Yes, it's hols time again and thankfully last year's chattering and pontificating classes ,- yes that includes the Archbishop of Canterbury too,-obsession with saving the planet by not flying is not the 2011 fashion. That gives our political leaders a little more leeway. Clearly they have to look serious and visibly share our pain as we set about paying for the Blair/Brown borrowing and spending spree but one can just about get away with making it across the channel to Europe. After all we are all Europeans now,- aren't we Silvio? We may not have quite got the hang of afternoon siestas or fully grasped that "popping in for a quick one on the way home" doesn't mean a half in the Red Lion by the station, but we do have few star spangled blue flags around and there is the brilliant Eurostar even if the French have so far stopped it going anywhere other than France or ,OK, Belgium but that's more or less part of France isn't it, Waloons excepted of course. Oh dear, it's all too complicated but yes we can go there by ferry or low cost airline and still be more or less sharing the pain. We are not sure that British Airways Cityflyer out of London City is quite RyanAir Dave but we will give you the benefit of the doubt.
Where then have the Big Three gone to make best use of their new increased freedom and range? It used to be the Big Two, but coalition etiquette demands a temporary elevation of status for the Lib Dem leader even if many of his knife fingering "team" would rather be lurking scowling in backbench obscurity influencing nothing but with no restraint on hare brained and hand wringing utterances.
Dave has gone to a smart Tuscan villa where he is hopefully sharing nobody's pain but his own should he over indulge in the excellent local produce. Poor Nick is for about the 16th year running imaginatively enjoying the company of his outlaws in an allegedly dusty Spanish village, again hopefully within an arm's length of the best of local produce and a corkscrew. That should reduce the pain. Ed though is said to be test driving his newly modified nasal tubes somewhere along the UK south west coast so there could be a bit more real pain sharing there. It is uncertain how the tube straightening might affect his voice but he should be able to sleep better and maybe enjoy a recurring nightmare that he will turn out sounding like Margaret Thatcher. On the other hand if he were to holiday north of the border he could come back with the resonance of his mentor Gordon Brown. That would be a nightmare for the rest of us.
For all the media-led carping and whining whenever politicians take holidays, cross the Channel, stay in a decent hotel or heaven forbid have fun , we should all want them to have more. They need to lighten up, stroll about unattended by grovelling functionaries, security men,or local party worthies. They should sit in cafes, on buses , trains (not in reserved carriages though) and listen and talk to people. In other words they should strive to live normal and pleasant lives with normal interactions and normal non-patronising conversations. They should also see and hear some of the rough stuff. Try, incognito, A&E on a Saturday night. (When Blair was rushed in to an NHS hospital with a possible heart problem the order came out that he should nor see or be seen by any of the regular clients.) Party leaders and Prime Ministers in particular are frighteningly cut off from the world inhabited by the rest of the population. They can rarely even walk down the road to buy a newspaper. As result they rely on others and the media to bring them news of what is going on outside and they lose their own feel for it. That's just at home in the UK.
Beyond the UK their lack of reach and breadth of experience and understanding is even more startling. For the people responsible for our political destiny they have astoundingly little. They have met few foreigners in non business circumstances and with few exceptions and some now distant gap years have not lived amongst them. On official visits they will operate to tight schedules with too little sleep and few off duty moments or chances to just stroll about. They could be anywhere and they will not even experience the normal delights and hassles of travel, queues, officials, wrong room keys, ripoff con artist taxi drivers or other travel experiences. They will not have sat at a small tropical airport in the rainy season or across the road in a bar in the dry season awaiting the distant sound of an approaching aeroplane and hoping it's theirs. Their lives, even when travelling , become very one dimensional and sanitised as well as time-pressured and measured in value in pounds or dollars per hour. Sadly there is no column in the accounts book for the value of time spent looking, listening, watching, thinking or even just enjoying doing nothing while in doing so revitalising the batteries and clearing the mind ready for the next big thing.
We should encourage all our politicians and especially the Big Three to travel frequently, widely and informally. They need to see and feel the adrenaline of the big Asian cities, the buzz and the hum of activity against a background of no benefits culture, no restrictions of when and how people can work , where smart school children set out every morning with a parentially driven inner need to work and do better. The Scandinavian countries, Europe,the USA, Africa, Australasia, South America all offer interest and instant education to the visitor as do a host of smaller regions and places. They provide the message and intellectual stimulus of "There are other ways to live and to do things. Don't think for a moment that you have the only and right answers" They open the windows of the mind and invite people to think of the big picture, the big ideas, what doing things differently could do for them and their worlds. For the politician it should take them away from the idea that protecting a narrow view or interest is a sensible use of the brain. It should also tell them that if UK Plc isn't prepared to understand, adapt, energise and compete it faces a very bleak future because for sure others understand what survival and advancement looks like and they aren't about to slow down to leave room for us to indulge ourselves. Our union leaders could get out and about a bit and grasp a few of the realities of the world as well,-but maybe that's just a dream too far.
Go well!
