some Politicians Do It Deliberately
While parties tend to naturally lead to division, some politicians deliberately divide the voters.
No-one gets angry, excited or passionate about lukewarm policies and issues. If a politician wants to be sure the voters are going to turn out and vote, they need to rile the people up and make them feel strongly about something, so strongly that they’ll fight flood and fire to vote.
This cuts both ways. The passion of supporters for a policy is often faced by an equally passionate counterview of political opponents. Strongly opposing views are perfectly natural in any debate, but some politicians will throw fuel on this fire to ramp up the flames and the anger.
They’ll accuse opponents of being unpatriotic, of not loving their country, of wanting to take away freedoms, of being responsible for all the problems in the country, of simply being the enemy.
Yet the reality is very different. I’m going to go deeper on this point later, but people are people. Ask most people across the UK and USA what they want at a general level and the answers will be much the same.
Where people differ is in their beliefs about how their wishes will best be achieved. The people may prefer different politicians, but ultimately they want those politicians to deliver the same things.
The worst of the politicians will seek to hide the similarities and magnify the differences between people to better serve their own aims and goals. They don’t care about the jeopardy they create by dividing neighbours, they care only about their own goals.
A simple rule of thumb, any politician who focuses significantly on who is the problem rather than how to solve the problem, is likely trying to divide and cares more about using the problem than solving it.
Judge Politicians By Their Actions, All Their Actions
We make it very easy for us to be divided. We let our biases interfere with our judgement and we’ll consider some of the reasons for that later.
Our problem is that if we identify with one party or leader, we instinctively dislike and mistrust anything that comes from opposing parties or leaders.
When we look at them, we only focus on the things that we dislike, the things that prove to us we’re right to dislike them.
At the same time, we look at our favourite party or leader and only let ourselves see their positives, while turning a blind eye to the negatives.
It’s a feature, not a bug, of being human as we’ll see, but we can train ourselves to think differently.
Boris Johnson is a hugely divisive figure. He always has been, from his time as a journalist, through Mayor of London, MP and Prime Minister and beyond.
If you like Boris Johnson, you probably really like him. He’s a great bloke, a man of the people, one of us, understands how real life is, cares about what’s important to us and puts us first.
On the other hand, if you dislike Boris Johnson, you probably really dislike him. He’s elitist, self-obsessed, thoughtless, manipulative, uncaring and dishonest.
We let our feelings about people and things affect how we see them. Clearly Boris Johnson isn’t just one of those two people described above. No-one could be present in the public eye as he is and behave in such different ways without everyone seeing it.
The reality is that he shares aspects of both descriptions of him.
Like you and me, he’s not perfect. Just because he’s no angel, however, doesn’t mean he’s a devil. Read stuff by the right people and you could be persuaded he is, and maybe they’re correct in that assessment, but it’s more likely he falls somewhere between the extremes. Possibly nearer to one extreme than the other, but still not absolutely a devil or an angel.
By looking at his actions as Prime Minister, we can get an idea of how easy it to see him as just one of two different people.
No.10 Party Street
Anyone who’s anti-Johnson will probably jump first upon the many tales of parties in Downing Street during the COVID pandemic, many of them directly breaking laws created there in the first place.
Johnson became the first sitting PM of the UK to be fined by the police, though it’s worth noting that his fine, like all the others imposed on those working in Downing Street, weren’t at the vertigo inducing levels imposed on some other private citizens.
The high jinks at the heart of government make it very easy to criticise the performance of the government during what was an unprecedented time.
Is that entirely fair though? The UK’s state of preparedness for a pandemic has been criticised plenty of times, but much of that criticism could be applied to past administrations and the civil service, as much as those in the driving seat when it happened.
Look across the world and did many nations really stand out as shining beacons of success? Politicians were having to formulate plans on the hoof and medical experts suddenly found themselves thrust into prominent positions helping to create policies after careers of generally hypothesising.
It should hardly be a surprise that lots of countries struggled and if you were caught up in the centre of all that, might you not have released some pressure, despite the rules? I’m not saying what they did wasn’t wrong, but we’re all very quick to raise ourselves up onto a pedestal and stare down at others for their failures and weaknesses while turning a blind eye to our own.
Fast Track to Riches
So we know government, like the rest of the world, was often chaotic during the pandemic, but does that excuse the PPE fast track process.
Put briefly, ministers and MPs were encouraged to put forward people and businesses that had the expertise to help the government secure the required Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) that would be required by healthcare workers at the front line of the pandemic.
That’s not quite how it played out though. Recommendations were put forward for random individuals and businesses that had no experience in the sector, who were then granted contracts worth tens or even hundreds of millions of pounds.
The government could have hired staff to phone and email various suppliers around the globe. That’s all some of these businesses would have been doing as they’d never sourced PPE for the healthcare sector before.
Instead, businesses like Trotters International Trading – Paris, New York, Peckham1, were given the opportunity to trouser vast sums of the public’s money. Private Eye investigated a lot of these contracts and found some businesses that normally reported modest profits at best, suddenly realised profits of millions or tens of millions of pounds.
They had no more experience than you, but because you’re not chummy with someone working in government, you didn’t have the chance to turn the pandemic into a huge money-making opportunity. You just had to pay their bill.
Proroguing Parliament
It’s an uncommon word, proroguing. It came to prominence when Boris Johnson attempted to prorogue parliament or, in English the rest of us understand, shut it down for a period to stop elected MPs from potentially blocking his plans to complete a hard Brexit.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court intervened and ruled the move illegal.
Nonetheless, even considering the things above, this was the most shocking event of Johnson’s premiership.
It would be easy to overlook just how very significant his actions in this were. It should terrify you that a British Prime Minister could attempt to usurp the power of the MPs that the British people elected to represent them in order to achieve his own goals.
It was literally an attempt to sidestep the democratic rule of the country.
Do you remember some of those names from the start of this book, those who had suffered or lost their lives because of the lack of democratic rule where they lived? They’d understand the danger such a move could present to their freedom.
Can you remember the faces of the 72 people you selected to live in autocracies? It’s actions like these that are steps on the road from democracy to autocracy.
Closing down parliament for a limited period to achieve one specific goal may not seem like a major issue, particularly if you were keen for the government to complete Brexit.
However, it could have set a dangerous precedent. What about the next time a prime minister wanted to do something that MPs might not agree with?
Could every PM ignore the will of the people and their elected representatives and shut parliament for a few days?
And why bother opening it again? Surely it would be easier for a Prime Minister to keep it permanently shut?
Now enough of Mr Negative-Pants, there was good stuff too wasn’t there?
Vaccine Rollout
I know COVID vaccines are a controversial subject for some and the subject will arise again later, but the consensus of expert opinion is that they’re a good thing and they have had a positive impact both during and post-pandemic.
Politicians can’t be experts on everything and they have to base their decision-making on the advice and guidance supplied by experts.
In this situation, Boris Johnson’s government listened to the experts on the subject and excelled.
As a result, the UK was one of the first countries in the world to start supplying vaccinations to their people. I believe, in fact, they were only beaten by the Israeli government.
I know at the time it was suggested that this was because the UK wasn’t constrained by the EU and was free to source their vaccines independently. The reality was that the UK would have been free to source vaccines independently, even if the people had voted against Brexit.
Which leads us to.
Brexit Completed
Whatever side you took in the Brexit debate, the fact is the British people voted to leave, but in the years following the vote, failures to find common ground with the EU made the actual act of leaving problematic.
With voters having chosen Brexit, it had to be delivered. That’s the essence of democracy.
Boris Johnson was clear from the beginning that this was the main priority for him and he delivered on what he promised to the British people.
Ukraine Support
In the run-up to the war in Ukraine, as Russia massed forces on their borders, Johnson was the first international leader to pay a visit to Ukraine. He followed that up with three further visits to the country in 2022 after fighting had commenced.
He clearly feels very strongly about the need for democratic countries to offer and maintain strong support to Ukraine as the country faces an existential threat.
While the war comes with costs to everyone in Western democratic nations, those costs are like nothing compared to the costs faced by the people of Ukraine.
Granted, Ukraine obviously isn’t a perfect country, but it has been moving in a positive direction and its wish to join the EU in the future will further ensure their government is held to account. The Corruption Perceptions Index shows a positive trend In the reduction of corruption in the country, with the 2023 score of 36 comparing to 25 in 2013.
So I personally believe that offering friendship and financial and military support to the nation during such a difficult period is vital and so I do admire Johnson for being committed in this regard.
It’s not fair or reasonable to view Johnson’s service based just on one set of actions. Look at them in the round and suspend any personal biases and it should be clear that he presided over both hits and misses. Rather like most of us in our personal and professional lives.
Donald Trump is another hugely divisive figure who tends not to inspire indifference. Love or hate, but rarely anything in-between.
Also like Johnson, during the COVID pandemic, he drove the rapid development of vaccines to help the world return to some form of normality, rolling them out to the US people not too far behind Johnson’s UK government.
Looking beyond that though, there is a mix of actions from his presidency that we can consider.
North Korea
The USA has applied sanctions in different forms against North Korea since the 1950s, while multi-national sanctions have been applied since 2006 to pressure the country to cease nuclear weapons testing.
Overall, sanctions appear to have had zero effect on three generations of Kim family leaders and the race to develop ever more powerful weapons seems to have escalated regardless.
The easy option for any US President would be to carry on as is or perhaps double down on sanctions, assuming there were any further options available.
Donald Trump did something I don’t think any other politician would have considered and actually engaged with Kim Jong Un. The two leaders held two summits during Trump’s presidency.
It’s probably the most audacious act a politician has done that I can recall in my lifetime.
Democrats at the time were often keen to criticise the approach for speaking with a brutal dictator, but there’s a famous quote that’s often attributed to Einstein, though he probably never said it, that goes “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
While the two summits between them didn’t ultimately change anything, at least he had the vision to try something different in an attempt to achieve the result the Americans wanted.
China
I think it’s fair to say that the West was slow to react to the rise of China. There was a belief that encouraging the Chinese leadership to open up and liberalise their economy would lead to their political system moving towards democracy, but the Communist Party is just as powerful as ever, with a single man dictating the lives of more than a billion people.
More than a million of those people have been detained and deprived of their freedom just because of who they are, not for anything they’ve done.2 None of the people have any say in how their country is run.
The Chinese military has been growing in power dramatically in recent years and Chinese claims over the island of Taiwan and vast parts of the South China Sea that international law says are the property of other nations3 is clearly worrying for other countries in the region.
Trump pushed back strongly against China and set the tone for most of the Western world, with similar approaches to China continuing beyond the end of his presidency. While it’s likely a change in attitude to China was inevitable, Donald Trump’s approach meant it wasn’t delayed any further.
Corporate Transparency Act
This probably won’t look like a headline act for many people, but considering much of the subject of this book, the Corporate Transparency Act that was passed into law as part of a defence spending bill in late 2020 is something to be celebrated.
It was designed to make it much harder for wealthy or criminal individuals and groups to hide money in the US. The law requires that the owners of shell companies registered in the US are identified to the authorities. Previously, this information could be hidden as long as the company had a named agent assigned to it.
Criminals will always look for ways to operate outside the law, that’s what makes them criminals, but any laws that make it harder for them have to be a good thing.
While these are things that I admire and believe are high points of his presidency, though you may feel differently, there are also aspects that I feel constitute failure.
Reduced Overtime Pay Protection
The previous administration before Trump’s passed a law that meant that workers who earned up to $47,476 per year would be eligible for overtime pay for working longer hours. This threshold would also automatically track wage changes in the future.
This faced a legal challenge and rather than defend it, Trump’s government passed a new law with a reduced threshold of $35,568 and no mechanism to automatically track future wage changes.4
The immediate effect was reported to be some 8 million US workers missing out on overtime payments that had been granted by the 2016 law.
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
In his 2012 book Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again, Trump was very scathing of OPEC and the way they manage oil production, in turn keeping the price high.
He wrote that the US should take legal action against OPEC and declared his support for the No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act (NOPEC).5 While I’m not a US citizen, I support that approach as hopefully, the EU would have copied a successful action by the US.
Trump was very confident it would be successful, believing that OPEC would fold, writing “What are they going to do? Fold their arms, throw a temper tantrum, and refuse to sell us their oil and be out billions and billions of dollars?”
Don’t you think that’s exactly what they would do? Think about it and it’s quite obvious.
All 12 of the current members of OPEC are autocratic states to varying degrees. The leaders of these countries have plenty of wealth, so can easily weather reduced income if the US refuses to buy their oil on their terms. They won’t lose money in the long term as the oil won’t go off. The people that suffer will be the general population and autocracies generally don’t worry about the people and crack down hard on dissent, whether that’s protests on the street or opinion pieces in the media.
Leaders of a democracy like the USA don’t enjoy those same benefits. If the people are hit by increased prices, they will complain and protest, with the complaints reflected by the media. And when it comes to elections, the people will punish the leaders they see as responsible.
I guess once he became President, someone explained that to him and that’s why he never followed through on his intention to teach OPEC a lesson.
Border Wall
Illegal immigration is an emotive subject, but as the name says, it is illegal. It’s a subject I want us both to consider in more detail later, as I’m going to argue that it presents a serious threat to democracy.
For now, though, building a wall to block the USA’s southern border with Mexico and stem the flow of illegal immigrants entering the country was one of the central policies of Trump’s election campaign.
History tells us that walls, while not 100% effective, have been favoured by other great civilisations. The Roman Empire used one to keep the Celts out of the north of England and the Chinese built a wall that you can see from space. Parts of that wall stretch back to 700 years before Jesus Christ, so while the southern border wall might seem expensive upfront, it could prove very reasonable over its lifetime.
Yet the border was still plenty porous after four years of Trump’s presidency. with just between 40 and 80 or so miles of wall built, depending on who you listen to.
Look around you right now. Unless you’re in the middle of nowhere, I bet you can see walls. You’re likely surrounded by them, probably literally. Building walls isn’t rocket science.
Again, Trump’s a three-dimensional politician. If we choose to just look at him from one angle, we’re always going to see the same things. The things that we want to see, whether we consider those things positive or negative. They’ll just reaffirm to us what we already believe.
It’s human nature.
Just because it’s human nature though, doesn’t mean we have to accept that’s how things should always be. We can be smarter.
We can simply choose not to.
As I write this, in the last 24 hours or so, a report on Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents (we’ll be coming back to this) described him as an “elderly man with a poor memory”. He then goes in front of the press to refute the claims and gets confused over the leaders of Egypt and Mexico.
We all make mistakes, but it’s not a dreadful slur on the elderly to say mental trips become more common as we get older.
Biden is 81 years old as I write this and Trump is 77.
This may explain why, if you search for Trump’s gaffes and cock-ups, you’ll find plenty of those too.
They’re both showing worrying signs that their ageing doesn’t make them well-suited for a high-pressure role as President of the USA.
Yet how do their supporters react?
Democrats and Biden fans ignore the worrying flags around Joe Biden’s cognitive state while claiming that similar gaffes show that Donald Trump is a mental train wreck.
At the same time, Republicans and Trump fans ignore the worrying flags around Donald Trump’s cognitive state while claiming that similar gaffes show that Joe Biden is a mental train wreck.
The absurdity is so huge and comedic, it should be on a Broadway stage, six days a week, twice on Saturdays.
- I don’t literally mean that Delboy and Rodney got a contract (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFuYIi5-igc), but, sounding rather like the plot of a TV sitcom, the landlord of the local pub of the UK Health Minister did. For clarity, it’s been reported that despite the landlord’s initial messages to the Health Minister asking about opportunities to supply PPE, their contract was for testing equipment supplies – https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/matt-hancock-covid-contract-alex-bourne-b1968161.html ↩︎
- https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-xinjiang-uyghurs-muslims-repression-genocide-human-rights ↩︎
- https://globalchallenges.ch/issue/1/legal-victory-for-the-philippines-against-china-a-case-study/ ↩︎
- https://www.epi.org/press/the-trump-administrations-overtime-rule-leaves-millions-of-workers-behind/ ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Oil_Producing_and_Exporting_Cartels_Act ↩︎