107. MUST BORIS GO? - On Empty Symbolism

Last week many of my students asked me if I agreed that Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, should resign following more and more allegations of lockdown-violating work parties held at Downing Street. Knowing my usual political leanings, and dislike of Johnson, his government, and his entire political party, I’m sure they expected my fairly easy agreement. Instead I pointed out that there was a more important question to ask than should the Prime Minister resign. That question was: what are we really trying to achieve here?

It seems to me that there are plenty of terrible things Boris Johnson has done that warrant his immediate resignation if resignation is seen as a comment on his fitness for the role of Prime Minister. A habitual public liar long before he became the leader of our government, Johnson’s lies around Brexit and the fictitious millions which would be injected into the NHS, as well as his history of explicitly racist comments, made it clear long before his election that this was not a man fit to be Prime Minister. Since taking charge of the country, however, and gaining the democratic endorsement of the majority of a country fully aware of all his previous failings, his handling of the pandemic has been flawed and dangerous at every turn. We were slow to lock down, quick to come out, and lack of financial security for those self-isolating or unable to work from home as well as conflicting and ever-changing public-health guidance on masks and social distancing undermined mitigation measures across a range of intersecting contexts and made the country a petri-dish of infection and mutating variants. Responsibility for the massive death rate and massive infection rate in England lies directly at his door.

But Boris Johnson resigning over Downing Street lockdown parties is no admission of his culpability or wrongdoing for any of those significant wrongdoings. Like Matt Hancock before him, overseeing a strategically underfunded and underprepared NHS and presiding over policies which he knew would over-stretch it only to resign because he broke social distancing guidelines, it gets rid of a figurehead, but not the actual problem. Hancock’s role was taken over swiftly by Sajid Javid and the NHS remains battered by covid and years of Tory dismantling of this cherished public service (and, before that, Labour’s neo-Thatcherism allowing privatisation in by the backdoor).

The face changed but the policies remained. Worse, the new face brings with it a sense of “change of course” which can mask the continuity with rhetorical flourishes of a “fresh start”, potentially allowing even worse policies to be put in place under the auspices of the new leader’s right to “put their own stamp” on their new department. If Boris Johnson resigns this week after Sue Gray publishes her report on the Downing Street lockdown infractions, whoever replaces him has to do only one thing different than Johnson did: not be implicated in those parties which took place during lockdown. Everything else that has happened under Johnson’s watch remains untarnished and uncritiqued. By reducing the intentional consequences of ideologically driven and systemically discompassionate Party policy decisions into a cult of personality that says “it’s Boris” rather than “it’s the Tories” or “it’s the whole rotten system” we forsake the possibility of meaningful change for the merely symbolic change of figurehead. Whether it was David Cameron, Theresa May or Boris Johnson, since 2010 successive Prime Ministers have enacted policies that have left people in this country with an ever-decreasing social safety-net and even fewer opportunities for a fulfilling human life under capitalism. Each time a head of the Hydra is cut off through the public humiliation ritual of resignation, however, the replacement head simply continues on with the exact same destructive mission.

So if I am angry about Boris Johnson on a policy level, an ideology level, a political discourse level, an ethical level - his resigning over the lockdown parties do nothing to address that anger.

But, asked some of my students, wouldn’t it still feel good to get rid of him, just emotionally? Like, wouldn’t it feel like there are at least some consequences for his actions and he didn’t just “get away with” everything if he is forced to step down?

Again, my answer surprised them. While not denying that the potential crashing of Boris Johnson’s political career might on some base level make me feel a sense of justice, it is important to ask why I might feel that way rather than just accept that whatever I feel is right. Our responses to such things, even our internal conceptions of things like justice, are things we learn from our society. And sometimes we are socialised into feelings or responses that we later discover to be wrongheaded, or even morally problematic. For instance, it might once have been considered just to feel aggrieved if a slave you owned escaped your plantation and, if they were caught and brought back to you, to feel as if they now therefore deserved some sort of punishment for their attempted bid for freedom. Now, of course, such thoughts are abhorrent. They are based on an error, socialised into slave-owning people in a slave-owning society, that certain other people are not worthy of the status of equal humanity and can instead be considered as property. Similarly, calls for the death penalty after a murderer has been caught are, in most modern civilised countries, seen now as antiquated and values-violating instincts rather than the moral actions of the truly just. When citizens of those countries remark that they still feel like the killer should be hanged or sat on the electric chair we are able to step back from those feelings and dismiss them as relics of a less enlightened time.

So some part of me might want misfortune to fall on Boris Johnson and to be able to watch live on the 24 hour news as he leaves his office in disgrace…but that doesn’t mean such instincts are important or worth listening to. When I interrogate further and ask why I want Boris punished I come back to the same thing as before: because he has been responsible, through his policies and rhetoric, for causing great harm to people across the country. This invites a follow-up question: does Boris losing his job undo any of that harm? And the answer to that is no. Furthermore, as already discussed, it willl likely simply allow a new Prime Minister to continue with the harm, possibly even accelerate it.

Boris being forced to resign might make me feel momentarily happy, but fundamentally it does nothing to address the actual wrongdoing or make things better. It is symbolic, but the symbolism is largely empty. Let’s not forget that, once resigned from Downing Street, Johnson not only becomes free to pursue all kinds of personally-benefitting opportunities in the private sector but, as David Cameron and Tony Blair can attest following their respective Greenshill and Iraq War scandals from which they emerged relatively unscathed, he will be far less likely to be held accountable for his true crimes committed in office in any meaningful way.

Do I think it was wrong for the Prime Minister to be breaking the rules that the rest of the country were forced to follow during lockdown? Yes, in this case I do. Am I furious? Yes. Do I think Johnson should resign? Yes - but not for this. I think we as a country should have risen up in anger against this bullish bullshitter long ago and never let him into Downing Street in the first place. He should resign for the lies he’s told, the blood on his hands, and the damage he has done to public discourse and we should be turning against him now not because of the lockdown parties but because of all the things he has done to make the country less safe, less humane, and less than it could be. We should be calling for resignations of all politicians who have lied to us, ignored us, manipulated us, and condemned us to lives unable to fulfil the true promise of human existence. We should be knocking the whole sick system down and demanding real, tangible, long-term change that shows we’re not going to accept the unacceptable anymore.

That’s if we actually want to build a world where “one rule for them and another for us” or “let the bodies pile high in their thousands” is no longer the norm. If we want to live in a truly transformed world and seriously address some of the significant problems of our current political norms and institutions then the mantra shouldn’t be #BorisMustGo, but #NeverAgainAnotherBoris.

If, however, we just want the empty symbolism of a head on a plate so that business as normal can resume as quickly and as uninterrupted as possible, then sure, yes, Boris must go.

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. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com