Section:GDN 1J PaGe:4 Edition Date:190906 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 5/9/2019 18:39 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
- The Guardian Friday 6 September 2019
4 Opinion
B
oris Johnson wants war. He and his
allies have turned a technical debate
about trade policy into a Battle of
Britain. They suggest ludicrously
that the national economy faces an
existential threat from Europe. They
forget that in times of war countries
seek to cohere, not descend into
partisan strife. A single-issue general election, as
Johnson now wants , would be irresponsible. His job as
prime minister should be to get a deal on Brexit and not
stall one , as he is blatantly doing.
The most eerie Commons performance this week was
by the minister for no deal, Michael Gove. He was like
an air raid warden from Dad’s Army. He had plans for
supplies of medicines and food. Trucks were assigned
to country lanes. Guards were reinforcing Dover. No
expense will be spared , no cost too great, to keep the
dastardly foreigner from our shores. MPs purred.
Johnson, in contrast, comes across as a mad general.
In the Commons he was shrieking abuse at Jeremy
Corbyn and accusing him of “defeat ... shameful
surrender ... white fl ag ... chlorinated chicken ... shit
or bust”, and something rude about a girl’s blouse.
He says Britain faces vassalage, bondage, humiliation
and subservience to the dire European foe. Thanks
to Corbyn, his legs had been “cut off at the knees”.
Johnson hurled his Spitfi re about the skies.We need to pinch ourselves to remember that all this
noise has nothing to do with whether the UK should
leave the EU. Parliament has voted in favour of that, in
accordance with the outcome of the 2016 referendum.
Objective evidence suggests the best way of honouring
the narrowness of that vote is within the context of
Margaret Thatcher’s single market. Theresa May’s deal
was designed at least to leave open that possibility.
There was no reason for this to be anything other than a
friendly agreement, to minimise the harm Brexit might
do to commerce on both sides.
It was only the witless failure of MPs – including
Corbyn’s Labour – to agree May’s deal that gave Johnson
his opportunity. He duly won his party’s leadership by
declaring that only by cutting all economic and political
ties with the rest of Europe could Brexit be achieved.
Eventually, only no deal was the answer to a national
cataclysm. Any degree of self-harm was a price worth
paying. Johnson’s hapless chancellor, Sajid Javid, was
left squirming in obfuscation on the BBC yesterday
morning, after proposing a spending splurge that would
have once made the Labour party blush.
This week, fi nally, a Commons majority has behaved
with some sense of public responsibility in bringing
temporary order to the no-deal chaos. This has involved
off ering Johnson what amounts to a compromise. If he
really wants Brexit on 31 October , he can have it, and a
general election to boot ; but he must negotiate a swift
Brexit deal in return, or face a delay. This is high-risk.
Much will depend on Johnson playing ball.
The prime minister has a choice. He can negotiate a
reordering of the Irish backstop – which the EU seems
ready to consider – and restore May’s withdrawal deal.
That will unlock Brexit on 31 October , and an early
election. It would be a compromise. But Johnson must
see that honouring his October pledge would be hugely
popular. The nation would heave a sigh of relief.T
he question is, can Johnson sustain a
postponed gratifi cation? His political
imagery, and thus his behaviour, is
gripped by the rhetoric of war. The
trouble, as students of war know well,
is that when the battle lines are thus
drawn, neither side is content with less
than total triumph.
Johnson is so hyped up that he seems almost to yearn
for the cost and disruption of no deal. He believes that
intransigence holds the key to election victory. His Brexit
has mutated into a Clausewitzian war by other means.
Ever since it was fi rst mooted, Brexit extremists have
drifted from rejoining the European free trade area , to
soft Brexit, to hard Brexit and now to no deal. The wilder
the stance, the greater the price of glory.
Johnson is a very British populist. I still fi nd it hard
to believe he seriously sees former colleagues such as
Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond and Nicholas Soames as
traitors to the national interest. But he clearly regards the
Conservative party , and indeed all of parliament , as an
Athenian oligarch saw the Delian League : as owing loyal
subservience to his vanity.
Expressing Brexit in terms of war does no favours to
the current ailments of democracy. Johnson may see his
chaotic reign in Hobbesian terms, as nasty and brutish, if
not short. But the strength of the Conservative party has
been its rooting in Burke, not Hobbes. It is the party of
compromise, a coalition of the little platoons. Johnson’s
cleansing of dissent strips it of diversity, much as Corbyn
would like to do for Labour.
The longer term casualty of Brexit may yet be the
demise of two-party cohesion in Britain. Parties across
the western world have become ever more bruised and
ridiculed, as democracies fragment into lobbies and
identity groups. Banal though it may seem, traditional
parties are crucial to accountable democracy. They are
Burke’s platoons writ large, the intermediaries between
the atomised voter and an overweening central state.
They are the agencies of power from the bottom up. We
need them.
Rhetorical war may be better than real war. But it is an
ever more polarised confl ict. No-deal Brexit may deliver
Johnson some populist gain, but is not the product of a
responsive democracy.A
n unexpected downside to living
in New York is a fear I’m not even
sure there’s a word for: I’ll call it
elevator-phobia. I live many fl oors
up and it can strike at any time,
but in particular on windy days ;
when one of my building’s two
lifts is undergoing maintenance ;
on random visits to the towers of midtown ; or, most
acutely, on opening a copy of the New York Post, paper
of record for grisly elevator accidents across the city.
In August, on the East Side, a man was crushed to
death while exiting a lift in the lobby of his apartment
building, trapped between the wall of the shaft and the
lift itself, when it plummeted suddenly towards the
basement. A few years earlier, a woman was killed in
similar fashion in a Madison Avenue offi ce building.
I have read everything there is to read about these
accidents and have concluded that, in the event of
the lift moving while I’m boarding or exiting, the best
strategy is to shrink back in the direction I came from.
My phobia is completely irrational. In New York, a
city of some 58,000 elevators and 11 billion elevator
trips a year, such incidents represent a minuscule
proportion of all accidents.
Still, the fear persists. Like subway folklore, a
healthy subsection of New York mythology is entirely
devoted to elevator life, including the greatest lift story
ever told, by Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker many
years ago: that of a man trapped in a midtown lift for 41
hours, wrestling with the possibility of his own death
like the New York City version of Jacob’s Ladder.
During the recent blackout in the city , the fi rst thing
many of us thought about was the fate of those caught
in elevators. As most New Yorkers buying an apartment
know, the city’s fi re department ladders stretch, at their
highest, to the 8th fl oor of most buildings, and plenty
of people refuse to live higher. When I fi rst moved to
Manhattan I lived on the 36th fl oor, and every single
day I had to suppress a surge of dread.
It is a fear connected, I suspect, to the anxiety felt
during a plane’s takeoff , landing or turbulence – that
is, to the suspicion that this thing we’re riding in defi es
laws of nature. I once rang the physics department of
Manchester University to check out the theory that,
in the event of an elevator plunge, if I timed my jump
accurately I might overcome the eff ects of impact.
Right? The physicist pointed out you’d have to jump
200 ft in the air to counteract a freefall landing.
My children have a friend in a neighbouring building
who lives on the 29th fl oor. We visited her for a
playdate this week and, as our ears popped on ascent,
I felt the familiar spike of alarm. When the elevator
doors opened, I clutched my children’s hands and
jumped over the threshold like Mary Poppins jumping
into the chalk pavement picture. And there it was, the
thought I can never quite suppress: that the only force
keeping this thing up is my own magical thinking.Simon
Jenkins
Emma
Brockes
The PM revels
in war rhetoric,
but could end
up its victim
The New York
high life has
given me a new
fear – of lifts
The BBC’s Dad’s Army, 1968 PHOTOGRAPH: ALLSTAR/BBCRELEASED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws