EU Referendum


Booker: a grim year for politics


28/12/2014



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It was two months ago when Booker wrote that today's political scene is weirder than at any time one can remember. Abroad, we still see little more than a world drifting into a dreadful twilight, where nothing ever gets resolved.

The great eurozone crisis floats on, having laid waste half the economies of Europe. Across the Middle East and northern Africa the shadow of Islamic fanaticism continues to take its awful toll. Mass flight from poorer countries to richer has become a worldwide running sore. The politicians have no realistic idea of what to do about any of them.

Equally insoluble appears to be the shambles over Russia and Ukraine, with the EU and the US seemingly incapable of recognising how much they themselves did to bring it about. Meanwhile, dispirited activists continue to work frantically for next December's "global climate treaty" which will never happen, while the evidence to support their mad scare story continues to crumble by the month.

Here at home, he now writes, we look forward to an election in May which still seems likely to land us with a prime minister less fitted for the job than any party leader in history — although an unexpected question mark has now been raised over this by the possibility that Labour faces a nationalist wipeout in that Scottish heartland which for generations it has, electorally, taken for granted.

As usual, the most glaring vacuum in the election campaign will be how many important issues never get discussed at all, not least since so much of how our country is run has now been handed over to that amorphous, dysfunctional form of government centred in Brussels, over which we have no control — and from which no political party, even Ukip, has any plausible strategy for how we might hope to get disentangled.

On a swathe of issues, from our suicidal national energy policy to our non-existent foreign policy, we shall have no choice, because the parties competing for power are congealed in mindless agreement. The one hope for the Tories is that, when it comes to the crunch, enough voters may regard the prospect of Ed Miliband in No 10 as so unthinkable that, for all his many failings, they may just shut their eyes and plump for Mr Cameron.

Of all those issues that our major parties never address, few are more disturbing than the criminally dysfunctional state of our "child protection" system, which this year ripped more families apart than ever before, and far too many for no good reason.

Only on those rare occasions when it breaks surface, as in Rotherham, do we glimpse something of how this system has become one of the most terrifying scandals in Britain today. At least we can see some hope in the continuing efforts of our most senior family judge, Lord Justice Munby, to prod the system over which he presides back towards some semblance of humanity and common sense.

Booker concludes thus by writing that nothing has personally cheered him more this Christmas than the joy of three families he has written about this year, who were reunited after the courts that had torn them apart finally had to concede that removing the children from their parents had been a terrible mistake.

Any candidates next May who promise to join the fight for this horrifying scandal to be brought properly to light, and ended, he says, will deserve our votes.