NATIONAL UNITY GOVERNMENT: A VANITY EXERCISE
- Liam John
- Aug 27, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Nov 28, 2019
The most recent plot to stop Brexit, devised in the Echo Chambers of Remain Twitter, is that of a Government of National Unity (called different things by different people. I like GNU).
Essentially the house would pass a vote of No Confidence in the Prime Minister and then appoint a stand-in Prime Minister who will call a general election and stop Brexit. Or at least that’s the part the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Green Party seem to agree about.
The parties have all weighed in with their ideas about who could lead the GNU and who would vote for who. The problem now is that all of the major parties are trying to implement such a government, which even collectively they do not have the numbers to support, by their means without a sign of making concessions to each other.
The Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn wants to lead the unity government, Lib Dem leader Joe Swinson wants Father of the House Tory MP Ken Clark to lead it and Green Co-Leader Caroline Lucas wants a cross-party team of women she has picked to lead.
Lucas apologising for “all white” list
What we’re seeing here is everyone trying to look like they are doing absolutely everything they can to install such a government, while knowing it cannot and will not happen. Using Twitter to out those unwilling to cooperate. Vanity by politicians in the social media age and by social media users in a highly political age can take a good share of the blame for some of what I like to call: “fantasy politics.”
University College London (UCL) have made an online tool where you can pick your fantasy frontbench. It “aims to make the process of politics and policy-making more engaging and accessible to the general public.”
We’ve all seen it on both sides of the aisle, people think they have the power to hand-pick politicians that they see as good and put them in a line-up to run the country, not unlike a fantasy football team, and see them solve the world’s problems. Nauseating enough from people on Twitter, when politicians start contributing their own fantasy politics draft picks it all gets a bit silly.
Naming five people you’ve seen in parliament on the television and getting infuriated when they refuse to obey. Despite what our American cousins might have us believe; politics’ main function isn’t entertainment nor is it about names.
This has become a particular obsession since the 2016 referendum, the Leave camp wanted to handpick an Uber-Brexit cabinet who would stick it to EU, which to be fair in many cases contained people now serving in Her Majesties Government.
Picture used previously in Obnoxious Optimism Can Only Take the Tories So Far
Ironically it is the same vanity, and possibly confusion, that has fuelled Remainers to believe that some sort of six-week-superstar-government with Rory Stewart (Tory) and Jess Phillips (Labour) at the helm is about to steam in and drain the Brexit swamp.
Not one of these politicians’ tweets about all-female cabinets, whether they should contain Diane Abbot, if Chuck Umunna will forgive Labour or if Corbyn is genuinely Remain enough to captain their specific fantasy side is worth the £6 London coffee it was composed over.
This has never been how British politics has functioned, no one should be surprised that the leader of the Liberal Democrats or Greens wouldn’t want Labour to be the party who stopped Brexit. A win for Labour is a loss for them in many cases. Likewise, Tory-Remainer MPs, one of the frustratingly spineless groups in British politics, won’t sell own party out for the sake of stopping Brexit.
You’re never going to get these people to vote to put each other in power if it excludes their party, or worse them personally.
All of the assumed alliances in the National Unity Government have been born through the assumption of friend-of-a-friend politics. retweets and emojis aren’t the same as political endorsements.
What they are banking on is the support they might receive from this vanity exercise, this isn’t a complex puzzle that only the best centre-left minds of our generation can solve, if the numbers don’t add up, meaning there aren’t enough people in agreement, moving the numbers around a bit and doing the equation again is what Einstein described as insanity.
Which, to be fair, just about sums it up.
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