4. THAT WAS THE PRESIDENT AND THAT WAS THE MAN - On The Importance of Loving Our Enemies

Friday May 24th was one of those days that truly test your humanity.  As I stood teaching Year 8 about the panj kakke in Sikhism, my phone lit up on the desk with a sudden news alert: Theresa May, the Prime Minister, had formally announced her resignation.

About time.  I thought, as I carried on with my teaching.  As failed Brexit deal after failed Brexit deal had been defeated in parliament over these last few months, it was inevitable that the woman who had campaigned on a platform of “strong and stable” leadership and being the only person who could negotiate a good Brexit deal had got to go.  Her position had been untenable for far too long and there seemed no chance of anything significant changing in the stalled Brexit process so long as she remained in charge.

So as I read the news alert I felt happy that May was finally going.  Full disclosure: I am not a fan of the Conservative party or Conservative politics, nor do I want Brexit.  In the last election, as with most previous elections, I voted Labour, and in the 2016 referendum on leaving Europe, I voted to remain.  The fact that the Conservatives had brought us to Brexit in the first place was already a strike against them, but the fact that they had messed it up so spectacularly in the aftermath, first with then-Prime Minister David Cameron’s immediate resignation, and now with Theresa May’s inability to negotiate a passable deal, were enough marks against them without even bringing into the conversation the more pronounced ideological differences I have with their general right-wing politics.  And whatever caused the British vote to Leave the EU in 2016, it appears clear to me now that many people who voted for Brexit regret that decision and many others, now they are fully aware of what Brexit would actually entail, have decided that it’s better the EU devil they know than the no-deal devil they don’t.  The calls for a people’s vote on the actual Brexit deal, or a second referendum on Brexit entirely now that we know what Brexit will actually look like, have always seemed entirely sensible to me, and the only democratic way of resolving this political and economic disaster.  May’s departure seemed like it might open the way for, if not a second referendum entirely, then at least a new General Election which might act as a proxy for a second referendum, or at least rearrange Parliament to end the deadlock and deliver something the majority of the country can actually live with.

All of which is to say I was unreservedly happy to hear that May was resigning, and would have been even happier had she lost the last General Election and left a lot sooner.  I have not liked her policies as Prime Minister, I did not like her policies as Home Secretary, and I believe that she is personally responsible, through her decisions, for making many people’s lives in this country miserable, and far worse off than they would have been had she not been in charge.  When it comes to the Conservative Party, I agree with the UN - they have inflicted an “ideological project causing pain and misery” on the UK since their 2010 takeover of Downing Street (at the time in coalition with the Liberal Democrats) and, furthermore, I believe that the architects and overseers of this continuing policy programme, from Cameron and Clegg in 2010 all the way to May today are morally responsible for doing great damage to our country.

However, all that being said, the happiness I felt at May’s departure and the prospects for some change to eventually come to UK politics that may give us the opportunity to, in my opinion, put things right, was not the only feeling which washed over me as I heard the news.  Because for all my political views I am still a human being and when I heard that Theresa May had resigned I also thought: Good for her.  Now she can finally have some peace.

I may not like her politics, and may find much of her career to be morally reprehensible, but Theresa May is still a fellow human being and I do not see how one can have watched her throughout her troubled and difficult premiership and not felt, on a basic human level, some compassion for what she has had to live with.  The personal and professional humiliations on an almost daily basis, those giveaway moments of losing her voice when the stress clearly got too much for her battling body, routine ridicule in the national press and far worse across social media, the clear absence of any allies or friends either in her party or outside of it…  May’s public undoing as Prime Minister has been hard to watch, and no matter my feelings about her politics and the consequences of her policies, there have been many moments when I have felt sorry for her and hoped she had something to go home to at the end of the day that brought her life some joy.  Some days I genuinely wondered if she would be the first Prime Minister to take their own life while in office.  As a teacher, I know bullying when I see it, and across the political spectrum and in all corners of the media, May has been a clearly vulnerable target for the sort of ceaseless torment that would result in letters home and suspensions were she a teenager in any school in the country.  

While I absolutely sympathise with the multitude of reasons people do not like her and what she has done politically, I do not believe that gives us license to lose our empathy and be cruel anymore than I would allow bullying in my classroom if it were directed at a child we could all agree was a difficult pain in the behind.  Just as “every child matters” in the classroom, so too in the world should “every person matter”, even the morally questionable ones.

So I was quite saddened to see the glee with which so many took to Twitter in the direct aftermath of May’s announcement.  Owen Jones, writing for the Guardian (and later endorsed by Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn on Twitter under the heading “a human response to Theresa May’s resignation must include remembering those who are suffering because of Tory policies” as he posted a video of Jones saying the same thing on SKY News) is a good example of the sort of thing I mean, writing that we should “feel no pity for Theresa May” because “she has been the worst Prime Minister in modern times”. 

While a case can be made for the second part of his claim (though I would personally pick Cameron as worst due to Brexit and austerity being his inherited legacy, May is definitely a close second), there seems no sound reason to me why the truth of that statement entails the prior claim that we should therefore “feel no pity” for her.  Pity is a perfectly rational response for witnessing someone experiencing something we wouldn’t wish upon ourselves.  Empathy is what raises such pity to the wider notion that what we wouldn’t want ourselves must not feel any better for a person who is not us.  Compassion is what allows us to recognise, from that empathy, that we wouldn’t wish on others that which we would not want ourselves because we ought not want anyone to experience suffering, pain, humiliation, upset, or any of the terrible things a life can throw at you which reduce happiness.  In other words, Jones is trying to make the case that May’s terrible Prime Ministership has revoked her rights for basic moral concern.

When you unpack the legitimate criticisms of Conservative political policies - in this case Brexit and austerity - then it is precisely the lack of pity, empathy and compassion shown in such policies which are the cause of those complaints.  Taking away essential public services which others rely on and leaving vulnerable people lacking key necessities, denying benefits and support for the most desperate in our society, and scapegoating foreigners for all the things we hate so that International trade for the few can be achieved at the expense of the working many.  Whether you agree with these criticisms or not, it is clear that this is the moral foundation of the left’s complaints against Conservative politics, and of Remainer’s complaints against Brexit.  We ask how these politicians can be so unfeeling to the suffering of others, and so short-sighted about how far-reaching the impact will be of their decisions.  We talk about the privileged 1% ignoring the suffering of the 99%.  We talk about the horrific uncertainty levelled on Europeans living in the UK, and Britons living in Europe and we wonder why people could be so unfeeling; so lacking in empathy and compassion?

And then as soon as “we” see one of “them” suffering, we revel in it.  We not only take personal pleasure in the pain of figures like May crumbling in defeat, but implore others not to feel any pity for them.  Ignore that most human of instincts and “never forgive and never forget” as another Twitter personality I follow put it. 

The argument gaining traction over the last twenty-four hours seems to be this: when Theresa May resigned, she cried, but such tears must be ignored and not generate sympathy because she didn’t first cry for the victims of Windrush, Grenfell, public services cuts, and the environment.  She cried only for herself.

While it is true the lack of tears for all the casualties of her reprehensible policies show a deficit in her character which is why many of us think she is unfit to be Prime Minister and should be held morally responsible for the suffering she presided over, none of that means we ought to deny her, or ourselves, the very human response which clearly we believe society needs more of.  To not shed a tear for poor families burning alive at Grenfell, to step over a homeless person as if they were a piece of garbage on the street, these responses come precisely from a lack of pity, empathy and compassion.  And just as Kant once claimed that the way we treat non-human animals is indicative of the way we treat humans, and that our treatment of the latter can be bettered by improved treatment of the former, the way we encourage a more compassionate and humane society is surely by being more compassionate and humane to all, not by picking and choosing who deserves our moral concern along fabricated lines of “us” and “them”?

In the 1960s, after the assassination of JFK, folk singer, Phil Ochs wrote the following lyrics:

Oh, the bullets of the false revenge have struck us once again

As the angry seas have struck upon the sand

And it seemed as though a friendless world had lost itself a friend

That was the president and that was the man

The last line always stuck with me as I came of age politically - that was the President, and that was the man.  The distinction between the two things.  The role and the human being.  That the figurehead role may dominate our idea of someone, but that they remain a human being nevertheless.  It is this idea which made me feel sorry for George W Bush as he helicoptered away from the White House on his last day as President, a lonely figure now reviled by his own party as much as by his political rivals as the far more popular replacement moved in.  I loved Barack Obama and had despised the eight years of the Bush presidency; but this wasn’t Bush the president, this was Bush the man, looking old, bewildered, exhausted, and vulnerable.  Likewise, as a vocal critic of New Labour’s economic policies spearheaded by then chancellor, and eventually Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, I was no fan of Brown the politician.  But on the day of his election loss, as the country blamed him for an economic crisis which was more to do with sub-prime loans in America than Labour over-spending on UK schools, and as the media derided his being caught on a live mic calling a bigot a bigot, I felt sorry enough for the man to write him a letter of support.  I have no idea if he ever got it, but I wanted him to know that I felt he had been hard-done by and treated unfairly.  I got the idea from my grandmother, who had done the same when Bill Clinton was impeached, despite some differences of opinion she had with a few of his political decisions.

I deny the moral acceptability of the death penalty for murder precisely because I think murder is morally wrong (and my humane hope that the killer is spared execution sits in no conflict with my simultaneous belief that the killer is a moral monster and that justice must be done).  And it is this same logic which makes me deny the moral acceptability of withholding our humane concern for others just because we don’t like them or their actions.  True morality means recognising that kindness, compassion, empathy and love are always going to be a better choice than vengeance, spite, cruelty and malice, whoever it is directed towards.  I don’t believe in Jesus Christ, but I do believe that if we want to live in a better world we should love our enemies as much as we love our friends.

So I am glad that Theresa May is going, and good riddance.  But I am also glad that she finally gets to live her life without the wretched job she has been suffering through the last year.  That was the Prime Minister and that was the woman. I am happy about the possibilities for political change on the horizon, but I will never take pleasure in seeing another human being as miserable and broken as we have seen Theresa May in the dying days of her leadership.  I refuse to lose my humanity in the name of “winning”, “justice” or any other false cause that allows for “us” to become exactly the same monster as the “them” we think we’re fighting. 

AUTHOR: D.McKee