Living in la-la land

La-la land usually signifies a pleasant dream-world, somewhere to escape to. I do not intend such a meaning here. Rather, I refer to the antithetical place our collective human head seems to occupy at the moment, where we are able to suspend all sense of reality and our better judgement and deny all we know to be right in favour of a medley of spurious, short-term gains.

The last week in socio-politics, here and elsewhere, has been quite astonishing, but let’s start with Israel’s nightmare war on Gaza. Most people I encounter feel utter revulsion over the doublethink the international community is perfecting and the reckless abandonment of every value we signed up to after WWII. Values that have kept the world largely safe for several decades are being wrecked on the bloody shores of Israeli self-righteousness.

The US and almost every other country, except South Africa most notably, has failed to call out a country that is contemptuous of international law. One which defiantly shuns the quickening entreaties of its principal backer and rejects every other source of encouragement to be humane and to show mercy to those they subjugate.

From where does Israel derive its power to lay bare and disrupt the sometimes questionable but necessary balance between self-interest and the greater good that is at the heart of international relations?

Few people can bear to watch the horrific news broadcasts, and most wonder why, instead of discontinuing the supply of arms, the US prefers to pussyfoot around Israel, pleading for humanitarian and supply corridors.

Israel’s barely legitimate political leader Benjamin Netanyahu will not be reined in by any argument or encouragement. Even Iran and Russia have responded to US and allied pressure. But the US dares not apply such pressures on Israel and its audacious leader and seems incapable of acting in any way that we recognise as honourable in the present debacle.

We sort of understand the realpolitik of the situation. Apart from the economic and security deals the US has with the various Middle East and other players, US political parties know who funds them and who they cannot offend in an election year. But the overweening self-interest is corrupting and the contagion is spreading.

Who nowadays believes in the greater good? Not the average Conservative British politician it seems. Last week, Conservative party members tried to pull off a Trumpian conjuring trick of gross manipulation and avoid detection – an extension of the Boris Johnson trait that was amplified by the extremes of Trumpian ideology and practice. One of the ruling party’s biggest ever donors, Frank Hester (TT$86.6 million in funds in 2023) was outed after committing what must be an offence under the Race Relations Act, causing yet another split in the floundering party. He said Diane Abbott, the trail-blazing opposition Labour MP of Jamaican parentage, who in 1987 became the first black woman in Parliament, “should be shot.” The very sight of her made him “want to hate all black women,” he said. It is incredible that his we-need-your-dosh party spokesmen have been arguing that those words were neither sexist nor racist.

They just might have succeeded if black Tory party members hadn’t remembered their origins and called him out. PM Rishi Sunak, Britain’s first PM of colour, who is of Indian descent, was finally winkled out of his carapace to condemn the remarks. Of course, the Labour opposition is making political mileage out of contaminated Tory party funding and Tory hate speech.

The distorting influence of money and external power on politics is worrying. It was with interest that I read Kirk Meighoo’s recent commentary which argued that ethnic rivalry alone does not define TT politics. Dr Meighoo, the UNC’s public relations officer, more or less correctly stated that ethnicity plays a big role, but region, religion, ideology, class, policy issues and perceptions of corruption also influence who we vote for. He omitted mentioning, however, the acute importance of the sources of party finances in the equation. His appeal for a broad church of party supporters was aimed, one suspects, at nameless potential financiers across the ethnic divide. It certainly was a bit of political conjuring to assert that policies divide the parties. I can think of no significant economic or social policy that divides our two dominant parties, except the bogeyman of property tax.

I have supported property tax because I regard it as a legitimate way of raising money to fund meaningful local government, but I was in real la-la land, thinking that local government was intended to work properly. Without the power to raise local revenue and use it to benefit local people, local government is nonsense.

Last week, our PM reportedly claimed that if the controversial tax was not introduced we would have to go to the IMF, ergo, all taxes go into the central pot. Now, the tax has been abruptly put on hold. If it were fiction the fantastical plot would maintain its integrity.