On Leadership and its absence
While we laugh at the debacle of the election of Kevin McCarthy as House Speaker in the USA, closer to home we face our own catastrophic failure of political leadership.
Britain’s public sector is in revolt, our national health service is on its knees and millions are facing poverty and destitution; and our political leaders response is compulsory maths and a clampdown on graffiti. This week Rishi Sunak, who looks like a sock-puppet and speaks as if he is addressing a kindergarten made a ludicrous speech in which he laid out five policy pledges promising to reset the economy and fix everything that had been broken by thirteen years of Tory rule. Seeming to inhabit a completely alternative reality Sunak tried to soothe the anguish and stress of the nation by promising the strangest concoction of policies. “Can’t get an ambulance? Never mind we will send refugees to Rwanda?” “Facing impossible fuel bills? Don’t worry we will make maths compulsory till your child is eighteen.”
It wasn’t so much an abdication of leadership as a departure to show great leadership for a completely fictional world that nobody lives in. If Sunak’s fresh-faced new agenda is bizarre, so too is Keir Starmer’s. The Labour leader has now wrapped himself in the language of Brexit claiming Labour would launch a “take back control” bill aimed at devolving sweeping powers to local communities in its first term. Starmer’s gibberish makes no sense at all. You cannot on the one hand deny a referendum for Scotland while on the other hand claiming that you “will devolve power across the UK, giving people control over their own future…”
Starmer and Sunak are determined to show some difference but are quite alike: they share much of the same political bandwidth and struggle manfully to put across that they are a safe pair of hands, the Labour leader losing no opportunity to repeat that a Starmer government would have to “make very difficult choices”. They are mere functionaries of a political class unable and unwilling to initiate change or help people understand the reality of the challenges we face. But if the abject failure of political leadership is routine and expected, as leaders find themselves controlled and limited by public opinion and an aggressive news cycle, where else can we look for leadership in a troubled world?
It’s ironic that some of the most effective moral leadership comes from a twenty-year old autistic girl, someone who shows leadership through her own actions. Others have opportunities for leadership thrust upon them. Take Prince Harry.
The media has this week been, once again, flooded with the Harry and Meghan Story. If the previous monarch’s approach to PR had been characterised by a dignified silence and a certain air of stoicism, the current crop of royals are characterised by the noise of an endless whining, a sort of narcissistic self-pity. For the Sussex’s and the Wessex’s (I forget which is which) this endless spiel is mingled with a hefty dose of psycho-babble and therapy-speak, none of which translates-through to any actual self-awareness. Imagine being so tone-deaf as to think that announcing that you had killed twenty-five people would, somehow help in your effort to gain public sympathy? As the journalist John Pilger noted:
“For all the public whining from Prince Harry and his wife, his admission that he slaughtered 25 people in Afghanistan, a country offering no threat to his own and left impoverished, offers us a glimpse of the ruthless system propped up by his family.”
No, ‘leadership’ is not really to be found from the gilded lives of the Windsor’s and their extensive hangers-on and wider brood.
If the sort of moral leadership expressed by Greta Thunberg, or previously by such as Gandhi or Mandela or Guevara – a leadership based on deeds not words – is extremely rare today, so too is the sort of leadership expressed through charisma. This might be no bad thing. The use of fine rhetoric and silky oratory has masked a thousand villainous deeds. History is littered with charismatic leaders: think of the Americans from JFK, to Martin Luther King, or from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama. But if the gift of the gab might be an essential tool for gaining power but it’s not much use at exercising it.
His speaking-style was extremely strange but Tony Blair was probably the last British politician that anyone thought had an ounce of charisma. Now we are more likely to be ruled by people with a charisma-bypass, assuredly dull creatures. Alternatively we will be governed by people who just dropped into power by dint of their position in society, people like Boris Johnson or multi-millionaire Rishi Sunak or David Cameron who thought so little of being Prime Minister he just hummed his own departure as he left the lectern at Number Ten, immediately imagining how he’d make millions doing something else.
In light of the failure of political leadership – across many continents and all parties – it is re-emerging in strange and new places. ‘Leaders’ are as likely to be found now on Instagram or Tik-Tok, as poets, writers, pop-syrens and artists, community leaders or activists strapped to a motorway or leading a union. If Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Mick Lynch or Vandana Shiva or other dissident voices and whistle-blowers are the new leaders we need they too often operate alone, as individuals. The actual forum of politics has become a place where people who are drawn to leadership must avoid at all costs. ‘Politics’, or party politics is a place where leaders go to die. It’s a suffocating space which guarantees the status quo and protects vested power.
Across terminal problems of housing, the drugs death epidemic, climate breakdown, disfiguring inequality and poverty wages, Britain is characterised by leadership in its absence.
New forms of leadership must overcome this, and yes leadership models and structures has a (big) gender element. Back in the heady days of 2014 Laura Eaton-Lewis wrote (‘We need to talk about leadership‘): “If we’re really interested in creating a socially democratic model of leadership, we have a great opportunity to do so in Scotland right now. With all this energy and engagement coming from the usually ‘invisible’ women and minority group leaders, it’s a timely moment to rewrite the governance models that underpin the systemic prejudice outlined above.”
“It’s entirely achievable to create a high functioning culture if we begin as we mean to go on. We can reap the benefits of diverse knowledge by representing ALL of our talent in leadership roles, putting the best of our minds together. But to do this properly, we have to tackle this problem now, and to do that we have to see that the problem has at least four dimensions:
- It’s systemic – the way we do things needs to change
- Cultural – the way things have always been done has created a self-fulfilling prophecy that favours the same people over and over again. To re-programme this we need to actively select leaders on a positive bias from amongst those who are currently invisible
- Behavioural – we need to set a new social contract about how we expect to conduct ourselves. We can’t leave politeness only to the ladeeezzzz.
- Modelled on a pre-existing template of what ‘success’ looks like. So we need to create new narratives and promote other models of success.”
In a world dominated by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Andrew Tate and Nigel Farage this optimism may seem outdated, but the opportunities to change the patterns and structures of leadership remain the same, and given the meta-crisis and the failure of our politicians to step-up, there’s a position, indeed many positions to be filled. Note: previous applicants need not apply.
Excellent treatise Mr Small..you’ve woken up from the bewildered herd infantile celebrations.. ie. the bigga J./aka Santa born again celebrations – which keeps the herd busy for the rest of the year trying to clear the debt incurred in all the lovely happy shiny thingummyies..That is if you managed an ambulance/doctor/nurse/train/mail shots…etc ( not necessarily in that order) and survived family arguments..
My sock puppet (who by the way objects to being compared tae Sunak) mouths silently….. UDI. ..out of compassion for those recovering from excess alcohol inhalation..etc
For Scotland!
Hullo, Squigglypen. BREAKING GOOD NEWS. A recent poll shows that 23% of Scottish voters would vote for Alba today. 23% = 20 seats +-. Scotland’s population has started to wake up to the fact that independence is going to happen with Alba’s determination and pride under Scottish law which will never be negotiated. Alba and ISP are on the rise as Sturgeon’s S.N.P. is joining the English Branch Labour party at Holyrood as it heads into oblivion. 9 years of absolutely nothing from Sturgeon has caught up.
I like Laura Eaton-Lewis’s comments on leadership. As you say, however, that was from 2014. Nine years on, this should read: “We HAD a great opportunity in Scotland to create a socially democratic model of leadership”. Your comments on the various English politicians mentioned are spot on. There’s a strange gap, though, in not referencing leadership in Scotland at all. Maybe you just can’t, and I’d understand that. Maybe this is the closest you can go? Here it is though: married couple in power for a long time (that’s never good), executive and judiciary joined at the hip, corporate capture of the Holyrood policy agenda, dearth of socially progressive legislation. No overall plan. It is a strangle-hold. Everyone knows. We should be able to talk about it.
No in fact Malcolm while I concentrate on the people who run Britain – I do mention that this failure is across all parties and I do mention particular failings of the current Scottish Government (drugs deaths). The focus of this article was on failure at a British political level – but the subject of previous – and subsequent pieces will focus on failure at a Scottish level, of which there are many dire examples.
Thunberg did not set out to be a leader. People who ‘want to be’ leaders are sinister; those who follow ‘leaders’ are deluded.
I agree Dave
brilliant piece of writing – and nice attiribution to the 2014 article
We need more of this questioning of the “dearth of leadership” – although people have been banging on about it for so long that the subject perhaps deserves a rather deeper analysis. Perhaps we need new forms of leadership? Or none?
In establishing ‘new forms of leadership’, we could do a lot worse than giving the principles of Zapatismo a shot:
Obedecer y No Mandar (To Obey, Not Command)
Proponer y No Imponer (To Propose, Not Impose)
Representar y No Suplantar (To Represent, Not Supplant)
Convencer y No Vencer (To Convince, Not Conquer)
Construir y No Destruir (To Construct, Not Destroy)
Servir y No Servirse (To Serve Others, Not Serve Oneself)
Bajar y No Subir (To Work From Below, Not Seek To Rise)
(https://globalsocialtheory.org/topics/zapatismo/)
Thanks, that’s great
Hullo Time, the Deer. Excellent post. I’d like to make a small change to the Spanish: Bajar y No Subir = trabajar desde abajo y no buscar subir.
Best Regards.
All radical organizations eventually become infiltrated by the establishment and lose sight of the people they are supposed to protect withThe labour party the biggest example. Blair abandoned the working class and built himself a property empire. Starmer is no better.
“The working class can kiss my ass, i got the foremans job at last”. Jeremy
Corbyn was a good leader, but the right wing press and the labour party right ensured his demise.
The snp is going the same way.
Good piece, so far as it goes. Good demolition of the Westminster leadership. Good indication of the qualities which have propelled Greta Thunberg into prominence. Thunberg’s leadership, prominent within protest, is however ineffective. If this piece had ignored the vacuous political class of Westminster, and instead looked for the true leadership required by Scots, and if it had looked not at those who protest, but those who attest a truly new systemic alternative, then it could have helped. As it is, it says little to me.
Who attest a truly new systemic alternative?
Protest is important.
Loved this Mike.
A depressing lesson of the last few years is that having women and people of colour in leadership in the British government doesn’t change anything.
Thanks. Yes that irony is really weird and under discussed
It is a conundrum but I wonder if it reveals more about our perspectives than their’s in that we assume that the ‘non-progressive’ right would not appeal to those seen as marginalised or worse. The easy answer is a bit like the idea that Scottish unionists are too indoctrinated to know their own minds, which if they did, would mean they must surely favour of independence. The hard answer is that being a woman or person of colour, despite the oppressions of society, may make less difference to how one’s politics develops than you might think and they are as varied as anyone else, or in fact, it may be a key factor but in the opposite way to what one might expect.
This article offers some interesting insights on Black Tories that covers traditional ideas of the Church and self-reliance, and that those interviewed felt that British society had actual helped them a lot, broadly speaking. The narrative that the UK is basically awful, especially if you are not white, does not always chime with people’s experiences, because, perhaps, it is not only exaggerated but also exploited as a political football and people react against that when for them, it isn’t actually true or not true enough. This is one of the dangers in only looking at the bad stuff and thinking that if we continually say everything is terrible, people will vote for us to make it better. But what if they don’t experience it as that terrible and / or they deep down like the place and don’t want it denigrated so much? You might be tempted to vote for those who align with that sentiment more than the opposite.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jan/07/new-black-tories-labour-doesnt-seem-to-understand-how-its-happening
Greta Thunberg is not only an activist but a philosopher of a desperately-needed kind, which is why her books are categorised as environmental philosophy, or biopolitical philosophy. Therefore her words, not merely deeds, are essential.
In anarchist thought, leadership can be recognized without the role of ‘leader’, as a contingent and possibly emergent or volatile effect. For example, in a single game of football, any or all players in a single team may show leadership at one or more times, in a variety of ways. Our complex societies require so many specialists that no single person can be competent in all the basic required disciplines, and fast-moving, expanding/fragmenting fields are increasingly difficult to master anyway. The precept No Gods, No Masters is a warning against letting leadership roles solidify. A solution to averting the corruptive influence of political power has not been found, as far as I am aware.
One could say that capitalist machinery works largely without human leaders; that is, it might easily be automated, and in some cases can already be. The science fiction of William Gibson, where AI secretly instructs agents like lawyers on behalf of gigantic transnational corporations in pursuit of unknown goals is already feasible.
But while anarchists are often able to provide reasonable critiques of archist politics, they have been less successful in presenting systematic alternatives that look like working (that is, the challenge of meeting the tests of planetary-realistic ideologies). To protect the living planet, some degree of coercion will be required. At the moment, we are still in the middle of the Greatest War*, that prosecuted by many humans (to various degrees) on the ecosystems and non-human lifeforms of Earth.
An alternative political system must take into account that many people who are not tedious bores will not want to spend large amounts of time in meetings rehashing endless debating topics, but will want to offload the critical job of saving the planet to an appropriately-qualified agency. Most people might be prepared to spend considerable engagement time and effort on setting up such a system through constitutional or international procedures if that is a rare demand.
What we do need, to achieve a workable biocracy, is to better understand bioethics and biological underpinnings of politics which are insufficiently understood, though widely supposed to be manipulated to some degree by big data corporations, and the subject of speculation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientation
#biocracynow
Where people are unable to engage with politics at an appropriate systems-oriented level, additional support dedicated to developmenting political literacy will be required.
*although some might say the 300 Million Year War between plants and animals is another contender for the title.
With a poll lead of about 20% I suspect that Keir Starmer will not be too upset at Mike Small accusing him of talking ‘gibberish.’
The key point about the phrase ‘take back control’ is that it resonates with so many people – as it did in 2016. Is Scottish independence not about ‘taking back control’ ? Starmer is accepting that for many people lacking control over their life is a crippling reality. The less well off you are, the more true this is.
Interestingly, Mike Small makes no attempt to argue that political leadership in Scotland offers a successful alternative to the uninspiring fare offered at Westminister.
florian albert, You say ” the political leadership in Scotland offers no attempt to offer a successful alternative to Westminster’s uninspiring fare”.
The current S.G. has no intention of offering any alternative and never has had. Sturgeon is a unionist and has accomplished zero in supporting Scotland’s independence. Here is a quick fact Blacked-Out by Sturgeon. Scotland is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, if not the wealthiest. Why? Because we have the resources to make it that way. Norway, the second wealthiest, doesn’t have even 1/2 of our resources. Alba has now 23% of the vote ( not bad for a party that started just about one and a half years ago) and on the way up. Meanwhile, Sturgeon’s S.N.P. is on the way out. Alba will deliver independence.