“Well then, it should all just go away,” says the President in Tom Clancy’s Clear And Present Danger, the “it” in question being the secret and deeply illegal war he has launched against the Colombian drug cartels.
For a writer of mass-market fiction, Clancy was an unusually acute observer of the political animal. “They want what every first term Administration wants. A second term,” says a character earlier in the film. Politicians believe it is in the national interest for them to be in politics, and pretty much everything they do is oriented towards that end. With threats to make his covert war overt, it is better for the President, and better for America, that it all “just goes away”, no matter how many soldiers die.
It would be easy to apply Clancy’s Rule to the grooming gang scandal. It is widely believed (rightly or not is impossible to tell) that Labour is soft-pedalling the issue because digging too far might reveal the collusion of party members, potentially including those holding elected office. Even if their hands are clean, given the ethnicity of many of the perpetrators, communities on which it relies for votes might take it as an attack on them. People rarely elect those they perceive to be persecuting them. It is good for the nation that Labour is in charge, enquiring too deeply into what went on might reduce the chances of that happy state continuing, so like Clancy’s soldiers, “it should all just go away”.
To those of this possibly cynical cast of mind, Lucy Powell’s intervention on Any Questions looks like a guilty woman keen to keep her guilt private. Her snapping “Oh you want to play that little trumpet now, do you? Let’s get that dog whistle out, shall we, yeah?” at Tim Montgomerie when he raised the topic of the grooming gangs, a panicked attempt to shut down a dangerous conversation.
Or was she more like a mother screaming at a child about to touch the stove, her over-reaction designed to distract and prevent an action which would hurt the actor?
“Identifying Reichenbach [the criminal] looked like a quick way of bringing down not just the Kripo, but the fragile government coalition,” says Bernie Gunther, the hero of Metropolis by Philip Kerr – an author less famous than Clancy but perhaps more willing to acknowledge the world’s complexity. Given the choice of justice being seen to be done and further instability afflicting the Weimar state as the populace learns that the serial killer who has been stalking Berlin was a police officer, he decides that discretion is the better part of valour, and the case should just “go away”.
For while governments have a responsibility to provide justice, that is not their only job. The protection of the realm is usually held to out-rank it. Community cohesion is also important, particularly if, as increasingly suspected, the state might struggle to put down an outbreak of mass disorder – something of which, one hopes, the government has a better grasp than the populace. Trust in the system itself is certainly “nice-to-have”. Online commentators have the privilege of dealing with the world as they wish it to be. We pay politicians to deal with it as it is – however much we might wish it were not. They have to act, we get to imagine. And blame them when they fail to live up to our fantasy.
“Justice be done, though the heavens fall” is a principle more easily uttered if one does not think the heavens will fall on oneself. Or if one has no responsibility for holding them up. Those who have no power can easily imagine themselves Jack Ryan; those who do, quickly realise they are Bernie Gunther.
We live in a complex world in which few questions come with easy, cost-free answers. We make trade-offs, balancing one right against another. Different people will reach a different balance. As they have always done. Christians did not suddenly put two and two together in the 1700s and decide that slavery was wrong. Gregory of Nyssa had pointed out in the fourth century that the institution was a clear betrayal of the Church’s message. And he had been told to shut up. Including by his brother, Saint Basil. So central was it to the economy of the day, that it was felt injustice had to be tolerated to keep the show on the road. Then as now, a justification was discovered: it was only by being slaves that the weak and intellectually challenged could survive.
Nor is this merely a matter of great affairs of state. In our daily lives, we make constant choices to prefer the convenient over the good. As we know. We may not, in our quieter moments, like the fact, but we are more than capable of tolerating it. We have to. It is who we are. We buy clothes from sweatshops because we want to look good, but don’t want to spend the money. We overlook our friends’ misbehaviour, because they are our friends. We don’t dig too deep, because of what we might discover.
Not that we admit it. We are all, politician and voter – Jack Ryan to ourselves, and Bernie Gunther to others. We all have problems we wish would “just go away”. They should stop pretending they do not, we should stop believing they do not.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.
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(Photograph: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Lucy_Powell_Leader_of_the_House_%28cropped%29.jpg)
‘Her snapping “Oh you want to play that little trumpet now, do you? Let’s get that dog whistle out, shall we, yeah?” at Tim Montgomerie when he raised the topic of the grooming gangs, a panicked attempt to shut down a dangerous conversation.’
I don’t watch Question Time but I would have thought that the lady had given Montgomerie an open goal to deservedly take her down a peg or two.
Politicians and their poodles/bought MSM may look the other way (wilfully, guiltily or with good intentions), should the voters?