Gravity is a flinty mistress. Our feverish public debate often resembles one of those Looney Tunes chase sequences – Wile E Coyote runs off the cliff, terrified, oblivious to the gulf yawning beneath him. Initially he remains aloft, legs wheeling frantically. It’s not until he looks down that he suddenly begins to plummet.
Public discourse is generally conducted on a permanent crisis footing – from the climate change debate (invariably labelled “an emergency”), to the two-year state of emergency that followed the initial Covid-19 outbreak. Large numbers of nominally sensible people have talked themselves into a constant state of hysteria over the NHS, too. In the public mindset, the health service appears to exist either on the brink of total collapse or at the mercy of some shadowy privatisation agenda. We are constantly being threatened that there are only “10 days to save the NHS!”
But hyperbole has its own downside. When everything is a crisis, nothing is – and constant doom-mongering has the power to desensitise the public as surely as inflation devalues the pound in our pockets. It may also trigger the wrong decisions; by breeding panic in some quarters, shocking complacency in others.
No longer. It is as if the invasion of Ukraine has caused the scales to drop from our eyes, exposing the hysteria and triviality of so much of our national conversation. United by a common enemy and the galvanising effect of a genuine humanitarian crisis, many of the West’s previous divisions are looking pretty frivolous too. Once-unimaginable positions have reversed extraordinarily quickly. Germany pledged to double its defence spending within 24 hours, the Swiss opted for economic sanctions over maintaining more than two centuries of neutrality. Pragmatism, not idealism, is now the order of the day.
So will the Net Zero fantasy survive its first encounter with “events, dear boy, events”? The Prime Minister is reportedly seeking a “climate change pass” for Western natural gas, to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian supplies. Few people would now complain about ramping up our own domestic gas production. Net Zero is of course a worthy ambition, but it should always have been a direction of travel rather than a binding target, passed without any real public discussion of costs and benefits, and lacking the necessary technology to make it viable. The hair-shirted zealotry of many environmentalists – justified, they said, by the immediacy and severity of the crisis – has aged very badly indeed.
In the House of Commons last week, I noticed that all but a small handful of MPs had discarded their masks in the Chamber. This may seem like a small thing – it certainly ought to be – except that for the best part of two years, mask-wearing has become a seething cross-party culture war on the green benches. Practically every week, opposition MPs would snootily chastise their unmasked counterparts. So for masks to vanish, with little fanfare, was as if two years’ worth of hot air had evaporated overnight. With hindsight, how petty it all now seems!
So too the corporate showboating of International Women’s Day – the self-congratulatory #girlboss emails and social media updates had a particularly hollow ring yesterday, with so many Ukrainian women simply trying to stay alive. The genuine emergency has underscored the frivolity – the decadence, even – of so many of our previous preoccupations.
We may have partially awoken from our slumber, but some frivolities remain. One is the ongoing desire in some quarters to view an eastern European crisis through the lens of British domestic politics. SNP politicians have drawn glib comparisons between Ukraine and the campaign for Scottish independence. Some hardened Remainers have sought to present events within a Brexit context, desperate to craft a “Little England” narrative despite ample evidence of the UK’s enhanced role on the international stage.
Others see in this unfolding horror only irreproachable British decency – a view which ignores, for instance, the Home Office’s shambolic response when called on to offer desperate Ukrainians visas. The truth about Britain’s performance probably lies somewhere between these two Anglo-exceptionalist extremes; but if anything, such examples feel increasingly ridiculous precisely because they are anomalies.
A sense of proportion is returning to our discourse; though the irony is that it took an incredibly disproportionate situation, a nightmarish emergency, to achieve it. Last week NBC news correspondent Ellison Barber was interrupted while filming a report on life in refugee camps, which subsequently went viral. Midway through the segment, a Ukrainian child wandered cheekily into shot, grinning from ear-to-ear and tossing a football in the air. There was nothing more chastening than the sight of this sweet little girl somehow finding a glimmer of hope in a desperate situation. Safe, rich and free: we should look at the resilience and blazing courage of the Ukrainians and check our privilege.
