Interesting Times

²⁰ “If the Lord had not cut short those days, no one would survive. But for the sake of the elect, whom he has chosen, he has shortened them. ²¹ At that time if anyone says to you, ‘Look, here is the Messiah!’ or, ‘Look, there he is!’ do not believe it. ²² For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.

Mark 13:20-22, The New Testament

We, unfortunately, live in interesting times as the apocryphal Chinese curse goes (1). For all their appeal to a mythical  “Great Britain” that used to be, the far right of contemporary politics is steadily eroding the ethical and moral underpinnings of the post-World War II  consensus that never again should the horrors of Belsen and Auschwitz, and the ideologies and policies leading to them, be seen. Out of that conviction the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, closely followed by the European Declaration of Human Rights, was born. Giving effect to these declarations the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the International Criminal Court (ICC) were established. But we see senior Conservative politicians openly campaigning to repudiate the ECHR so that we can treat desperate migrants in any way we wish, unconstrained by the very laws that Britain itself helped to establish after the war. The cry is that we as a nation should be able to determine what is right and what is wrong without interference by an outside body (the irony is completely lost on the Far Right!). Two generations on from those who marched in horror into Belsen this generation of politicians has forgotten that countries can go badly wrong and bodies such as the ECHR were established to prevent that from happening.

This drifting away from the ethical and moral anchors of the post-War years is no more clearly illustrated than by the decision of the Prime Minister to absent himself from the main D-Day Landings event for world leaders.  I feel sure it wasn’t deliberately intended as a signal that Britain was now distancing itself from those anchors, but it demonstrates the relative importance in his mind, and of the advisors around him, of that post-War consensus.

Why does this matter? If one of the major architects of the post-War consensus is seen to be now walking away from that consensus and detaching itself from the moral and ethical anchors of that consensus then others will feel able to do the same. The result is that Putin felt able to invade Ukraine and once again wage war on European soil after decades of peace. It means that Israel has been able to inflict huge suffering on civilians in Gaza with impunity in its pursuit of the destruction of Hamas. It means that the moral force of the EHCR and the ICC is necessarily weakened. Nations and their governments feel free to behave as they please without accountability of any kind.

It is the greatest irony that the nation that had a central role in overturning the worldwide norm that slavery was simply a regrettable fact of life, and which was a major architect of the system that holds governments and nations to account for their actions  should be turning its back on the latter. These two are the diamonds in the history of Britain that could justify the epithet “Great” as the politicians of the right like to use it, and yet they are seeking to consign at least one of them to the rubbish heap of history!

Britain has not yet broken entirely with the consensus it helped to establish after the Second World War, but one wonders if, after this General Election, the new government will seek to repair Britain’s commitment to that consensus or whether the rot which has set-in under the outgoing Conservative government will be allowed to continue. Will we hold to the ethical and moral anchors of the post-War years or will we yield to the Siren calls of those who would unleash our baser instincts?

1. The supposed Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” appears to have no basis in fact, or, at least, there is no record of such a curse that has been found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times acc. 27 Jun 2024 16:04