104. DOWN ON DOWNING STREET - Refocusing The Ethical Inquiry Away From Christmas Parties

I’ll be honest - it’s the end of term, in the last two weeks I have had to mark over 1,900 student answers in a range of examinations from year 11 and 13 mocks to delayed year 8 and 10 common assessment tasks, and I am tired. There are various things I have been thinking about writing for this week’s last post before we break for the Christmas holidays but I haven’t had the time to really hone in on anything specific. And as every fresh idea pops into my head the noise from everywhere else keeps coming back to lockdown Christmas parties at Downing Street. The hypocrisy of our government telling us we had to stay at home, forsake seeing loved ones, protect the NHS, while ignoring the rules themselves and enjoying their privileged festive celebrations. People are angry. Even milquetoast light entertainers, Ant and Dec, are making pointed satirical jokes about it. And it’s rare that the bulk of the whole population involves themselves in public debates about ethics, so it maybe feels like a moment of philosophy being truly unleashed. Conversations down the pub, in the playground, at the hairdresser, in the queue at the supermarket and around the kettle at work, all about what exactly the current government has done wrong with their “one rule for us and another for them” approach to governing.

But the ethics chat is leaving me cold.

Because if this government falls - and it should - it should be for their far more egregious moral wrongs than this purely selfish complaint: how come they got to have a party last year when we couldn’t have one ourselves? The more important questions we ought to be asking might be: how come they have continued, since 2010, to gut public services and leave so many in this country unable to make ends meet or get the help they need when difficult times arise? How come they presided over wilfully creating a “hostile environment” for immigrants? How come they haven’t been made accountable for the outright lies they told about Brexit in 2016 and the mess they made in all the years since of transitioning out of the EU? How come they have been enabled to play fast and loose with the tenuous peace agreed in Northern Ireland? How come when the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, we were not prepared as a result of their continuing underfunding of the NHS or investment in long-term disaster planning? How come no-one remembers their equally poor disaster response to flooding year after year? How come they were so slow to enact basic mitigations against COVID-19 such as mask-wearing, or larger ones like the first lockdown, causing thousands to get unnecessarily - and sometimes fatally - infected as they wrung their hands and wasted time? How come they made inhumane choices about how such lockdowns would work which allowed work colleagues to interact while keeping lovers, parents, grandparents and children apart? How come they messed up test and trace so badly? How come the COVID app is still so bad? How come they prioritised giving lucrative contracts to their friends over the protection of their citizens? How come they were so slow to offer economic support for those who needed to self-isolate? How come they offered so little to those who lost their jobs during the pandemic? How come they lied to us repeatedly about the criteria on which decisions would be made about ending lockdown and fudged data to put the economy first and human lives second? How come they offered no help whatsoever to the arts and continue to trade on a phoney “culture war” which divides us rather than brings us together? How come they’re so scared of critical race theory, decolonisation of academic curricula, anticapitalist education and anything which raises critical questions about the current economic and political system? How come Johnson was ever Foreign Secretary, let alone Prime Minister, given his awful “letterbox” comments? How come they cavalierly decided to eliminate any preventative mitigations against COVID-19 despite the obvious risks it posed, especially in schools, and allowed the space for new variants - such as Omicron - to mutate when “Freedom Day” came? How come they were allowed to call it “Freedom Day” when the pandemic was still raging? How come they didn’t make more effort internationally to roll out the vaccine beyond our borders? How come they allowed COP26 to come and go without a better deal for the future of the planet?

There are so many morally questionable and truly despicable things this government, and its Tory predecessors have done since they first got their foot in the door through the 2010 coalition government (and I didn’t even mention Dominic Cummings “testing his eyes” at Barnard Castle!). That it’s taken the country over a decade to recognise the duplicity and selfishness of this political party, and only then because they are bitter that festivities were being held at Downing Street while they were forced to spend Christmas 2020 home alone, is more a damning indictment of the moral status of the UK’s population than it is a reason to lose confidence in its government. The government has been fairly consistent in its immorality. The latest hypocrisy is entirely in keeping with its character - a character that was already well-established two Christmases ago when, in December of 2019, 44% of the country voted them in again for the third time since their 2010 coalition victory. I would expect nothing less from this government than that they would be laughing and singing together with tinsel in their hair at illegal parties held without reproach while the rest of the country sat alone at home or died in overcrowded hospitals. I’m sure they hold the same sort of parties when their friends make another few million from another untendered contract while, elsewhere, others are having their Universal Credit cut or losing their homes. This is the Party, after all, who introduced a target system to incentivise the mass deportation of the Windrush generation - ruin a life, celebrate with a pay bonus. Clink your glasses at your financial success and raise a toast to other people’s misery.

So yes, the real moral outrage here is not the party, but the country who gave this brazenly Christmas partying Party the keys to Downing Street again and again, in 2010, in 2015, in 2017 and in 2019 despite every piece of evidence telling us exactly what sort of moral agents they are.

I had other things I could write about, but frankly I’m too tired. Too tired from all the marking, yes, but more tired of the perpetual disappointment of this pseudo-democracy and the uncaring and self-serving liars we have chosen to represent us.

They represent us alright!

Maybe 2022 will be the year we finally wake up to a consciousness beyond the headlines and clickbait and learn to just see with open eyes the day-to-day atrocities of our leaders and their underlings? But if all we really care about is the Christmas party we couldn’t have last year, then I won’t be holding my breath.

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE  and from all good booksellers.  Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here.