Although the UK general election is on Thursday 12 December 2019 – when I plan to be hiking the trail – I will be voting by post to ensure my voice is heard. That is, if I could only work out what voice that is. I have never felt so disenfranchised as I do now.
The UK Prime Minister, like the US President, has turned lying into an art form. It has reached the stage where neither actually seems conciously to realise they are lying; they just say what is convenient at the time and, on that basis alone, claim it must be true even when it is demonstrably false. So, it is absolutely clear Brexit will be a long term disaster for the UK economy whilst Johnson claims the opposite. It is also absolutely clear that we cannot get an EU trade deal in 2020, and Johnson will not ask for an extension of time in June as he would need to. So we will head for the worst kind of Brexit – a no deal Brexit with consequent chaos. You may want Brexit for other reasons – but acknowledge the economic and practical truth.
On the other side, Corbyn is incapable of moving on from policies (or rather dogma) developed in the 1960s and 1970s. His economic ideas are outdated and impractical. His political views so narrowly extreme left wing that he is rabidly anti-American, anti-NATO, anti-EU and anti- antisemitic, and so lacking in self-awareness and flexibility of mind he genuinely doesn’t believe it to be so.
So who on earth to vote for? The best result would be a non-conservative led coalition in which Corbyn and Momentum are ejected from Labout leadership; I think that eg a Hilary Benn led Labour Party would have walked the election against the narrow far right English nationalist party the Conservatives have become – the successors to the Brexit Party. But how to get it? That I am still pondering – although it looks like a vote for the under-performing Liberal Democrats.
The challenges in the UK are mirrored elsewhere. The US President (like Johnson) lacks decency and moral fibre – not ideal for someone leading a country. He is incapable of seeing his efforts to withhold aid to Ukraine to blackmail them into investigating the Biden family as off the scale wrong – the evidence is overwhelming even from the President’s own supporters.
In Israel, we have the Netanyahu farce; another dishonest demagogue who sees personal loyalty to himself as overriding the national interest.
At least the hike pushes all this into the background a bit….
Hiking the Israel National Trail 