"Rolling out to vote, I took my Benson"
Earlier this week, I played Joy Crooke's 2019 album Skin. In the process I stumbled across what is now one of my favourite songs, Kingdom. I replayed it a couple more times and I can safely say that it gave me good material for an old-fashioned overthinking session.
There a couple of lines from this song which also gave me some article inspiration as well, one of which I'll be going through in the post. Firstly, for a bit of context. Crookes wrote this in the aftermath of that years General Election where Boris Johnson's Conservatives won a landslide against Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party. This was an era of deep political polarisation in Britain as the topic of Brexit split through our communities, perhaps the most obvious divide of all being between the pro remain young and the pro leave mature voters who ended up winning the referendum by a margin of 52 to 48. Britain had also been going through the years of austerity under the Conservative administrations of David Cameron and Theresa May where funding for public services was slashed whilst Britain aimed to balance the books after the mass spending done during the financial crisis. Since 2010 when austerity measures were put in place, inequality, especially regional inequality has skyrocketed with the poorest in society being hit the hardest. From a political perspective the message was clear to a large portion of the British population, this government doesn't care for people like you and will continue to do so until we're voted out. The frustration was clear throughout the song. |
| Joy Crookes on Skin Album Cover |
"No such thing as a kingdom, when tomorrow's done for the children"
The idea of a nations legitimacy can mean different things for different people, the idea proposed in the line is relatively simple. The government of the nation is no longer legitimate due to its failure to adequately provide for its citizens. From a philosophical perspective this refers to the so-called social contract theory as was proposed by enlightenment thinker Thomas Hobbes'. In his book Leviathan, Hobbes' aimed to tackle one of the base ideas of political philosophy, our behaviour in the state of nature. This was a time before government or authority where mankind was forced to live communally. Hobbes' famously concluded that life in this period would have been, "solitary, poor, brutish and short," and that humans would simply be unable to cooperate without the existence of a state to rule over them. This is where his social contract comes in. Hobbes's suggested that because we can't live without it, we as people surrender some of our liberties away to the state. In turn we receive the protections which we wouldn't have otherwise had in a stateless society. Their role is to serve as a force to ensure order and a smooth running of the society, granting it the legitimacy to rule over us. From a British perspective means the government has a duty to ensure the safety and stability of its people. This is given to the government through the consent of the British people, however in any functioning democracy there are, of course, those who didn't consent for the government at any particular time. Hobbes sidesteps this problem through his idea of tacit consent. This is the idea that because we live and obey the laws of our nation and benefit from the safety derived from the government being a place, we are therefore implicitly consenting to being ruled over. The one way, in Hobbes' eyes, which a state can lose its legitimacy is through a failure to provide the safety it's contractually obliged to do. This is where the line at the top of this paragraph shows its effectiveness. In Britain, government policy has led to the untimely deaths of people across the nation. Our national health service is operating at maximum capacity with people forced to wait hours for an ambulance or to be given a bed at hospitals. Education is failing our students as truancy rates are at record highs as our kids flock out of classrooms, this in turn puts them out into a world where they'll be unable to compete against others. A report from the London School of Economics estimated that 190,000 excess deaths occurred between 2010 and 2019 due to cost cutting measures. Perhaps the most depressing indicator of state failure was the estimated up to 9000 so called additional, 'deaths of despair' as people living in the sixth richest nation in the world died prematurely due to drug poisoning. An economist would call this a misallocation of resources, a Conservative politician might refer to this as prioritising inflation, either way under the metric of Hobbes' the British government is failing in its sole aim of offering protection to its people.
The social contract
This is the idea of only one philosopher, now we can move onto a more contemporary political philosopher John Rawls. The American proposed we take part in a similar thought experiment called the 'veil of ignorance', here we are asked that if we had no knowledge of ourselves such as our own abilities and societal position, which principles would we put in place to best govern the nation. This is basically designed to push us to think of how we can create the most equitable society we possibly can. For example, something such as 'survival of the fittest' would be a pretty poor answer considering that you as the individual might be the weakest in society and won't get the same chance at life as someone who is stronger. Rawls concluded that there are only two principles from which a truly just society can function from. The Principle of Equal Basic Liberties and the Difference Principle. This is effectively his version of the social contract and is what a legitimate government has to provide for its citizens. Firstly the equal liberties principle. Rawls listed a number of liberties a state can provide however for the sake of clarity they can be boiled down to John Locke's inalienable rights of life, liberty and property. It's hard to claim the British government is threatening our life and property (in spite of neo-liberals whining about taxation) hence we can assume that they pass this metric. However, liberty is a more interesting matter, more specifically political liberty. Rawls specifically wants the state to grant people the liberty to enter the political process. For some this just covers running for parliament or council however in the modern world this is also through outside groups or protest. In recent years, both Labour and Conservative governments have attacked this right to protest as can be seen in Labour's recent Crime and Policing Bill which would ban face coverings at protests to benefit further police surveillance. Starmer's government have also been in the firing line for labelling Palestine Action as a terrorist group, this was after a few members engaged in political activism by defacing government property. This has then been used to arrest anyone showing support for the group as seen by the over a hundred arrests made by police across the nation, a clear attack on our political liberties. Lastly, The Difference Principle is the clearest failure of the British government. Rawls in his thought experiment accepted that inequality to some degree would be inevitable but the fairest method of doing so would be to ensure that those who are the most disadvantaged in society benefit the most. This can be seen in our progressive taxation system which ensures that those in the lowest tax brackets pay in the least as a percentage of their income. However, this difference principle is something that has been ignored in economic policy in recent times as well as at the time of this song. I've already touched upon the damage austerity did to Britain however it's important to note that it was those on low incomes, living in deprived communities, and the disabled who lost out the most to austerity measures. Public sector workers had their wages frozen, meaning those handling our services effectively had a pay cut as their money didn't go as far as it used to. This is all to show the government failing yet another element of the social contract as showing us all that there is, in fact, no such thing as a Kingdom.
To conclude, the British government at the tine of this song was failing in its obligation to its citizens. The priorities of the 2010s Conservative Party was not to ensure a just society but to raise big macroeconomic performance indicators, irrespective of whether people felt the difference or not. Kingdom is one of the most underrated songs on the album and I hope you go have a listen sometime.
Thanks,
David Agyemang