-gate

Retreats from politics, and the pretence of serious affairs

The Watergate Scandal of the early 1970s saw the breaking of a crisis in which it was revealed that the Nixon administration had used institutions of the US state - FBI, CIA, IRS and others - against its political opponents. When the scandal grew to undeniable proportions, Nixon resigned; disgraced.

In brief, and for those fortunate enough to have no awareness of the playpen of British politics, the so-called ‘partygate’ scandal refers to the fact of Boris Johnson holding a party, against lockdown rules of the time. In turn, ‘beergate’, now refers to the fact that Labour leader Keir Starmer also held a party against lockdown rules of the time, with images emerging of him drinking a beer in the process. That these two charges sit so obviously side-by-side - whatever (and I do not care) the varying merits of each - should unsettle any sense held by Keir Starmer and his husk of a Labour Party that the twin sagas will lead anywhere but the famous (and, for Labour, disastrous) verdict that politicians are all the same. Given that Keir Starmer has set out to build a Labour Party that as a point of strategy either apes, enables or worsens Tory policy anyway, this may even be the intention.

But these two trivialities of lawbreaking, whatever moral failing, and failure to follow rules set for others, that they might point to, do not really interest me. In these twin non-scandals is essentially the entire rottenness of British political life and the media narration of it. To expect better, however, would be like expecting a one month-old to walk, a six month-old to read. The comparison here, however, is not entirely fair, because an infant will most often learn in time to walk and to read, whereas this political class will never do better, because they were never intended to, and no political standards are demanded of them by the insipid media class content to function only as gossips in a vacuum from which can come no betterment.

The growing ubiquity of the suffix ‘gate’ deserves special mention in all this. As I once wrote for Jacobin, on the subject of Jeremy Corbyn attending a wreath-laying ceremony on the site and anniversary of an Israeli bombing of Tunisia that killed 60 Tunisians and Palestinians, only to see this quite obvious commemoration repackaged by the British media as an antisemitic gathering under the title ‘wreathgate’; the ‘gate’ suffix is now used to lend an air of seriousness to events and discussion that has none and deserves none. It is a karaoke of actual politics, a mimicking and a borrowing from the actual journalism of Watergate, and it is performed by people whose political gravity and associated license to recount or elucidate politics is lighter than air. Were this not odious enough, still worse, even peculiar, is the way in which the media class, repeatedly indulge this ‘gate’ label, perhaps believing that they’re doing so ironically, but unable to discern that in using the terminology they identify themselves as belonging to, and upholding, its same ridiculousness. That this overt, public ridiculousness attaches to the business of state under which people live their lives and increasingly have them ruined by political stasis, makes the laughing, bantering complacency all the more staggering.

Aside from the media class who created this asinine culture, special mention should go - more even than to Boris Johnson - to Keir Starmer and all those close to him. Starmer did not oppose Johnson on legislation (Overseas Operations Act) that enables British soldiers to commit war crimes free from fear of prosecution. He did not oppose the so-called ‘spy cops’ bill (Covert Intelligence Act) allowing undercover police have relationships with women, particularly in the environmental movement, for the purposes of espionage. Starmer has been at his most animated against Johnson in decrying a garden party, and concerning who paid the bill for a Downing Street redecoration (a subject on which - despite my concern at nepotism and corruption - I know mercifully little more than this). Given that the British political-media class is often accused of treating politics - the business of people’s lives - as a parlour game, it is no surprise that the parlour and who’s been in it should attain such central focus.

Beyond this, it is important to spell out what is happening here, in that - having forgone efforts to create a genuine political morality from which to attack the Tory government, having declined to truly condemn war crimes or state-condoned rape by undercover police - Starmer is instead left, or perhaps content, to attack Tory wrongdoing at only its narrowest and most incidental.

What Starmer and his media allies are spearheading is a retreat out of politics and into the individual. They have perpetrated a gross trivialisation of the political, all of it based on some faith that you can “land a knockout blow”, or create a scandal “that sticks”.

It is of course significant to what happened, and the fact it is remembered at all, that in actual Watergate, Nixon resigned; because there was a culture of shame to which to appeal (a previous Köprü on shame as a force for good).

Having decided that Britons fearing heating their homes this winter, fearing deportation, or facing imprisonment for protesting either thing, are all just the rules of the game Starmer is willing to accept, it should come as no surprise that having a gathering in a garden, against the rules or no, is hardly the sort of thing that induces sober reflection or a resumption of ethics in public life. To expect otherwise is to expect morality in an ecosystem that is patently comfortable with immorality. We all knew precisely who Boris Johnson was when he campaigned in 2019, the man himself is now only cashing the blank cheques the media then signed-off on. Where is the surprise?

Perversely enough, there is even some sense of security in having the hard right-wing media - The Sun, The Mail - come for Starmer in his own scandal, where the softer in tone (and so arguably more insidious) right-wing media of The Times, Statesman and all the other subscriber-hustlers have energetically conspired to give the man a wash of statesmanly stature.

Not only is there some perverse relief to not having the entire media class entirely aligned, there is also a peculiarly safety in the intellectual honesty of true Murdoch, and of true Rothermere, asserting that they do in fact want the real deal of Johnson flippancy, Sunak austerity, and Patel authoritarianism, and they will not consent to - and do not, as with the metropolitan right-wing - require the more urbane airs Starmer offers on the same policies of hard borders, hard economy, and hard policing.

There is an almost helpful honesty - a bedrock in which you can at least orientate - in a political culture that wants to call spades ‘spades’, and not forks. Starmer is perhaps by both nature and design a man too stupid to realise that, having done all he could to prostrate himself before this media establishment, still they will come for him, perhaps all the more so due to his obvious willingness to lie-down before them.

On one level, of course all this is only a fissure in the regime Starmer makes no pretence at being unwilling to serve in; it is a game in a fairly thick scab over the wounds of British society and democracy. But on another level, within that surface-level politics, it is also an assertion of rank; an assertion that the regime is run by one quarter and it will not for a second, when the moment requires, shy from coming for even its cuckolds. That Starmer himself might be impaled on the charge of individual transgression is only evidence of his own personal fault for opting to create such an individualised device, where all around was the systemic moral and political failure with which he chose to enjoin.

A final hinterland of course exists in this media-political swamp, and that is the chorus of polite society who - much like Starmer - are content to exercise morality only within safe limits.

Without wanting to contradict my point that individualising politics and upholding expression with experience is bad and - where an actual set of political morals exists - unnecessary, I too in the main adhered to all Covid restrictions, certainly where the pandemic was at it s most serious. I stayed home, I cancelled events, I met outdoors and - owing to hospital requirements of isolation - I missed at least one life-altering moment for which I’d have liked to have been closer to a loved-one. But still, I do not and never did deeply care about a Boris Johnson garden party. This is because I was already outraged about Britain arming Saudi Arabia to destroy Yemeni lives; at UK failures to sanction either the Saudis or their Israeli allies for the apartheid in Palestine. I was outraged at the exploding need for food banks in the UK despite its wealth, at the deportation of the Windrush Generation and thousands more because their skin was black or brown. I was outraged that a genuine opposition to this saw the UK media-political class indulge constant character assassination and a sabotage of democracy to see it off.

Against all these consummate disasters and tragedies far greater, the idea that my own comparatively small personal losses and sacrifices during Covid could ever have matched such catastrophes of the British state is preposterous. I have squirmed at all those who elected to be mostly voiceless over Windrush, Palestine, food banks, Islamophobia, now turn themselves into a screaming pit of moral outrage because they personally felt wronged by Boris Johnson and the Tories, that a cake in need of no icing now had some. While we can be sure that Keir Starmer has few if any leadership qualities, he is the undisputed leader of this weak-willed and almost wholly amoral form of outrage, a thing that nine times out of ten can be trusted to remain voiceless, only to be surprised to one day wake-up and realise it has lost its voice.