Take Back Control - Open Letter to Johnson, Gove and Stuart

Dear Boris, Michael and Gisela,

You asked to take back control and the result went your way.  Since some brief platitudes on Friday the country has heard nothing from you.  Now is a crucial time for the country and for leading politicians to show their leadership qualities.  All you have done is show us the backs of your head as you left the stage on Friday lunchtime.

Leadership is more than attending rallies with people hanging off your every word, or a couple of hours debating the arguments with other politicians.  It is about dealing with hard complex problems and having difficult conversations.  This country now has hard complex problems to answer and needs leaders who can have the difficult conversations, both within the nation and with the rest of Europe.

Our country needs leaders now, not after the party conferences or leadership campaigns.  If you are not the people who can come up with a workable plan for what this country does next - say so now so we can ignore you and get on with fixing our nation.

Yours,

A concerned voter.

Who Won?

All Vote Leave supporters voted to “Take Back Control”, but what does that mean?

Does it mean no law-making body above the British Parliament?  

Does it mean controlling immigration; which a lot of voters interpreted as significantly reducing the number of immigrants.

Does it mean hundreds of millions of additional funding per week for the NHS?

Or does it mean none of those things, in the way the voters understand them?

After campaigns with messages that have been interpreted in clear black and white terms by the real, ordinary and decent people, we now enter the nuanced language of politicians and diplomats.

How are the campaign messages turned into realisable policies, whilst healing divisions, keeping the Union together and averting an economic downturn?  This is certainly the political version of alchemy.

Not everything people believe has been promised can be delivered.  We are already being told there is no rush to start negotiating the exit from the EU, we need to determine exactly what it is that we are seeking and in what timescale.  I think voters will ask why the politicians didn’t know what they were seeking before calling the referendum.

We are in danger of heading into the familiar territory of politicians promising much and delivering something significantly less than people expected.  The ordinary and decent voters will not take kindly to being treated so shabbily yet again.

Living in Fear

I live in fear that our politicians do not understand modern life.  The Right are wedded to the Market, obsessed that only through competition can any service be provided, and as an inevitable consequence, fear must stalk the corridors of our hospitals and schools.

The Left put their faith in the State, but because no-one trusts all those faceless bureaucrats, they put in performance targets, generating perverse incentives (anyone tried to get a GP appointment further than 48 hours in advance?), and wedded to outmoded classifications of productivity.  These are all put together into league tables.  Perhaps the school tables could be sponsored by a bank like the Premier League and we would have Paxman on Newsnight with the head of Ofsted and an academic discussing the latest positions like on Match of the Day.

“Westminster are up two places, but I still don’t think their History department is strong enough for them to push for the title.”

“I fear for Rutland College, poor all round performance, no star quality, they look likeliest for the drop this term.”

Neither way works. 

I fear a country where teachers view children as part of a performance framework – either to prove they should keep their jobs, or to maintain league position and avoid being re-badged as an academy or failing school, with all the extra paperwork and scrutiny that entails.

I fear a Political Class inculcated from real life by policy papers and think tank reports, which probably know the answers that are required before setting out on researching the subject. 

I want an honest debate about what the country needs, not framed in terms of market or state solutions, but in terms of what we really want from our public services and what we, as the populous, need to contribute in terms of money and responsibility.  There is no one right solution, nor one correct way to view the problems.

We need to start facing up to our individual part in the position we find ourselves in.  It is easy to blame the Markets for causing the economic bubble and collapse.  It is easy to blame the then Government or the Coalition for poor decision making.  We just sit here and shake our heads, whilst having less money to live on.  We were the ones who took out the easy loans and 110% mortgages.  And now we expect the politicians to solve the problems with the same mindset that created them in the first place (after Einstein).  We have to take some responsibility and tell the politicians we want it to work differently from now on.  If we don’t then once we climb out of this economic mess we will walk blindly into the next one.