You don’t say much, so I know little about you. It’s probably the way you like it, and I don’t blame you.
Simply by the process of demographics, there’s an boringly good chance that you are British, middle-aged, middle-class, white, comfortable and of relatively moderate opinions. You also have an active sense of irony, an ability to change your mind and you appreciate the freedoms that living in this neck of the woods brings. Close?
This week, a tiny incident in my life has given me an equally tiny pause for thought on the freedom front.
By way of background, the pandemic has clearly affected many of our freedoms, and I’m not qualified to comment, beyond an irritating sense that the Health Secretary seems to be enjoying it all just a tiny bit too much, like a deputy head boy when the real one is off sick. Neither do I fully understand the Crime and Police Bill going through Parliament, save to note that they can now ban demonstrations that are a bit noisy, which I thought was the whole point. But I think we might agree that the government’s long sulk about the Today Programme, the Prime Minister’s refusal to sack either Priti Patel (for a clear breach of the ministerial code) or Dominic Cummings (for breaking his own rules) shows, if nothing else, a particularly robust contempt for dissent. Maybe it’s an Eton thing.
But then, I’m no revolutionary. I actually voted for them.
Last week, our MP came to the village to help our long-standing local councillor put election leaflets through letter boxes. Someone chose the moment to unfurl a large Extinction Rebellion banner off the fence by the pub and, disgusted, the MP duly turned straight round and went home.
So far so boring. Many of us in his position might have rather relished the opportunity for a chat, but it may well be that he knows something we don’t, like that the organisation is about to be banned, and that he shouldn’t be trapped into a damaging photo opportunity. It is what he did next that is a bit intriguing.
What he did next was to go home and Facebook-stalk the parish councillors to try to come up with who might have leaked details of his visit. Apparently, if you google ‘Roger Morgan-Grenville Extinction Rebellion’, you come up with two things: a blog I wrote in October 2019 (https://rogermg1.home.blog/2019/10/09/see-for-yourself/) and the fact that the Godalming branch once invited me to come and talk to them about bee-keeping.
Armed with that explosive knowledge, he then wrote an email to the person who had organised the visit of which I was privately sent a much redacted version which included the following: “Could Roger Morgan Grenville be someone you told about or who got to hear of my visit? He is someone that we believe to be an XR activist?”
It is just worth reading that sentence once again, in the context of the liberal democracy we have become used to.
I’m not an XR activist, but even if I was, this seems a bit top-heavy. More Peter Sellers than Pol Pot, I grant you, but a bit uncomfortable, like a stubborn wrinkle in the undersheet. So I told him that I supported their aims, but not their tactics, and asked him how he had found my name, who ‘we’ was, what he would have done if he ascertained that it had been me, and what other little lists I was on.
The correspondence between us has been polite but without conclusion, and he has made donation to the charity for whom I happened actually to be walking 50 miles that day (https://virtual.thekiltwalk.co.uk/fundraising/roger-morgangrenville). But his last words (‘let’s leave things there’) don’t indicate to me that he feels that he has done anything wrong, which he probably hasn’t, or that either of us are going to persuade the other to change their stance. But something has changed.
One of Boris’s problems, if you ignore the one about not really being interested in stuff like this in the first place, is that opposition these days is coming in the form of shadowy, osmotic, shape-shifting groups, like XR, Black Lives Matter and Me Too, groups whose central message is often hard to argue with, but who attract into their outer edges people with an altogether different set of priorities and constraints. For an idle man, it just takes too much effort, first for him to understand them, and then to decide what to do about them. You get the sense that Boris would be more comfortable in the uncomplicated Cold War scenario, where the dastardly enemy simply drives T72 tanks across the North European plains, and drinks vodka.
But, equally, I remember my granny endlessly quoting Edmund Burke in her letters to me, that bit about evil triumphing and good men doing nothing. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he is evil, and certainly not that I am good, but I might just sit up and take a bit more of an interest in it all from now on.
And just see how many other lists I might be on.
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