Welsh politics was taken over a few weeks ago by the introduction of a new law. The default speed limit in urban areas was reduced from 30mph (miles per hour) to 20mph. Local councils were left with the power to exempt major wide major thoroughfares with good visibility to maintain as 30mph zones. The reason for the policy was to reduce road accidents and make urban centres more livible. Many small villages in Wales have a major arterial roads running through the middle of them, indeed many of these villages spread along these major thoroughfares, and modern fast noisy vehicles speed through these villages, not how things used to be at all.
The law was voted though parliament in April 2023 with support from all the major political parties, and 20mph zones had already been implemented in parts of major towns and cities and in other countries. There wasn’t really much fanfare about this law, until a week or so before implemetation day and the hard right Conservative party suddenly U-turned and started a major campaign seeking to overturn this law; a law they had voted for and senior members of the Conservative party had promoted pictures of themselves supporting the campaign of “20’s Plenty”.
This kicked off Welsh media into a frenzy. For many it seemed this was the issue of utmost importance. I was a little baffled. To me, a centre-left Social Democrat, it seemed like a sensible enough idea to reduce road accidents and make urban centres more livible with a relatively low inconvenience cost. If it works, great, if it doesn’t scrap it. I can understand centre-right folk being a bit more sceptical and as they value individual liberty a little more highly and social cohesion a little less highly and tend to be more averse to social change unless there is a very clear case fot it. However for those on the hard-right this was the number one issue, loudly proclaiming how ridiculous and somehow viscious an attack on individual liberty it was to drive slightly slower where there are children and the elderly people trying to live their lives. When the right to protest or human rights to be taken away, these people were not bothered about, iso it’s not freedom as such that they care about? It made me wonder what was going on. How has our political world become so emotive and divisive?
I believe it’s understanding the difference between centrists, whether they lean right or left and the hard right and the hard left. The left generally support the 20mph law, as it intention is to improve road safety, to improve society, so it ticks the boxes of the key principles of socialism. For the hard right it ticks the boxes of restricting individual liberty and and an overly-prescriptive “nanny state”.
This is perhaps the key difference between centrists and the extremists. For centrists the pragmatic solution, of what works, of policy where the benefits outweigh the costs and this can be tested by data. Centrists only support a law like this 20mph law if it actually reduces the cost of road accidents more than the cost of slightly increased journey times. Or at least to then modify the law so it targets where it does have advantages and leaves areas it doesn’t at 30mph. Whereas for the extremists, what actually works in the real world is of less importance than whether the policy aligns with key facets of their beliefs, whether the policy chimes with their worldview or not is mnore important than whether it is a policy with measurable benefits. That it is more important if something feels right rather than is demonstratably right. So to the hard-right this 20mph rule feels wrong and even if it actually saves many lives, or even improve traffic flow in congested urban centres.
The hard right don’t acrtually believe in liberty, freedom and democracy, just the parts that they like or the parts that affect them as a social group, it’s th enature of th eright to be selfish perhaps. In reality, freedom for us and not for everyone else, which to an expert or an academic is not a definition of freedom or liberty that stands up to scrutiny, as liberty only works if everyone in a society has freedom and liberty.
The difficulty of this ‘common sense’ approach, with ideas feeling right and a belief in principles that don’t actually hold up to close scrutiny that can be a real problem. I’ve used this example before, pre-Copernican people believed that the sun orbits around a flat Earth because that’s what you see in your everyday lives. Once you send cameras into space you can then see that the Earth is a sphere that spins around with a daily day night cycle. If humanity had never embraced abstract thought we’d still be banging flint together to make sharp stone edges to use on axes as the ultimate expression of human endeavour as we did for millenia
It was even pointed out that during the fuss they campaigned for 20mph zones only near schools and hospitals, the fact that most urban areas are near schools and hospitals and that it would cost far more and be less productive for towns to me a mess of 20mph and 30mph zones, that a default law was the cheapest, easiest and lkikely most effective way of making this change, with local democracy able to opt the roads out where it didn’t work. The objectors hadn’t thought it through, but that didn’t matter, the rabble rousing rhetoric was all of what was important.
Politics wasn’t always like it has been for the last 10 years or so. We used to kind of operate with a political consensus. Change didn’t happen unless a majority were convinced or that experts would be the ones making the case and the arguments for policy. This doesn’t happen as much now, particularly in the UK and the US. Centrists are now vilified as politics has moved to the extremes. We are now ruled by those who don’t trust expertise, don’t test ideas and rely on ideas and policy matching the dogma of political ideas from generations ago that were created to resolve particular problems of the time, that are not universal truths and simply damaging to the world we now live in. The politicians have worked out that reason and logic don’t get you very far, educated people have worked things out for themselves, of far greater political probity is rhetoric to appeal to the uneducated about politics, and this shift has proved successful for politicians. The UK and the US thus elected buffoons like Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.
How does this rhetorical game work. You start off with a truth, somethind hard to dispute, but also something that chimes with people’s gut feelings or “common sense”. For Trump it was that the political class are corrupt and don’t represent ordinary people’s interests, For Putin that NATO and the Western Alliance are really not good guys. Truths that are hard to dispute and of course not mentioning that Trump, Johnson and Putin are all very much a part of the establishment they claim to despise.
The next stage is to pretend that your big idea follows logically from that truth, even if the logic falls down under scrutiny, but their target audience isn’t people interested in philosophy or abstract concepts, so it works. For example: Politicians are educated and corrupt, climate activists are educated and corrupt, therefore climate change doesn’t exist, it’s just suits these educated folk to make money out of it. This isn’t logical as it falls into the pattern of: Brian is a bad cat who likes sleeping , Megan is a bad cat who likes eating fish, therefore fish do not exist.
It’s also that pursuing the divisive policies of the extremes of the political spectrum, also divides society and creates social unrest. Turning society into an us and them, rather than a people with a common cause and this is dangerous. The Hard Right are playing these divisive culture wars, because it works to convince the socially conservative majority (and people are naturally socialy conservative I believe) that they need to support them because it feels right, that homosexuality is a sin, that war against Bongo Bongo land is fine as they are all bad people there, that children in poverty deserve to be in poverty because their parents are not exactly like us and don’t live in “our” neighbourhoods.
How did this become socially acceptable? My other thought recently was that is is due to the decline of the church in our lives. For me going to a church does a couple of things. It gives everyone a space to think. The material given to attendees to think about comes from an educated person, the priest, who has plenty of time to think and reflect on events affecting the members of their church, that they are too busy working or raising children to consider and find a way to present these ideas in a thoughtful way and join everyone together for a bit of a sing song. This is the Episcopal Church of Wales I grew up with and attend now. We don’t accept the dogma of a religious text written 2000 years ago as being literally true but is a path to guide us to God’s truth, wisdom and peace that we seek to understand. To accept science and other academic disciplines and use those truths to also inform how we understand the world.
I mention this as when I was a teenager a lot of people left the church behind, I did too, Wales is now a very secular country, because it didn’t seem relevant, we could work this stuff out for ourselves and make our own decisions as confident young people without the church. Yet we’ve grown up into a society that doesn’t reflect, that just accepts dogma whether religious or political without thinking things through, without scrutiny and the decline of attending religious services in the UK may not be such a good thing.
All this is scary. Most of the time whether we drive at 30mph or 20mph doesn’t matter as we rarely knock over other people and many of us have never hit someone with our vehicles. Whether the staistics for next year show a percentage decrease in road accidents or not isn’t all that important (well unless the numbers are huge!).
However this media frenzy was overtaken by events, by the tragic escalation of the conflict in Israel-Palestine. I was deeply saddened as the reports came in daily of the mounting thousands of deaths that have been part of this escalation by extemists. We pray in church every week for the victims of war, whether Israeli, Palestinian or in wars that are ongoing elsewhere. It is such a human tragedy that we should reflect on that in 2023 there are still people firing bullets and flying drones and missiles at other people, killing children, destroying hospitals, destroying lives.
Yet it seems that not everyone shares this view of these events as human tragedy. My social media feeds are full of people condeming Israelies and sharing the tragic tales of Palestinian families. Others share the stories of the Israeli families who have sufferent and condemn the Palestinians. I don’t get this need to pick sides, this isn’t football, it’s human life and death. I also don’t get why the Hard Right side with Israel and the Hard Left with Palestine. or indeed that the Hard Right are more sympathic to Putin’s war on Ukraine and everyone else solidly backs Ukraine, it just feeds into more extremism. In Wales people have been so incensed that they are taking things out on the Jewish and Muslim communities in Wales. This just makes the conflict worse for everybody. I know decent Russian, Jewish and people from the Levant, it’s not these people’s that are to blame for this, but people don’t think it through.
Extemism isn’t helpful, it doesn’t resolve conflict. You need to instead work on solutions, because they exist or can be found. To do that you need to understand why there is a conflict and what will end that conflict and those answers don’t come from a gut feeling, a political principle or “common sense” they are complicated.
Squimple 