Political Belligerence

 The Post-Truth era, in which we all now exist, it seems we have to also get used to a heightened level of political aggression and game-playing. Politicians are apparently happy to take greater risks with outright lies, half-truths, misdirection and gaslighting. 

In my four decades of writing about politics in many different countries, I can’t remember a time when shameless dishonesty was so rife. Sadly, many seem to be getting away with it and like a child with a new toy are delighting in it as it appears to make little, or no, difference to their political standing. 

It seems like a revelation to them, and they are revelling in it. It has emboldened some to behave as they like and take even greater political risks with their lies. 

"All is fair in love, war and politics", is a much used proverb when discussing the machinations which go on in the political world. While deeply cynical, it is nonetheless at least partly true. 

Look at former US president Donald Trump. His litany of years of lies and bad behaviour - not least the Big-Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him - has gradually descended into unbalanced ravings. His call for the US Constitution to be torn up so he can be simply reinstalled into the White House, is as outrageous as it is mindblowing.

Happily his antics look like they are finally backfiring on him and President Biden now leads Trump in a head-to-head matchup, 47 percent to 40 percent. Plus, Two-thirds of Republican and Republican leaning voters want Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to run for President in 2024. (Personally I’m not sure which one is worse, but that’s another matter.)

But such behaviour has emboldened the likes of Republican Kari Lake to flatly refuse to accept she lost the 2022 Arizona governor race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, a move which led one US publican to describe her as the “saddest dead-ender” and someone who has “doubled down on a losing bet: election denial.” 

There are others like gun-toting Republican Colorado representative Lauren Boebert, notorious for fueling anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry, support for the Big-Lie and being an insurrectionist sympathiser. Likewise Georgia Republican representative the crazy Marjorie Taylor Greene with her Space Lasers, Political Murders, and Muslims Taking Over America. All truly bizarre stuff if you can be bothered to check into what exactly she said. 

Take the brutish Boris Johnson in the UK. His bravado and disdain for the public led to him telling lie after lie, a strategy which eventually caught up with him and he was deposed as leader of the ruling Conservatives. He is still under investigation by a Commons committee over whether he misled the UK Parliament.

Again, this has bred contempt for the truth with Secretary of State Michael Gove claiming the UK had secured GBP800 billion in “new free trade deals'' since leaving the European Union.

Which is a blatant misrepresentation of the facts because the bulk of this figure is not “new” trade and he has since been reprimanded by The UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) which has warned the ruling Conservatives that they should provide sources for such figures in the future.     

These are just recent examples of shameless dishonesty in politics which have ‘come home to roost’ but it is nevertheless a worrying trend that such outrageous behaviour is on the rise and lying is becoming ‘part of the political game’.

It’s easy to identify such trends here in Taiwan with some politicians feeling it is OK to ape some of the more outrageous behaviour we are witnessing abroad. That’s not to say it is anything new, but it does seem such practices are on the rise.

For example Terry Guo who has said Taiwanese people have no choice of which Covid vaccine they have, which is a clear lie. He also said the Government didn’t care whether people lived or died during the pandemic which I would class as not only a lie but also the dirtiest of political game playing. Of course the government cares whether people live or die.   

While the atrocious behaviour of the likes of Trump and Johnson did catch up with them in the end, it nevertheless propelled them to power in the first place and for a while afterwards they made political capital out of it.  

Politics is a dirty business, and, like boxing, is aggressive, confrontational and sometimes nasty but should be played to a set of rules. Outright lies, misdirection and gaslighting should play no part in a civilised society.    

Which brings us to the opposite situation. What happens when politicians act in a decent way, are broadly honest and try to behave in a respectful way towards voters? The answer is they  tend to lose out to those who think they can behave badly and break the unwritten rules and maybe even appear to be weak. 

There really needs to be an element of fighting fire with fire, with lies quickly called out just as aggressively as they were told in the first place. That is not something I see happening often in Taiwan. The government response to recent outrageous comments have been left unanswered for hours, sometimes days by which time the lie, or comment, is planted firmly in people’s minds and it is too late. 

Winston Churchill once said “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” 

At least responding to that lie quickly lessens its impact and maybe stops it in its tracks. Waiting hours to come back with a rebuttal is simply not good politics.

It’s also noticeable that the current administration appears not to think too hard about the way they deliver their messages. An excellent example of this is their latest budget announcement on Facebook.

It led with TWD111 billion to pay back government debt and towards the end it announced TWD577.3 billion more local government spending and more cash for education, infrastructure, defence and environment. 

This was a golden opportunity to lead with the good news of more spending on all the things people care about and push the budget payback to the bottom, or even not have it as part of the highlights at all. It would have been the smart way to handle it politically. 

But it backfired hugely as people latched on to the relatively small 111 billion figure and likely didn’t even read down far enough to find the much bigger 577.3 billion figure before they waded in with criticism. It even broke the first rule of journalism which is to lead with the bigger more important figure. 

That’s just one example but it’s fairly typical of the DPP and its somewhat passive approach to politics. Plus, the opposition parties are far more aggressive and emboldened in the Post-Truth era by the behaviour they see tolerated elsewhere in the world. 

With a presidential election just over a year away the current administration should perhaps think harder about their apparently relaxed and passive stance on the political battlefield and take a close, hard look at the way they make better political capital out of their successes.

Tinkerty Tonk... 

A familiar pang

(中文在下方)

Sadly, I felt the all too familiar pang of disappointment yesterday at the DPP’s poor showing at the local elections, although I felt more sorry for the cat who was curled up on the sofa and unusually quiet as the results rolled in.

I am no stranger to such disappointment, coming as I do from an innately conservative country where the ‘establishment’ has been building on itself for hundreds of years. 

In the UK it is the establishment of the rich and titled, public school educated so called elite. In Taiwan it is the KMT and those used to wielding power during the troubled times of Martial Law and in the years after as that rich and privileged strata of society retained power by dint of influence and money. 

So there tends to be a strong demographic at work as the older generation generally display a deference to the establishment, for whatever reason, which is something I have never understood but is nevertheless true. One essential in Taiwan is to lower the voting age to eighteen, but, of course, the establishment will resist this. 

The cat and I went to the polling place early yesterday and judging by the number of older people voting and several wheelchairs, my first comment was that it did not look good for the DPP. 

The turnout was low which is no surprise as these local votes, like the local elections in the UK or the midterms in the US, do not spark as much enthusiasm as they should, but that is a fact of life and something you need to accept.

That said, voter apathy among young people is an ongoing issue with many disillusioned with older generation politics and a sense of helplessness, or just a lack of interest, leads to them just not bothering to vote. This is a global problem and Taiwan is no different to many other democracies. I’m personally in favour of mandatory voting although even those countries which have it seldom enforce it vigorously. Australia being perhaps the most famous of these.  

I’ve had my fair share of disappointment with the stupidity of Brexit and the Brits voting a classic establishment figure like Boris Johnson into office with a huge majority. Both of which I found profoundly depressing.  

Whether voting for the establishment is caused by dogma, habit, or peer pressure the only thing to do is keep interested, get out and vote and don’t allow setbacks reduce your enthusiasm to keep the establishment orthodoxy on the backfoot.

Tinkerty Tonk...

其實想想是蠻令人悲傷的，我對民進黨在地方選舉中的糟糕表現，幾乎感到一種非常熟悉的失望之痛。不過我家那頭蜷縮在沙發上看電視，並且在開票結果不斷更新時異常安靜的貓，應該感到更加難過。

我對這種失望並不陌生，因為我來自一個天生保守的國家，那裡的“建制派”已經建立了數百年。在英國，它是富人、有頭銜、受過公立學校教育的所謂菁英體系。在台灣，那是國民黨和那些習慣於在戒嚴的困難時期，以及之後的歲月中掌握權力的人，他們因為財富和特權，靠著影響力和金錢保留了權力。

因此無論出於何種原因，從年齡層來看，老一代通常都表現出對所謂“建制派”的尊重，這是我從未理解但仍然是事實的現實。這次投票，台灣的一項重要改變是將投票年齡降至 18 歲，但當然，建制派會抵制這一做法。

我們投票當天一大早就去了投票站，從投票所外的老年人和幾個輪椅來看，我的第一評論是，這對民進黨來說不太好。

投票率低並不奇怪，因為地方性的選舉，如英國的地方選舉或美國的期中選舉，並不會激發選民應有的熱情，這是事實，也是你需要接受的。

這也就是說，年輕人對投票冷漠是一個持續存在的問題，許多人對老一輩的政治感到失望，無助感或缺乏興趣，導致他們根本懶得去投票。 這是一個全球性問題，台灣與許多其他民主國家沒有什麼不同。 我個人贊成強制投票，不過即使有強制投票的國家也很少大力執行，澳洲可能是其中最著名的。

我對英國脫歐的愚蠢行為，還有英國選民以絕大多數票，將像強生這樣的經典建制人物推上權力高峰感到失望，這兩件事都讓我感到非常沮喪。

無論投票給建制派是因為長久以來的信條、習慣還是同輩壓力造成的，你唯一必須做的就是保持興趣，去投票，不要讓挫折降低你的熱情，這樣才能讓建制派的傳統處於落後地位。

For Sale

Mayoral Clown Car

 (no longer required by owner)

Eight years old.
High mileage. 
Bodywork in poor shape after heavy use.
Seats in bad condition due to high constant high occupancy.
No seat belts.
Indicators not working.
Steering requires attention.
Would consider part-exchange for Clown Campaign Bus.

Tinkerty Tonk...

IV or not IV, that is the question

 

Tinkerty Tonk...

Corrupt, or just a childlike simpleton out to insult us

I don’t know if you have caught any of my recent pieces on various political shenanigans, but as the days go by I seem to be undergoing a shift in my emotional response, in terms of the way I view them.

The cat still flies up to the ceiling and gets angry, but to be honest I think I left anger behind months ago. I’ve moved from anger at the outright corruption, through incredulity at the utter shamelessness, and am now settled in a bleak despair at examples of behavior more suited to an attention seeking eight year old. 

Even this is now giving way to a feeling of being downright insulted by the transparent stunts these people actually think we will fall for. They really do seem to believe we have all just fallen-off a Christmas Tree, and they have given up even trying to be a little bit clever. 

A 38 year-old Ann Kao had the affront to emerge from a medical facility with an IV line still attached to her arm. Oh, and the sleeve of her baggy shirt conveniently rolled back to make sure all the cameras caught that she had been made so terribly ill by the criticism she brought on herself through her shameless and entitled behavior. As sad stunts go, it was a doozy.

It’s hard to conceive a more obvious antic to garner sympathy in a pathetic attempt to distract from her petty cash scam, moonlighting and not giving proper credit in a doctoral university paper. Of course, the rest of the TMD misfits lined up to defend her, but that is normality in the clown-car of deviants the party is.

They are laughing at us, and really do appear to think we are all so dumb as not to see through such simplistic and childlike games. I feel insulted, and I’m sure you do too.

Grow up guys, at least make a bit of an effort, you really are embarrassing yourselves now. 

Tinkerty Tonk…  

The dire state of British politics

I left the United Kingdom 25 years ago on a day when there was a profound transformation in British politics as Tony Blair’s Labour Party swept away John Major’s Conservatives with a landslide 179 seat majority on May 1, 1997. This put an end to 18 years of Conservative Party rule (note: The Conservative Party is also known as the Tory Party, they are one and the same.)    

My posting to Asia had been delayed because Reuters Editors’ wanted me to stay in the UK to help cover election night as I was then part of the political reporting team. So I left the London newsroom direct to Heathrow for Asia after election night and as Blair headed to Buckingham Palace to meet with Queen Elizabeth II for royal assent to form a new Government. I have not lived in the UK since. 

As the political cycle ebbed and flowed, there was a switch back to the Conservatives in 2010, who managed to just about scrape an election victory based on forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, so they were still not wildly popular.

We now seem to be witnessing an echo of 1997 with the Conservatives again deeply unpopular and riddled by chaos, scandal, economic mismanagement and an almost complete lack of party unity across a wide range of policy issues, but mostly membership of the European Union which for decades has split the Tories. It has torn many political careers to shreds. 

Rishi Sunak is now the fifth Party Leader/therefore Prime Minister, since the Brexit referendum in 2016. By any analysis, Brexit has been fundamental to the Conservative Party meltdown as the far right Europe-hating wing of the party openly battled with moderates and party discipline disintegrated.

Theresa May’s abject failure to persuade the party to rally behind her Brexit plan, Johnson’s apparent lies and disastrous Brexit deal culminated in his resignation over scandals too numerous to list here, and now Liz Truss’s disastrous 44 day dismal failure at leadership has left both the party and opinion polls in tatters.

Truss now owns the cringingly embarrassing ‘honour’ of being Britain’s shortest ever serving Prime Minister. The previous shortest time served was Tory Prime Minister George Canning, who died after just 119 days in office in August 1827.

Most of the current political carnage can be traced back to the 2016 referendum on whether the UK should remain in the European Union which split the country in two with the result only just coming down on the side of Brexit by 52 percent to leave and 48 percent to remain.

It took four long and acrimonious years until a deal was eventually thrashed out for Britain to leave Europe. The hard-right of the Conservative Party continuously pushed for a hard uncompromising ‘walk-away’ deal which created divisions in the party and eventually destroyed the Premiership of Teresa May. David Cameron resigned as Tory leader just after the referendum.

The slow but steady economic damage done by the Brexit deal is now all too evident with the UK’s trade performance recently falling to its worst level since records began, heaping more downward pressure on sterling and upward pressure on interest rates. This was made far worse by a mini-budget under Liz Truss which was quickly unwound but not until it has done even more damage to the economy. 

There has, of course, been the background factors of Covid, the war in Ukraine and subsequent rise in energy costs, but all this has been made worse by Brexit. The sunlit uplands promised by the leave campaign have not come, nor will they. It is obvious to those of even the meanest intelligence that leaving the EU was not a good idea. 

Tory backer and billionaire businessman Guy Hands last week warned the government he supports that is putting the UK “on a path to be the sick man of Europe”, predicting higher taxes and interest rates and fewer social services.

The longtime Coservative supporter called for a renegotiated Brexit otherwise Britain is “frankly doomed”.

The Conservative party “needs to move on from fighting its own internal wars and actually focus on what needs to be done in the economy”, he said in a radio interview.

Britain’s political woes do not just stem from Brexit or the mishandling of events like Covid and Ukraine, but a force far more fundamental and worrying is at play here. That is the level of talent within the ranks of the government’s Members of Parliament. 

“It’s not so much a talent pool,” commented one radio journalist last week. “It’s more of a talent puddle.”

The analogy is a good one. When the Tories were stupid enough to elect Liz Truss as their leader there were many across the media, politics and the public at large pointing out she was a lightweight, was overpromising, had no real substance and would crash and burn in a job she was so clearly not capable of doing. Just 44 days later they were all proved right. 

On the face of it, Rishi Sunak looks a better bet and is way more level-headed than Truss, but his party is nevertheless facing political oblivion according to the latest polls of voting intentions. 

Politico’s Poll of Polls has Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour party on 53 percent with the Conservatives on 22 percent. An election tomorrow would see the Tories all but wiped out.

Former Conservative Party campaign director Mark Neeham said last week “If current opinion polling is correct, Labour will have 500 seats at the next election and the Tory party will be reduced to 48,” he told Sky News host Chris Kenny. There are a total of 650 UK Members of Parliament.

The government does not have to face a general election until January 2025 and they are clearly hoping to turn things around before then. But the general public are sick of them and there are growing calls for an earlier election basically because Sunak is not seen as having a  solid mandate because he was not voted in by the public, or even the around 175,000 card carrying members of the Conservative party.

He had already lost a leadership challenge to Liz Truss and was simply ushered in as leader because he was the only candidate who gained the required 100 supporters among the 357 Conservative MPs. You can see just how shallow the tallent puddle is!

The British public is clearly sick of the constant lies, gaslighting and fantasy economics of the current government and Liz Truss with her pathetic 44 day shelf-life has been, for many, the final straw. 

Less and less people are believing that ‘things will get better’ or ‘we will fix things’ and the empty rhetoric is all sounding increasingly hollow and, frankly, pathetic.

Every voter in every democracy should look at the state of Britain now and reflect that when they hear their own politicians speak and question what they hear. Are they lying, gaslighting, full of empty or impractical promises or, frankly, just plain stupid and lacking in talent? 

Are your politicians swimming in a pool, or a puddle? 

“You can fool all of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time,” is a quote long attributed to Abraham Lincoln in around 1860.

It would seem that the vast majority of the Great British public is no longer being fooled. 

Tinkerty Tonk...

On the back foot - desperate politics

Politics is a game, albeit a very serious game because it potentially affects millions of ordinary people. But it is a game, and that is something voters quite often lose sight of.

Whether politicians play the game well is open to question. To my mind here is the latest example of someone playing it very badly and perhaps should be considering another career.   

When those playing start to say things that are simply not true, or a bent version of the truth, it really needs immediate push back before it can sow seeds of doubt among those who do not have the time to follow domestic or international affairs closely enough.

The latest, and most blatant, example of this kind of behaviour is the opposition calling the former Health Minister in his bid to become Taipei Major a “Murderer” over the way the handled the Covid crisis. 

Just how absurd do you have to be, or how stupid a politican, to say something so idiotic and so blatently untrue? 

The attacks reached a new high recently when Huang Shanshan angrily criticised former Health Minister, now Mayoral Taipei mayoral candidate Chen, as failing in his efforts to protect Taiwan citizens from Covid and accusing him of corruption in deploying the vaccine. Also, she became more unhinged by saying "If anyone does this, he will be punished by God, watching people die and seeing people hurt but feeling indifferent."

This is clearly an absurd rant and a rather pathetic attempt to play political games. It smacks of desperation and is the politics of the madhouse.

It also comes from someone who refused to pick up phone calls from the Minister at the height of Covid when she was the pandemic coordinator for Taipei City . This is supposedly a responsible politician who is seeking higher office?    

Before we get into the numbers which easily disprove such utter nonsense, let’s reflect for a moment the mindset of those with all the facts and numbers at their disposal who make such a statement. Let’s remember that accusing someone of being a ‘murderer’ is the most extreme form of defamation as the crime is pubilshable by death in Taiwan.

At the time of writing, Taiwan has lost 10,950 lives to Covid, the United Kingdom has lost 207,000. Adjusting for population, roughly the UK has three times the population of Taiwan, you have a comparison of 69,000 vs Taiwan’s 11,000. That is just 16 percent of the UK number.

Looking wider, deaths per million of population are currently around 826 for the world as a whole, with Peru topping the list at 6,421 deaths per million. Taiwan is at 127 from the top on the  list of 219. The United States is 20th worst, UK 23rd, European Union 34th and Germany 61st. China appears on this list in 213th place with three reported deaths per million of its 1.4 billion people, which is, by pure coincidence, near North Korea at 215th place which has reported a similarly low figure of zero per million!

Setting aside the obvious anomalies inherent in such lists which do not take into account methodology of data gathering, or indeed honesty, it is clear Taiwan, and by implication Chen himself, has done a fine job in steering the country through the pandemic.

I rode out the bulk of the pandemic in Taiwan with no restrictions on my movement, no lockdowns and really no inconvenience other than having to wear a facemask. Compare this to my friends in the UK who had to endure weeks of virtual imprisonment in their own homes,   being questioned by police if they were seen on the street and being fined if they did not have an adequate excuse for being outside. 

I had many conversations from those who wished they were in a country which was handling the pandemic sensibly and in a better way. Not to mention the huge economic damage the likes of the UK did to their economy by preventing people from going to work and the sheer waste of billions of pounds on their inept, and failed, Track and Trace scheme. 

In all these respects Taiwan stood head-and-shoulders above a G7 country and the world’s fifth largest economy with its huge resources in its handling of the pandemic. I would say it is impossible to say Taiwan, and the Health Minister, did not do a spectacularly good job.     

Just how politically desperate do you have to be to level such an appalling accusation at someone? Answer, as desperate as an opposition bereft of ideas and trying so hard to find fault as to resort to the rhetoric of the libellous and of the gutter, to try and score political points.

It is sad and depressing to see those vying for high political office are so wretched and have such low morals they cannot bring themselves to be honest and admit the former Health Minister did a good job during Covid and their ridiculous accusations are both weak and pathetic.

The simple facts are there for all to see and anyone can quickly Google them.  

It also puts fully on display the ineptness of their political acumen. Why not pick on his other faults rather than resort to lies? Why not criticise his policies rather than call him ridiculous names, why not come up with some alternative policies than his rather than froth at the mouth and yell “Murderer.” Particularly when it isn’t true. You know it, and worse for you, the public knows it. 

To those involved in this latest piece of nonsense, some advice. It doesn’t work, it never has, and it will not in the future and you are insulting the public. Lose the election by all means, but please just be a bit smarter about trying to win it and not bore us all with these inane and unwarranted attacks.

Tinkerty Tonk...