21st Century Vision: Casualties in the Great Game

I keep meaning to watch the schoolboy bunfight that is PMQs every Wednesday, and I almost always forget. This week I managed to remember it, and it was quite an interesting one. Not for the quality of the insults but because, for once, David Cameron seemed more concerned with geeing the government into action than with scoring political points. He was just back from Darfur, and he really seemed to want to get something done about that appalling mess. Blair's responses indicated bored annoyance at the naivete of the idea that anything more could be done than was already in train.

I am not (for once) seeking to pillory our glorious Prime Minister - I imagine the exchange would have been quite similar had the roles been reversed. My interest is in why it is that politicians seem to find it so difficult to deal with any international problem. Darfur ought to be a relatively easy one: genocide is clearly under way and everyone agrees we ought to stop it. But it has been going on for several years already, and not only has nobody stopped it, it seems to be getting worse.

There wouldn't have been the same problem in the nineteenth century - glossing over the fact that then no-one in Europe would have minded if one lot of Africans were killing another lot of Africans - somebody would have sent a gunboat (OK, an expeditionary force, Darfur being in the middle of a desert). The only danger would have been two or more European expeditionary forces ending up fighting each other. Nowadays everybody is dead scared of offending their opposite number's sensibilities - even though most politicians have to have the hide of a rhinoceros. Criticism, even of genocide, has to be muted and usually made without specifically naming the target - though everybody knows who is intended, and the media take great delight in joining the dots for anybody too stupid to work it out.

It's all just part of the 'Great Game' of politics. That seems to be how politicians see it. Politics is not about running the country or saving the world - it's about beating the opposition and winning elections. The current state of British politics is a perfect illustration: Labour got so fed up with 18 years in opposition that they threw out all their policies and principles in desperation to make themselves electable. Duly elected, they didn't have anything left to steer their course by - except of course, "what do we need to do to win the next election?" Following 3 successive routs, the Tories seem to be heading the same way. By sometime in the next decade we may even have the spectacle of the rabdly left-wing 'Conservatives' facing a far right 'Labour' Party.as each determinedly moves to deny their rivals their traditional support base. Who knows where the Lib Dems will end up? These must be confusing times for a party whose main policy is to be different from the other two.

No wonder the voters are giving up in despair and either slamming the door in the face of any politician, or seeking relief in the fringe parties.