Cheer up!

Cheer Up!

By @AlexCrowley

If the west is to get out of its current malaise we need remind ourselves how lucky we are, reject the miserable prospectus of UKIP and Front National and cheer up.

I received an email the other day from a friend that got me thinking. ‘Britain is Broken’ read the subject line – the author channelling his inner David Cameron circa 2009. “With great sadness I have come to the conclusion that Britain is broken. I am sad because I love this country intensely and I feel quite strongly that its culture has shaped my entire way of thinking. But the truth is that the centre cannot hold; things are falling apart.”

The email went on to list a series of domestic and foreign policy failings with which I silently, and solemnly nodded in agreement. In fact, my inner cynic gleefully thumped the table. Yes! The political class is spectacularly incompetent! My God, Churchill would turn in his grave and bloody well try and break out of it were he to see the weakness of today’s leaders!

My downbeat correspondent concluded his message by declaring he was leaving for the country of his birth. I drafted a short reply stating I was in complete agreement and only regretted that I couldn’t join him, mainly due to his native country’s tight visa controls. And then I paused before I hit send, and deleted the whole thing.

Why should my friend uproot his whole life and start again because of the failures of others? It wasn’t his fault that the collective leadership of the west has as much backbone as a half set jelly on a hot day. It wasn’t his fault that the E.U has been allowed to chip away at hard won freedoms, undermining Parliament and making elections increasingly irrelevant.

But most importantly, why should my friend be so pessimistic? Indeed, why should anyone who lives in the west feel this way? I’ve kept up with current affairs since I first read broadsheet newspapers at school (not the way to get in with the cool kids, let me tell you). Never before has it all been so utterly grim. Nothing’s working, they’re all useless so sod it let’s vote for Farage/Le Pen/Sarah Palin/[insert popular comedian here] and be done with it.

Yes, we got a mighty shock over the last few years when our creditors wanted their money back. Yes, politicians have sort of morphed into a one giant ball of dough, springy to the touch and ready to be shaped into anything. And yes, it is annoying that if I gambled my savings on the stock market I’d probably lose my shirt, whereas when an investment banker does it, he gets a fat bonus for his losses.

But take a minute to read what is happening in the rest of the world and you begin to realise what a fuss we are making over nothing.

Flicking through various publications of record over the last few days I am confronted with the following facts of life for those who live outside – for want of a better catch all term – NATO countries (with apologies to the fine democracies in Oceania and south east Asia):

• If you are a woman in most of the countries of the Middle East and Africa you are, sometimes by official state decree, a second-class citizen. If you so much as undertake activities that challenge this status, even without meaning to make a fuss, you risk fines, imprisonment or in some not-so-extreme cases, death by stoning. And by challenging the status quo, we not talking about taking to the streets in violent protest. We are talking, in Saudi Arabia for example, about driving a car.

• For a homosexual man or woman, you can pretty much point to anywhere on a map of Africa and find a hostile reception, illegal as it is in 37 of that continent’s 54 countries, with punishments ranging from fines, imprisonment and, yes you guessed it, death by stoning. Such oppression isn’t the preserve of Africa alone, of course. You can, in a delicious irony surely not lost on devotees of S&M, be whipped in Malaysia. And there is unlikely to be a Jamaican version of the app ‘Grindr’, such is the likelihood of falling foul of its 19^th century ‘buggery law’.

• If you live in Haiti, you can reminisce over the recent passing of Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier who, as ‘President for Life’ between 1971 and 1986 (the ‘for Life’ bit made redundant by a coup) impoverished the island on the back of personal largesse so absolutely it is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere barely two hours flight from the richest.

• If you live in Hong Kong and happen to dislike the current leader, your choices at the next ‘election’ are very much limited to the shortlist chosen by the Chinese Communist Party. And you can stand in the rain politely objecting all you like, it ain’t going to change.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

Yes, even though the governance of the E.U strongly resembles that of the former Soviet Union it is still highly unlikely the Nordic countries are going to be turned into a giant Gulag any time soon. I can march out of my front door and, if I so choose, stand in a public square and denounce pretty much whomever I like with no greater sanction than irritated stares.

I can serve my needs and pursue my ambitions in a system based on laws created by elected representatives, upheld by an independent police force and judiciary, both scrutinised by a rabidly free press. Very different indeed to the experience of someone in, say, Nigeria, which was described by a colleague from that nation as a place where everyone accepts that in order to prosper you need to cheat.

Most importantly of all I, we, can vote our current leaders out if we so choose. We can exercise irritation in all manner of elections, local, national and European. And when the results come in, the politicians never question them, with the losers more likely to reach for the bottle than a gun.

We should never forget that our daily lives are, for the most part, substantially freer, richer and safer than those for many millions of people. What’s more this is no accident of history. It’s because the clutch of liberal democracies we call home are based on a set of values that make it so. And with these values coming under increasing threat from within and without, we must remember than in order to successfully defend them we must first remind ourselves of how well they have served those parts of humanity who have chosen to adopt them.

The various protest parties that have capitalised on the current sense of malaise in western countries have tempted our inner cynics out and into the voting booth.  They do so on a thoroughly miserable prospectus that says the future is bleak and hope is dead. Is everything perfect? Of course not. Do voters feel let down by promises of a better tomorrow? Absolutely. Do we need a more responsive, less closeted political elite? That would be nice. But if you stop for a moment and look at the privileges we enjoy and opportunities we have to change our lives, today, compared to many of our fellow humans we have nothing to complain about and every reason to be hopeful.

With that in mind, I replied to my friend not to be so silly, cancel the plane tickets and refuse to let the bastards get him down in a culture where he is entirely free to do so. (He admitted afterwards that he might have been a little drunk when sending the email. I made no comment on the matter and, at the time of writing, I’m glad to say he’s still very much here).

Crédit photo : Daniela Muno-Santos