Thursday, April 14, 2022

Political personalisation and the jigsaw

Historian David Starkey has been asked (from 6:00 here) whether the Chief Librarian at the British Library should continue in her post. In his reply he says that British institutions now have a particular strand of political thought running through them like the letters in a stick of rock.

Not so long ago I thought that intelligent children shouldn't attend school if there is some reasonable alternative; I now think the same about many universities, which because of their ideological intolerance I call 'monoversities.'

But this being so, there is no point in trying to remove an individual from the structure. If you take a piece out of a jigsaw it leaves a hole that only another piece with exactly the same shape will fill. It is the picture itself that is a misfit.


The same craziness is evident across the Atlantic; and as here, there is more than one jigsaw. Right-wing commentators go on about strands of socialism and race relations; but at the top of American society the jigsaw is about wealth, its increase and preservation by power and influence, and the main political parties appear to collaborate so well that some commentators I read refer to them as 'the uniparty.'

These collusions and petty tyrannies, encouraged by their success to overreach, are likely to continue and worsen until there is a revolt. Starkey cites Brexit as an example.

Is it too feebly idealistic to hope for reform, instead?

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