Everything is politics. It has taken a war to wake me up to this truth. It’s not that I have been apathetic; I am informed and I do care about the events in the world. But I have simply complained from the sidelines, as if it is someone else’s job to sort this stuff out. I have done nothing. Nothing. I have stood by and watched us all slide into this situation, where we have a vicious war in the heart of Europe, when we all saw the signs for the way our world is heading. Putin has been a constant menace. Poisoning. Assassinating. Murdering his way to a stranglehold on the Russian people and on the world. Trump trying to overturn the machinery of American democracy by fomenting insurrection and treason. The backward-looking isolationism of Brexit. The march of populism. State sanctioned murder in Saudi Arabia. Hostage terrorism in Iran. The weakening of liberal democratic values and the rise of fascism. We have watched this collapse happen in just twenty years.
Like most people, I have stood by and watched. Tut-tutted my disgust at the television and sat idly by. Like most people, I have been more concerned with making a living, with where our next trip will be, with holidays and my children’s exams. With the birthday around the corner or the day to day administration of life. I have been fiddling whilst Rome was burning down around my ears.
In hospital, last November, I determined to live according to the mafiosi code: looking after number one and my immediate family and hang everyone else. That’s not good enough anymore (it never was). Every news bulletin shows the ordinary kindness of humans to one another as three million refugees turn west and are greeted by total strangers at the rate of 10,000 a day in Germany as well as Poland, Hungary, Czechia and Moldova. The daily example of my wife is humbling; she has plugged into a virtual network of helpers who are guiding Ukrainians to safety via crowdsourced information on routes out of the war zone.
The complicity of western capitalism in its own downfall is undeniable. Greed has propelled us to this situation. We have become reliant on fossil fuel from dictatorships such as Saudi and Russia and sent billions to line the pocket of the kleptocracy in charge in these countries. The money we pay them comes back to be laundered in property and off shore investment funds. And to fund our political parties. If the western model of life is to survive, it needs to turn off this tap. (As a spin-off benefit, maybe this is the prompt Greta Thunberg has always wanted: a spur to the west’s need to wean itself off fossil fuels.)
Once upon a time I was politically active. That was back in the death days of the Cold War, the mid 80s. The motto on the headed paper of my then chosen political credo was:
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance
Thomas Jefferson
I forgot that for a while. I became a voyeur, a spectator, not a vigilante. It is time to take up the cudgel again.
Last week I made my first trip overseas for 29 months. By lucky coincidence, it was to Brussels. Into the heart of the European Union. And into the heart of the heart of the EU – to train an agency who specialise in helping the EU explain their policies to the people of Europe. (Where were they when Britain needed them to fight the lies of Farage, Johnson and Gove?) These people were from all over Europe; Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Poland, the Netherlands, Italy and Belgium. They were in Brussels because they believe in the European project. I, too, am a believer. Now, a believer with renewed vigour because the hope of the world is invested in the west now. The alternative, a world run by despots and dictators, by China and Russia and their cabal of kleptocrats, cannot be allowed to win. Until the war in Ukraine, I believe they – and we in the west – saw the waning of the western hegemony as inevitable. The disunity of NATO during Trump’s era, the disintegration of the EU, the ineffectual response of western governments to poisonings in Salisbury, annexations in the Crimea, military adventurism in Georgia and the seemingly unstoppable rise of China all fed the narrative that the west was dying and a new age was coming into being.
Thank God for Putin. Thank God for his incalculably large miscalculation that the west was done. This one gigantic mistake has united the west once more. It has shown him and China and kleptocrats everywhere that the west will strangle their economies to death if necessary. China will now think again about a military assault on Taiwan. The world is not safe for despots. Not on my watch. We have woken up again – just in time.