Labour and the ‘totemic gesture’… August 24, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics, The Left.trackback
A depressing Back Room column in the Sunday Business Post this weekend. Depressing not so much because it lauded Enda Kenny who is in the happy position of presenting himself as ‘the optimistic face of the government, while ministerial colleagues have to find nearly four billion in savings and new taxes and face the wrath of countless vested interest groups queuing up for the comprehensive spending review whingefest’.
Actually that is pretty depressing if one parses that rhetoric right there at the end of the sentence. That spending review will see cuts in addition to those already imposed across the last three years of a cumulative severity that the idea that to critique them is somehow a ‘whingefest’ suggests that the author is very well insulated from the reality of what is actually going on.
But for me there was another paragraph in it which summed up much that is wrong with our political discourse and system in this state.
Eamonn Gilmore has to make the odd noise about eh need for cuts, given that his party occupies the main front-line cutting departments – but he would gladly join the Taoiseach in happy town [as an aside, wouldn't it be great if the reason the LP had taken those departments was in order to minimize or reverse such cuts - yep, that would be great]. However, the Tanaiste will need to assert Labour’s influence in government in the next Budget. The Re Rose backroom boys will be working hard between now and December to come up with a totemic gesture that gives Labour a figleaf to protect them from Sinn Féin and the left-leaning Independents during the long winter nights’.
A ‘totemic’ gesture? Three thoughts come to mind. Firstly this isn’t what left politics should be about [albeit in fairness to the LP it is the SBP columnist who ascribes this to them], if anything it should be about process, not events, not totems. Particularly neither of those in the context of the economic situation we now find ourselves in.
Secondly, isn’t this typical of an analysis beyond the left, but one which is characteristic of how Irish politics is conducted, where again it’s not about the actual process but about perception. No one would deny that perception is important, but in the face of the swinging cuts experienced, and if we are to believe the three year outline to be offered us in September of the course of the next three Budgets the swinging cuts to come, it seems so… minimal.
Thirdly, even taking it on its own terms I find it difficult to see how in light of those aforementioned swinging cuts Labour could shape a totemic gesture that would suffice.
Well, other than withdrawal from government.
Depressing is right. There’s something hateful about these insidery nudge nudge wink wink columns, all fuelled by the presumption that people are basically eejits.Hence all it will actually need for Labour to retain their support is not anything of political substance but some kind of ‘totemic gesture’ (which incidentally sounds like a band you might put in the What I’ve Been Listening To . . . slot, or perhaps a lost B-side by The Wild Swans).
Political journalists will be clever enough to spot that this gesture is merely a token but the voters will fall for it, even though the papers will have pointed out the empty nature of the gesture. It really does require a serious amount of contempt for your fellow citizens to come out with stuff like that. Sadly I can imagine Pat Rabbitte believing it.
A Labour withdraw from govt? I’d equate the possiblity of such an event as being similar to the withdraw method of birth control. In theory it’s possible, but in the heat of action rarely happens.
What gives WBS? Totems, withdraw – all very risqué.
For the first and last time this year, I perused a well known Irish political website. Many of the usual educationally indoctrinated pontificators had only good words to say about the Labour Party these days, seeing as Labour is taking swift and decisive action against the core problem of the Irish economy. Labour is hunting down the slackers and unemployed in our society. The mittelstat can rest easy in their beds knowing Labour has identified the instigators of our economic malaise – labour. I suspect the LP is happy to attract these knowledgeable pontificators to its ranks.
[Btw, I thought the Waters article was very good. A realist appraisal
of the modern economy. This economy can only generate part time and low paid jobs because it is dysfunctional, and getting more so.]
Hey, I’m no prude
Re withdrawal, nah, not going to happen.
The English word ‘totem’ derives from the Ojibway ‘Ototeman’, meaning ‘he is a brother of mine’. In relation to North American Indian/Native American peoples, it refers to those objects which serve a symbolic purpose, that of helping to assure the social unity of the group.
How ironic then, that this well paid pontificator would have Labour (sorry “Labour”) use putatively ‘totemic’ policies to provide a meagre figleaf with which to cover its part in shredding the unity of Irish society (such as it was).