We need a war on conflict, not terror | Deborah Orr
What tribute to the people killed in Manchester would be fitting? How could we, as individuals, be part of such a tribute? Maybe a start could be made by stating as simply as possible the cause of that attack. The cause is political conflict, at its most global and ideologically crazed. At its least amenable to reason. At its ugliest and most crude. At its wildest and most ruthless. At its most pitiless and self-righteous.
Britain is, of course, in the midst of a vastly more ritualised political conflict. The general election campaign was paused after Monday’s atrocity. No one will ever know quite how much its course has been changed by Salman Abedi’s nihilistic crime.
One thing won’t change, not in the short term. A general election is the enactment of the most direct expression of our democracy. It is democracy that makes it so worthwhile for millions of people to learn and think about all manner of complex matters, and how our society can attend to them. If Britain allows Abedi’s bomb to distort all that, we will be furthering his agenda.
Our democracy is far from perfect, offering only two plausible choices: as basic and simple as conflict can get. As well as the smallest range in which choice can be said to exist. Few people, thinking about how to vote, will believe that all the answers lie in the making of one choice and none in the making of another. Yet our leaders and media persist in pretending that somehow the choice between Labour and Tory is like the choice between night and day.
In truth, a triumph for either party will not change the nature of the challenges that face us, or the difficulty of solving them. And neither is even offering complete honesty about that. Carl Emmerson, the deputy director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, offers stark warnings about both of them.
“For Labour, we can have pretty much everything – free higher education, free childcare, more spending on pay, health, infrastructure. And the pretence is that it can all be funded by faceless corporations and ‘the rich’.” Conservative plans “imply at least another five years of austerity, with the continuation of planned welfare cuts and serious pressures on the public services including on the NHS”.
The crude caricatures, of Labour standing for tax and spend with consequent pressure on private enterprise, and the Tories standing for shrinking the state and utter misery for the most vulnerable, remain dispiritingly accurate. Both parties imply that they will do the things they have done before, but somehow, this time, with different results. Each party, however, tends to get a turn only when the other’s shortcomings have been fully exposed. This is our own political conflict, from which we seem unable to free ourselves.
Is it possible to find a way to lessen that conflict? Private enterprise certainly benefits from infrastructural investment, for example: but is it truly outrageous to imagine a corporate mindshift in which private enterprise stops believing that taxes are being squandered on ne’er-do-wells, but are demonstrably being invested in necessities of construction and engineering that benefit all of society? We need to remember Monday’s victims. I want a bridge named after 15-year-old Megan Hurley. I want a block of social housing that carries the name of Sorrell Leczkowski. I want this not only in Manchester, but all over this country, for all those who died as a consequence of political failures.
I want a bridge named after 15-year-old Megan Hurley. I want social housing that carries the name of Sorrell Leczkowski
Wouldn’t any wealthy company be proud to know that its profits helped to finance such an endeavour? The idea that the rich are taxed to subsidise the poor, rather than to enrich the country as a whole, has been the central conflict of our political culture in my life, and it is time for all sides to make an effort to change the terms of the debate. Our political system is so mired in conflict that the pointing out of obvious things has become a mark of naivety.
I don’t want the legacy of these dead children to be further squabbling over the “war on terror”. Everyone understands that the past has brought us to the present. Everyone knows that the past is littered with mistakes and cruelties and horrors. Everyone knows that only the future can embody the change that we want to see. There are manifest goods, so many, in British society: for example, the capacity to house all our citizens in safety and comfort. Why we allow this wonderful truth to be traduced by an argument over whether public or private money should fund the endeavour is a hard thing to explain to any child.
I do want the legacy of these dead children to be a recognition that conflict is problematic and should be minimised wherever it is found. It is time for the people of Britain to let our politicians know what is expected of any politician from any party: ideas and approaches that seek to unite us, not ideas and approaches that seek always, always, to divide us. That’s the only direction that will bring progress – and, dare I say it, even some harmony.