“I want to be able to say I did the things I thought were right”. These are the words of Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, in an interview with Stephen Moss in the Guardian’s G2 published on Monday 1 August 2011 (link to the on-line version above, if you can stand to). Now, for some reason, either Moss or some editor or some sub-something or other, decided that this would be a suitable headline for the whole interview/story*. And indeed someone, or maybe someone else, decided it was fitting for the front page of Monday’s G2 supplement. I don’t know, of course, if whoever it was who chose the quote for this headlining role did so because A) they wanted to reveal the vacuity of Danny Alexander, B) they wanted to highlight the pointlessness of political interviews in which subjects reveal themselves (i.e. cover themselves up), C) they wanted to show something unintentionally revealing about the subject, or D) they thought these words were wise and interesting and therefore were well worthy of such prominence. What abides of my faith in humanity tells me it’s A, B, or C. Unfortunately, however, my diminishing faith in humanity tells me it might well be D. The article itself was largely very soft and sympathetic, which suggests, sadly, a D. Below, however, I’m arguing for why it should have been a C. My initial instinct was A or possibly B, but I now think it’s a C.
*By the way, I don’t know if this is new or not, as I’m not a media expert, and would love to be informed and enlightened by any media studies chaps or chapettes who happen to read this post, but these days it seems that newspaper interviews are not just produced through a journalist talking to an interviewee in a room and then writing up the stuff they say with a bit of analysis thrown in. These days it seems that there has to be a story, some sort of action-based narrative alongside the interview that supposedly reveals something else about the subject. In this case, Moss followed Alexander around his native Scotland, mostly talking to fellow ginger people in his constituency of Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey. Come to think of it, the whole thing was actually almost certainly arranged by Alexander’s people, to show him all nicey-nicey and helpy-helpy, improving people’s lives, and very much away from Westminster where he is in fact all nasty-nasty and cutty-cutty, fucking up people’s lives. Accordingly, the trip and the whole interview turned out to be as insightful and as revealing as Danny Boy’s sound bite: "I want to be able to say I did the things I thought were right".
Actually, though, the words are insightful and revealing, I think, but not, presumably, in the way Danny Alexander thinks. My first reaction to the apparently staggering banality of the phrase was to think, “What a refreshing change from all those politicians who want to be able to say they did the things they thought were wrong. Thank goodness the Chief Secretary to the Treasury is such a clear-headed and intelligent man.” And that’s what I wrote on Facebook. I tried to write it on Twitter too, but had to break it into bits because of the 140-character Nazism. Well, to be fair, I suppose I understand why Twitter has a character limit, but why is it so pompous about it? If you write anything of excessive length—i.e. 141 characters—it not only tells you this information but adds as well that “You’ll have to be more clever”. Which is, frankly, a bit arsey, perhaps especially so, delivered as it is by an automaton rather than an actual sentient being. And, in an interesting turn of unintended irony, I notice now by the green squiggle appearing in the draft of this increasingly undisciplined aside, that “more clever” is deemed incorrect by my word-processor’s grammar checker, another non-sentient smart-arse. So, clever-clever Twitter should in fact be telling us to be cleverer. I’m beginning to envision a future post on the subject of Twitter snobbery. Especially how the biggest Tweeters think they’re oh-so-much-better than Facebookers. But, anyway, I digress.
So, as I was saying, my first reaction was “What a refreshing change” and dah dee dah dee dah. And then I got to wondering, well, how exactly does Mr Alexander foresee this happening, his saying “I did the things I thought were right”? In what exact circumstance would he “want to be able to say” these words? I think perhaps the first clue here is the more-than-a-hint-of-defensiveness in the whole phrase. He may or may not be convinced enough himself that he’s doing the things he thinks are right, I think on the surface, yes, deeper down maybe not, but he must know very well that others think he’s doing the things that are wrong. The defensive tone lies most obviously in the implied scenario: if you want to say that you did the things you thought were right, you must be imagining and imagining answering all those people who think the things you’re doing are wrong. Less obviously but perhaps most revealingly, the defensiveness is visible in the precise and slightly tortured construction of the phrase. If he was really confident, deep-down, that he’s doing the things he thinks are right, he would surely be more likely to say something such as “I want to be able to say I did the right things”. Rather than “I did the things I thought were right”, as if he knows somewhere deep in his traitorous Tory-hugging heart that the things he’s doing are NOT-RIGHT-AT-ALL. In these respects, Alexander’s phrase has a bit of a stench of Blair about it, Blair indeed at his most weasily, as when the pretty straight kind of guy defended his actions on Iraq by saying he genuinely believed he was doing the right thing. As if, if he believed it, genuinely, then it was okay. As if we would somehow forget all the dead people and embrace Tony once more because of his sincerity and his genuinely good intentions.
But Alexander must know, because he will have been told by fellow Liberal Democrats who cannot believe what they’ve got themselves into, that he is not doing the things that are right, whatever he might think he’d like to be able to say. It is not right, at least for a Lib Dem, to participate in the dismantling of so much of Britain’s civic infrastructure and the consequent dismembering of our civil society. It’s alright for the Tories to do it. They are Tories. That is what they do. It is what they are for. That and vomiting all over restaurants they’ve just trashed. They can dress up cuts with Big Society bullshit, but we all know that the Tories are about the cuts and we can vote for them, or not, accordingly. But the Lib Dems, at least those participating in the Coalition, or the Collaboration as I prefer to call it, are not only betraying our civic infrastructure etc, but they are betraying their own purported political philosophy and, as a consequence of that, they are also betraying nothing less than our democratic process itself. Like many people, I voted Lib Dem partly out of frustration with New Labour and because of the sheer heinousness of Tony Blair, not just in the most recent election but the two before that, and partly for the very positive reason that the Lib Dems were promising to raise taxes from those who can afford them (me included, and rightly so) and to spend the money on good things that help people who are not so well off. That’s what the Lib Dems are supposed to be about, that’s what they said they’d do, and that’s why most of the people who voted for them voted for them. That was therefore the deal, and not just any old deal, but a solemn democratic contract kind of deal. It is a give-me-your-precious-vote-that-you-possess-as-a-result-of-centuries-of-struggle-and-sacrifice-and-I-solemnly-promise-you-x kind of deal. There is hardly any more important kind of deal than that. Doing the exact opposite of what you promised in an election is therefore not and can never be a thing that is right. It is very, very, very wrong. And pathetic pleading and Blair-like bleating about how “I want to be able to say I did the things I thought were right” only adds insult to injury. And I reckon deep down Danny Alexander knows it.
I voted Lib Dem too, and for much the same reasons, which means - surely - that what Danny 'Ginger Rodent' Alexander says about doing 'what [he] thought was right' cannot be correct, unless he is admitting that everything he thought was right up until May 6th 2010, and everything which the Liberal Party had thought was right (which one assumes led him to join the party) for many decades before that, he now thinks were wrong.
ReplyDeleteGood point!
ReplyDelete