The Politics of Excuses

Britain increasingly feels like a country where ordinary people are expected to absorb failure while elites explain it.

Photo by Matt Hoffman on Unsplash. Cropped.

“What could we have done?”

“The state the last government/mayor/councillor left us in, it will take some time to fix!”

“Events around the world are affecting us at home.”

I am sick of politicians making excuses. Since Kier Starmer has been elected on the ticket of bringing bills down, making things more affordable and making the country safer, it seems like he has done little to make things better for the average working Brit.

It seems every week, he is talking in slogans about what he is doing and needs to be done and saying things about “national unity” and “stability” while seemingly doing nothing.

Taxes have gone up, along with bills. Constantly I am hearing narrative management and blame shifting. Before it was about the previous Tory reign. Now it is about the Iran War and global events.

In my previous job in retail, if there was a bad handover before our shift, we were expected to turn it around by the end. My old boss made a point that someone eventually has to fix it. Even if there was a serious incident or sickness, the bare minimum needed to be completed and the shop left tidy.

So, if I wasn’t allowed to make excuses, why does it seem like Labour are constantly blaming things out of their control?

Britain increasingly feels like a country where ordinary people are expected to absorb failure while elites explain it.

Wes Streeting has spent the past week challenging and undercutting his boss, Kier, for his own personal ambition.

Wes, who is responsible for the NHS, should be focussed on improving and saving patients’ lives. His job is literally a matter of life and death-this isn’t retail. If he does a bad job, people die.

He wrote his resignation letter boasting of his “achievements” in improving the health service. People who are good at their jobs generally don’t have to write letters about it. People just know.

He must think people can’t tell when the statistics and facts don’t match what they experience in GPs and hospitals.

They promised to lower energy prices. At the moment, our energy is privatised, with state owned foreign companies currently profiting off selling us electricity. When Labour were campaigning, they promised to deliver Great British Energy, a company they said would be a national energy supplier.

After they got in, Ed Miliband announced that actually that meant he was creating a company to invest in green energy.

We have large oil deposits in the North Sea, which Ed has said will not get drilled. Maybe if he drilled that oil, he could invest it in green energy, similar to what Norway did with their North Sea oil.

History shows that when democratic governments appear useless, people often become attracted to leaders promising drastic national renewal, whether in Singapore, Taiwan, Israel or China.

When populations lose faith in gradual improvement, they begin craving decisiveness instead. That is how political extremes slowly become normalised.

I want a Deng Xiaoping, not a Mao.

People want something drastic to put us on the up again. If not now, people will want something more and more radical. As people get more desperate, the leaders get more despotic.

The problem I have though with the current government’s explanations is that they are in charge of so many people’s lives. Excuses are something children or people with jobs without much responsibility make. Not what the most powerful people in the country make.

Every year it seems we are mid crisis. Working people are always the one to foot the bill when there is another annual crisis. Britain now feels like a country permanently stuck in the phrase “under difficult circumstances.”

The public increasingly feels they are being managed rather than spoken to honestly.

Politicians feel less like leaders and more like corporate communications departments.

They are increasingly governing through justifications rather than accountability, when everything feels slightly worse every year, while everyone insists progress is happening.

I worked in retail for six years. To begin with, we didn’t really put anti-theft tags on much. Each year we tagged more and more stuff. When I left last year, we were tagging butter and cheese.

I also found that the laziest people were mostly the ones who always bragged about how much work they did.

Put a frog in water and increase the temperature by a degree every hour, it will not notice it is being boiled.

It is this gradual worsening that is scarier than sudden riots or collapse. Complacency kills the frog and it doesn’t even know it is in hot water.

Small negative changes compound. Expectations lower. People celebrate things like basic humility or honour from MPs.

I don’t want Britain to see rock bottom.

Thanks for reading.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might also like “The Doormat Matters”

I publish three essays a week on current affairs, culture, politics and modern life. You can read more on **Substack**.

Originally published at https://jcalebs.substack.com.