Johnson should beware - forcing a crisis rarely ends well for aspiring strongmen

[Judi Lynn]

Andy Beckett
There are revolutionaries on the political right who crave this kind of upheaval. But their opportunism can end in disaster

Thu 5 Sep 2019 00.59 EDT Last modified on Thu 5 Sep 2019 03.13 EDT

Genuine national crises, where everyday life is disrupted and the status quo buckles or crumbles, don’t come along often in a usually stable, sometimes boring country like Britain. Over the last half century, there have arguably been less than half a dozen: the three-day week in 1974, the winter of discontent of 1978-9, the riots and recession of 1981, the financial crisis of 2007-8, and the current, accelerating meltdown – constitutional, economic, and cultural – around Brexit.

Such episodes are a nightmare for many people, but others yearn for them. Once, these catastrophists were mostly found on the revolutionary left. Now they increasingly come from the right.

During the long, often politically placid interlude between Thatcherism’s triumph in the 1980s and its undoing by the financial crisis 25 years later, rightwing British newspapers sometimes seemed to be almost willing a national emergency into being. Awful but only temporarily disruptive events, such as the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2001, were often reported in apocalyptic terms. The Daily Telegraph described this as “one of the worst social and financial catastrophes to befall peacetime Britain”. With Tony Blair’s Labour government in office, that assessment by the voice of the Tory shires had a whiff of wishful thinking about it.

For the British state, national crises are both a curse and an opportunity. Many civil servants want to be consistent administrators or incremental social reformers, not crisis managers, and Whitehall’s routines are disturbed by emergencies. During the three-day week, power cuts meant that staff at the Department of the Environment – then an ambitious new ministry housed in a glassy, hard-to-heat complex with bare floors – had to be issued with small squares of carpet to place under their desks to keep their feet warm. More recently, at the Department for Exiting the European Union, so many extra staff have been hastily recruited, a civil servant told me over the summer, that there are not enough toilets. The Brexit metaphor almost writes itself.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/05/boris-johnson-national-crisis-brexit

[empedocles]

1. ' . . . forcing a crisis rarely ends well for aspiring strong men' - hopefully the concept has legs

[dalton99a]

2. Boris Johnson's Russian-speaking senior adviser:

‘Much is being said about how the confrontations and disorder around Brexit all fit into a clever plan devised by Dominic Cummings.’ Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Image