Skip to main content

The Politics of Jelly and Ice Cream

As a child you may have wanted to eat jelly and ice cream for every meal, to eat it until you were sick. Yet, for most kids, there were adults to prevent such greed from causing their offspring such harm. In the end we put away childish things and if we eat jelly and ice cream today it is with an adult sense of moderation. Learning such moderation is a large part of growing up.

Yet our society today seems to reward the infantile and the irresponsible. The adult equivalent of jelly and ice cream is probably sex- and here we seem to revert to our inner child. The tawdry succession of sex partners that Katie Price, aka "glamour" model Jordan, has left in her wake has enabled the manipulative owners of the "Big Brother" franchise to populate their nasty programme with quite a few of Jordan's former bed mates. Ms. Price's candour- on the front page of gossip magazines, newspapers, and in a series of ghost written books- about her complicated, even tortured, love life is supposed to show her as some kind of empowered new woman. Of course it does not: her infantile screeching towards one of her ex-husbands, and the father of some of her children makes her out as a child inside a cartoon of a woman's body.

Yet, Katie Price is held up as some kind of role model in certain circles, which is pretty worrying if we want to bring up well adjusted, thoughtful, mature and kindly children. Jordan is a symptom of a widening coarseness in Britain: a country that is seemingly unprepared to impose adult disciplines of moderation upon itself.

Instead of saving-up for furniture or electronic goods, or any other "must-have" in our consumer society, people now buy them on the never-never and sometimes even throw their goods away before they have even finished paying for them. Nothing: not lack of money for consumer goods, not damaging your physical health with drink or emotional health with promiscuity must get in the way of the hit of immediate gratification.

Our politicians can recognise the zeitgeist. In order to get elected, it will not do to give the voters too many home truths. As a society we insist that we can have it all: material progress, environmental protection, deficit reduction, full employment, economic growth, universities and apprenticeships, housing and the green belt; but we can't, we must make choices. Leadership is being able to articulate these choices and convey the benefits, and the costs to the rest of society.

We have few leaders in the UK today. A very small number of political leaders since Margaret Thatcher, have been prepared to defend their positions when they face unpopularity. Whether it is the short attention span of the media, or the growing complications of modern society, the fact is that the masculine, goal-oriented traits of decisiveness and tenaciousness in the face of unpopularity have been drowned by more feminine, process-driven traits of consensus building and compromise. This is not altogether healthy. We see the emergence of moral relativism: one can not condemn Jordan as the sad slapper she is, because "slapper" is sexist and demeaning to all women, not just slappers, and anyway who are we to condemn any one?

It is how we have become a society that is puking on too much jelly and ice cream- in the case of 60 stone men this is literally true- too much debt, too many broken homes, too many sick and dying alcoholics. Yet, if we may offer no condemnation to people who are sick, are we to make no judgement at all? Surely to recognise- to judge- aberrant behaviour is the first and necessary step to finding solutions to the problems that are created? Yet the compulsory social consensus - cheaply called "political correctness"- will not allow society to make such judgements and to impose discipline upon itself.

If, as a society, we have become addicted to the jelly and ice cream- of things that are bad for us without moderation- so our politics reflects this. Political leaders will not take a stand, they will not offer difficult choices, only the bromides that are so banal as to be a lie direct.

It is a tragedy that "tough choices" has become a meaningless cliche that exists to give the impression of decisiveness in a political class that reflects the social crisis but lacks the detachment or discipline to understand it, still less to address it. In the meantime our social, economic and political infrastructure are devalued by our inability to control ourselves and make responsible -adult- choices in the face of temptation.

Comments

Newmania said…
Well yes C but ...oh you`ll never get it will you , who do you think is responsible for this ?

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo

Bournemouth absence

Although I had hoped to get down to the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth this year, simple pressure of work has now made that impossible. I must admit to great disappointment. The last conference before the General Election was always likely to show a few fireworks, and indeed the conference has attracted more headlines than any other over the past three years. Some of these headlines show a significant change of course in terms of economic policy. Scepticism about the size of government expenditure has given way to concern and now it is clear that reducing government expenditure will need to be the most urgent priority of the next government. So far it has been the Liberal Democrats that have made the running, and although the Conservatives are now belatedly recognising that cuts will be required they continue to fail to provide even the slightest detail as to what they think should guide their decisions in this area. This political cowardice means that we are expected to ch