De-clawing the British Lion

One of the lesser acknowledged people who have passed through my fair city of Bristol is a man called Ernest Bevin.  Bevin knew what it meant to be poor, working as a manual labourer on the docks for pennies and then working as a driver at the same place for not much more.  He rose up to become an effective and passionate trade union organiser, becoming instrumental in organising a huge trade union confederation the Transport and General Workers Union.  However while he prided himself in standing up for the working man against a government seemingly dominated by an oligarchy of the ruling class, he refused to swallow the rhetoric prevalent in the socialist movement about all threats being manufactured.  He used his influence and his own fiery rhetoric to denounce George Lansbury at the 1935 Labour Party Conference.  George Lansbury and his supporters only saw a ruling class conspiracy in rearmament, a line supported by a wide spectrum of leftist authors and celebrities including Virgina Woolfe.  Ernest Bevin meanwhile saw the world as it was.  Italy was invading Ethiopia.  Hitler who had been in power for only a few years had already begun to violently crack down on trade union activity.  The German leader incidentally was almost in stitches of laughter after meeting George Lansbury.  Bevin’s courageous stance lead to the end of Lansbury’s resignation from his position of the Labour Party.  After a distinguished term serving as Secretary of Labour during World War 2, upon Labour’s victory in 1945 Bevin became Foreign Secretary. During his tenure has Foreign Secretary, recognising the threat from the Soviet Union Bevin was instrumental in cofounding the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation better known as NATO.  And today that organisation still stands.

 Bevin helped form NATO because while he recognised the need for major domestic reform he knew that Britain could not afford to ignore the strategic map.  Divided and disarmed Europe was prey to danger.  However united, ready and able Europe would be ensured that it could enjoy the fruits of the postwar peace.  Bevin realised the truth that both guns and butter are needed and ultimately one can’t survive without the other.

 Our present leaders, in the government and without, are not strategic thinkers in the least.  They act more like managers and mis-managers at that.  When they look at lists of our strategic interests next to lists of our armed forces.  They look at both of those lists and in place of what they should see they see pound signs.  And that creates the need for efficiencies, cost saving measures, expedient minded solutions and ultimately cuts.  The armed forces are really just an inconvenience to them.  Something to be patted on the head next to the cenotaph and to provide a musical accompaniment to the opening of the Ashes at the Lords grounds.  They talk so much about how much the members of the armed forces sacrifice while they dismember their regiments and close down their bases.

 So why do they get away with this?  Well at the moment it appears the answer is, because the balance of the British public support it.  Leon Trotsky once said “You may not have an interest in war, but war has an interest in you.”  But the problem is not so much that we are not interested.  The British are simply tired of war and the military that comes along with it.  They are tired of sharp suited politicians sending the armed forces to fight in far flung places only to see the shooting carry on long after they have left.  They are tired of being given multiple reasons why they our forces are being sent to a certain place when one solid golden reason would do.  And most of all the British are tired at seeing their money seemingly being ploughed into the military while public services are cleaved.  The peace dividend in short is looking very allusive and all too far away.

 But the problem is the world doesn’t stop being a dangerous place just because we have had enough of it and the problems within it.  We don’t even need to look on the world scale to realise that, looking at our region is bad enough.  President Vladimir Putin of Russia has thrown down the gauntlet to Europe.  It’s vastly outnumbered eastern neighbours are fearful while the central European powers do what they always do; make a lot of noise and postpone a challenge without meeting it.  And meanwhile we go about our paper tiger business as our hard power declines every day.  Vladimir Putin is a remorseless and determined nationalistic fanatic who targets weakness and exploits it.  From the start we have shown weakness.  We treated and still treat Alexander Litvinenko’s assassination in London like some kind of minor diplomatic inconvenience, like an ambassador’s outstanding parking ticket.  As Euromaidan started coming into force and the Russian supported Ukrainian President Yanukovych’s thugs started launching themselves at protestors, Vladimir Putin was having his pictures taken in front of Number 10.  Only now the rhetoric from our government has started to heat up.

 But Putin must know this rhetoric is empty.  Either as our government is spouting it they are tying themselves in knots strategically.  British bases are closing in Germany in a region where our commitments are increasing, while a base is being opened in Bahrain in a region where our operations were allegedly powering down.  How can we hope to deter our enemies when we give off such mixed signals.  How can we reassure our vulnerable allies, including those in Eastern Europe, when we are so lacklustre when it comes to defence?  Despite the fanfare, they realise that a NATO ‘spearhead’ force of 5,000 strong is pretty puny when set against the Russian Western Military District’s 65,000 strong.

The public rightly do not want war with Russia.  Such a war would be devastating for everyone, although by numbers (not in the least 3 NATO nuclear weapon owning states versus one) Russia would lose.  But wanting a peaceful endgame and going out of your way to show how little resolve you have to stand a challenge are two different matters.  If you are confronting a determined foe such as we are with Russia, it is unwise and dangerous to lay all of your cards down on the table at once.  An open public acknowledgement of our desire to only go so far until Eastern Europe is on its own is a very unwise stance on our part.  We are a part of an alliance that commits us to help those in need and in distress.  Now is the time to own up to that commitment.  If that upsets Vladimir Putin (and there isn’t much “if” about it) then that is too bad.  There is no honour or satisfaction to be had in appeasing a bully.  Historically it is not what our country is known for.

The Iraq War has left a toxic legacy in this country.  It has stoked the fires of isolationism and in it’s aftermath terrible and frankly wrong narratives have emerged from it.  One of which is that all military action not sanctioned explicitly by international law is wrong.  Tell that to the Kosovans alive because of NATO’s intervention in 1999.  Another is that every single humanitarian intervention we have been involved in has failed.  Tell that to the people of Sierra Leone.  Those forces conspire to tell us that the UK has never been and can never be a force for good in the world.  I for one believe that they are completely wrong.

In the upcoming general election the future of our armed forces will hardly be discussed.  To be sure there will be a few patronising remarks about how much good they do, probably by the same powers that be who want to carve them up.  It isn’t popular to talk about defence or about using our defence capability to help others.  It is much more popular to be ashamed of our power, or rather our former power.  On the right we have UKIP who want a massively financed military to go virtually nowhere.  Perhaps more persuasively we have the Greens who want to go nowhere too but for good measure hack away at their financing too, so they will hardly be equipped to go anywhere.  I wouldn’t vote for UKIP regardless of what their defence policy was, unless I had a frontal lobotomy.  But I do fear the momentum of the Greens.

The Greens have a toxic and corrosive view of Britain with regards to international security.  They support the sadly popular leftist moral relativist philosophy of the day that basically traces the source of all suffering in the world back to our doorstep.  It also seemingly advocates the appeasing of bullies like Putin.  In short the legacy of George Lansbury is alive and kicking, so it is time to invoke the spirit of Ernest Bevin.  So my parting advice with regards to confronting this terrible and enduring philosophy is simple: don’t stand for it.  Be proud of us being committed to the defence of the little guy.  Instead of only  decrying the unfairness of the UK’s Permanent seat on the UN Security Council, we should think about the good we can do while have it, and consider carefully whether our successors may prove as altruistic in their motives.  Our country has made mistakes with regards to military intervention, but that is no excuse for isolationism.  In the face of mistakes we should endeavour to do better, not endeavour to do nothing at all.  Our philosophy should be similar to Thomas Paine’s “The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

 

Standing Up For a British Presidency

Mentioning the possibility of Britain becoming a republic and one day having a president to someone can often provoke a surprised and somewhat dumbfounded response.  It is almost as though you said “hey I think it would be a good idea if I crossed that main road at rush hour doing a handstand.”  It is seen in the mainstream as simply a bizarre idea and often portrayed as against British values.  As a republican I believe this reaction is somewhat typical of the human condition.  People after all can get used to pretty much anything, especially if they are lead to believe they can’t change something or more controversially that they shouldn’t.  “If it ain’t broke why fix it?” is the usual response from royalists, who then usually ignore the multitude of ways the institution of the British Monarchy is broke.  But this response is often prompted by the fears of what could replace the monarchy, which as far as Republic is concerned would be a democratically elected British President.  President; that title has many controversies around it.  And yet all it means nominally is the not so very an radical idea, these days anyway, of electing your own leader.  But it stands to reason that if we republicans are for a presidency, we need to tackle the stigma that is attached to it.

 The past is continuously mythologized and the characters and actions of past leaders along with it.  But curiously the myth making seems to be different when it comes to mythologizing monarchs on the one hand and mythologizing Presidents on the other.  When one king annuls marriages or executes their (former) spouse this is largely overlooked to preserve is greater legacy, politics is separated from the personal.  Yet with Presidents this separation doesn’t seem to exist.  If a President cheats on his wife, who cares about them stopping genocide or passing life changing reforms?  Many Kings and Queens practiced corruption and torture on a gargantuan scale.  Their greater legacy remains intact while a single corruption or spy scandal can bring down an entire presidency in historians and the public’s view.

So why do we have these double standards?  The conclusion I have come to is that Presidents are just too close to home while most monarchs are silently in their grave, hardly vocal witnesses to a controversial history.  Put simply Presidents just remind us too much of well……us.  But we have fell into this narrative where we apparently don’t want Presidents to be like us.  We don’t want them to be fallible.  We don’t want them to say the wrong thing.  We want them to reflect the power and status of our country as it was, to take our minds off our continuous decline.  We want them to be confident and to know what to do and when to do it.  In other words we want our leaders to be special.  How much more special can you get than a line of people trained from birth to be leaders? 

Politics for all its good and very visible ills is at the end of the day a product of the human condition.  Like it or not we are responsible in one way or another for the way politics has developed.    Confronting the problems synonymous with contemporary politics will lead us to have to deal with many difficult issues.  The biggest issue that our paradoxical fixation on the monarchy highlights is our completely unrealistic and warped view of human nature.  We expect the best from the leaders we don’t choose, but we expect the worst from the leaders we don’t.  We have come to the point where we are so frustrated and ultimately dumbfounded about where politics should ultimately go, we give ourselves an escape from reality in the form of the Monarch.

“Its (British Monarchy) mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic. We must not bring the Queen into the combat of politics, or she will cease to be reverenced by all combatants” Walter Bagehot

 The “mystery” element is pretty alien to a democratic system, ordinarily.  Could you imagine a member of the US President’s staff being called into a Senate hearing and when asked a question refraining “sorry, can’t say anything.  We have mysteries to keep.”  If this was heard the questioners would be forgiven for wondering what the staff member had been smoking.  Royalists tend to reflect on human nature as it should be.  Republicans see it for what it is.  Presidents aren’t corruptible, people are corruptible and Presidents of course are human (although some may not live up to the name).  But in functional and transparent republics the President is seen as the leader but is ultimately bound by the strains of the constitution of their country and ultimately the ability of the public to renew or cut short their job’s duration.  And of course monarchs are just as human as Presidents.  But the difference between them is that while monarchs perpetuate the myth that people are born leaders the legacy of Presidents prove time and time again that leaders are not born, they are made.

The life experiences and challenges of monarchs are reflected on and mythologized, while those of presidents have by contrast often been taken for granted.  This is a great shame since these stories humanize the characters we describe and give colour to lives that on reflection look a lot more inspiring and at the same time less remote.  These experiences have lead Presidents to make bold leadership decisions.   Here are a few examples.  Please forgive the mainly male selection.

 US President Abraham Lincoln was accustomed to loss from an early age with the death of his mother in childhood.  At the same time he learned the virtue of patience as he worked himself up from being a common labourer, to a lawyer and eventually President of the country.  While he lead his country through the bloody American Civil War, he had to put his own loss aside when his young son died during the war of natural causes.  He did this since he thought it was hypocritical to visibly mourn for his own son while he ordered hundreds of others to fight and die for the country.  This caused an massive strain on his marriage that never really recovered.  This also contributed to what many historians speculate was acute depression that Lincoln had to live with among his other burdens.  To add to those burdens he was likely a closet homosexual, no doubt contributing to his depression.  Another experience when he was young tuned him away from slavery for life.  He went to work for a slave owner, didn’t like what he saw, then turned around and went home in disgust.  One of his successors was Ulysses S Grant.  Grant struggled with alcohol and depression all his life.    This struggle ended his army career once.  Then when the American Civil War started he became a patient, modest and yet determined general.  He got support from his friend and colleague William Tecsumeh Sherman who himself suffered from depression, leading them to help keep their mutual demons at bay.  Ultimately they became successful generals and won the war.  As President Grant promoted reconciliation with the south, but deployed the army against the violent Ku Klux Klan.  French President Charles De Gaulle was fully accustomed to loss due to his country falling prey to fascism.  His experience of fighting against overwhelming odds steeled him for tough fights later.  Many people recall from history King Juan Carlos of Spain telling the soldiers to stay in their barracks, but he stole that act off De Gaulle.  As paratroopers threatened to land on Paris De Gaulle went on TV and demanded they pledge allegiance to their leader and preserve the French Republic.  And in a more modest though not in the least important example, President Mary McAleese of Ireland sought reconciliation in a country where it has all too often been absent.  When she stated her intention to celebrate Protestant heritage as well as Catholic heritage, an American Catholic Archbishop denounced her.  Undaunted she turned around and said that his comments were out of line and she would do what she thought was right for all of her people, not just those who were Catholic.

If we republicans truly want a President we have to be prepared to argue and fight for one.  That does mean dealing with some controversial history.  There are people who empower and taint the presidential legacy.  But if the legacy of Presidents is controversial then that is the least that can be said of monarchs.  The main difference between the two positions is that we are ultimately responsible for Presidents since we choose them.  That is a big responsibility.  But shouldering big responsibility is what being a republican is all about.  Starting a British presidency and giving it a worthy legacy will be hard and it will take time.  For myself personally I relish the challenge and can't wait to start.