Tag: Jordan Bardella

Pandering to the old folk

We are overloaded in our politics toward older folk, of whom I’m one. I watched in 2016, as a teller, as sixty consecutive voting slips from my own area were unfolded, literally, as votes for Brexit. I’d moved a little further out of London, beyond the liberally-minded borough of Richmond, and into an area where immigrants rarely ventured but where they were often stigmatised.

Taking the tube, the mix of my fellow passengers changes from Hammersmith, and then on into town. I’m happy with that. It’s the way London should be – cosmopolitan. Ideas mixing, the serious and the radical and a little bit of the crazy too.

Why is it that as we grow older we narrow our horizons? Literally.  Live, maybe not so much in fear of, but apprehensive about, what we see as the unknown. Not least immigration and climate change. Every generation as it ages grips harder onto the world and institutions it knew in its prime. Being conservative becomes a badge of honour, it gives a sense of belonging. It reads the same newspapers. And it tilts toward UKIP and Brexit and now Reform and Faragist obsessions.

We run the risk of, by our attitudes, holding our country back. Politics demands change and adaptation, and we resist it. We need to allow the generations who do the work, and politicians who represent them, to be the primary policy-makers. They will, after all, fund the pensions on which our welfare depends.

By that argument, should not we, as the oldies, relinquish some of our power and influence over the future of the country? I don’t want to see politicians pandering to us to get our votes. We need instead local political parties, parliamentary candidates and MPs who have a single-minded focus on building both the country’s economy and its productivity.

We want policies decided not on the basis of jam for the oldies but on the economy and on investment, on housing, and working conditions, as they affect younger generations.

There’s one obvious problem – the young don’t vote in the numbers that we oldies do. The Tories have less than 10% support among 16-24 year olds. And yet how many of those who can, the over 18s, will actually vote?

But who will they vote for? Look to France. We used to think young people everywhere instinctively inclined to the left. A 28-year-old and charismatic far-right party leader, number two to Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, is giving the lie to this. He’s adept in using social media, TikTok especially. Gender and race are not the primary issues (though the old hard right wouldn’t agree). Instead, the focus is on insecurity, job prospects, and a future where the rising prosperity earlier generations relied on is no longer guaranteed for them. Also, a wider sense that traditional parties are compromised.

If we believe in the post-war world order of toleration and international trade, in open minds and open borders, we liberals (and we older liberals!) have to be pro-active. Maybe Labour under Keir Starmer, if elected. will take the first steps in that direction. Restore confidence among younger generations in our political system. So they don’t reject it. That’s no small ask.

We’ve been here before

We think our own times unique – but we’ve been here before.

I’ve been reading Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf’s autobiography. He has memories, almost fond memories, of the world before 1914.

In the decade before the 1914 war there was a political and social movement in the world, and particularly in Europe and Britain, which seemed at the time wonderfully hopeful and exciting. It seemed as though human beings might really be on the brink of becoming civilised. The forces of reaction and barbarism were still there, but they were in retreat… it looked as if militarism, imperialism and anti-Semitism were on the run.

We were of course mistaken in thinking that the world really might become civilised but the fact that it didn’t does not prove that our optimism was foolish or credulous… It was, I still believe, touch and go whether the movement towards liberty and equality – political and social – and toward civilisation which was strong in the first decade of the 20th century, would become so strong as to carry everything before it. Its enemies saw the risk and the result was the war of 1914. They postponed the danger of our becoming civilised for at least 100 years.

There is a terrible irony in that last line. Where they were before 1914 is not so far from where we thought we were either side of 2000.

The columnist ‘Charlemagne’ in an article in The Economist fastens on 1999 as ‘peak Europe’, when 300 of the world’s top listed companies were European, and and it looked as if China and Russia could be part of a Western-inspired economic and liberal order which could be ‘the end of history’.

We also had a sense that the forces of barbarism were still there but in Woolf’s words were ‘on the run’. We hoped, even thought, that the ‘movement towards liberty and equality – political and social’ was so strong that ‘it would carry everything before it’.

And yet … 2014, a century on from 1914, was just a year after Xi Jinping had come to power. Putin was confronting the Maidan uprising in Ukraine. The enemies of the liberal order ‘had seen the risk’. Ukraine and Hong Kong exemplify the threat today. Might other countries follow the example of Hungary, and indeed of Donald Trump, as might be? Where might Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella take France if their party, Rassemblement National, is victorious in the French election in three weeks time?

Woolf, in his seventies, was looking back from the late 1960s. There’s an almost elegiac tone. Yes, the Cold War was at its height and the nuclear threat had a stark reality. But we knew what we stood for. Do we now?

We do need certainties. And, indeed, defiance. ‘Charlemagne’ ends his piece by striking exactly the wrong note. ‘Perhaps Europe peaked in 1999. Or maybe it failed to see it was already in decline.’