Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Many-sided

Been thinking a bit about our apparently insane new government in the UK. 

Graham Greene famously observed that "sooner or later, one has to take sides". 

I have a good sense of what he meant, and it was not a reference to the kind of decisions one takes at the roulette table. 

Nor really was he referring to the political choices we make or reaffirm every time an election comes around. Or indeed the sides apparently just chosen by the Tory membership. 

For Truss and her team the sides are more like the character classes in D&D, along with their 'alignments'. 




I suppose the PM might see herself as "chaotic good" — a gleamy-eyed libertarian like our very own Gloria Álvarez, though less born to it than baaaawn again. 

What one makes of all this will kind of depend on one's view on the seventies. (And to think it was Corbyn who we imagined was destined to take us all back there on the nostalgia tour.)

The thing is, the government isn't taking sides, it's just rolling those odd shaped dice, having reflected that if only Tories really ever cared about fiscal responsibility — dutifully making the at-least-partly-false comparison between household and Treasury budgets — why should anyone else really care if they abandon the pretence of being lawful neutral paladins once and for all?


No comments: