Where is the Pied Piper?
The town of Hamelin was full of rats, so the legend goes. Luckily for the good people of Hamelin, a bloke with a musical persuasion turned up and led them all away thus saving them from the plague – or whatever other rat-based horror was looming. Well, that was the theory…
As you’d expect, the people of the Middle Ages had a thing for plague myths, given that it had a tendency to kill a lot of them and it would wrong to draw any modern day equivalence from the story. But I will anyway as, it seems, we live in duplicitous times.
The moral of the story, extracted specifically for my own ends, is that rats are easily led. Let’s be honest, most of us don’t even want to hear our own kids play the recorder so the thought of following the noise into the river suggests a severely influenced will. Sadly though, rats are so easily led, if you get the wrong piper he’ll bring them the other way, cue plague.
So, as I lurch painfully towards my point, it’s important to have the right piper. A piper that is of sufficient moral fibre to leads the rats in the right direction but, crucially, one that is attractive to rats – and it might be important to make sure you pay him too. That’s quite enough analogy now.
We live in a political vacuum. There is plenty politics but no leaders, no real ones, no one that history will look back on and refer to as a “statesman”. We have Obama, for a few more months, but once he goes, where are the good pipers?
We have many people that are attractive to rats. Trump, Boris, Farage are all proficient on the pipe but they are not heading for the river.
As I grew up, there was always a notion of wisdom in politicians, venerable, intelligent, good. Now, I know this naive, but I was young. I’m still naive enough to think this should be possible. Whether the politicians of my youth were any good or not (and I would argue strongly for Donald Dewar and John Smith), the ones of today are utterly hopeless.
Today we have a choice, you can have politicians that can get the rats to follow, largely for their own ends or, those that know where the river is but tend to head there on their own. There is no doubt that Corbyn is an exemplar of morality but what use that is that with no command of the rats? Tony Blair did it, briefly. Anti-Tory protest or not, we stayed up for Portillo and had a moment of rejoice long before we realised that his river compass was a bit off.
How is it that we can end up with the choice of leader presented to us today? How can you possibly conceive of a situation where are you slightly sad that Cameron has resigned? That, surely, should not be possible. The quotable, inspirational statesmen of this time, Obama aside, are all in business. We might have followed Jobs or Elon Musk. Benioff is a very able politician, every time a state threatens anything immoral, he pulls out and they reverse it. He knows where the river is. But none of these people are in politics. What do we need to do to get some of the good ones to choose politics? Can we ever again? Is is such a squalid mire that it will be left to rat-catchers of Vulgaria?
A microcosm of this can be seen in Scotland. As Scottish Labour ran out of talent with a line of successively less-compelling leaders, the only politician of any note popped up and took over easily. Say what you like about Salmond but he could play the pipe. Nicola is similar and she, at least, has a better sense of where the river is. The national reaction to Ruth Davidson showed the gaps in statesmanship that exist. You turn up with half a brain and the world acts surprised, perhaps relieved. Scotland has a long history of producing the right type, leaders who are compelling enough to be followed and moral enough to head the right way. We need to do that again.
If there is anything good to come out of the current mess we’re in I hope it is simply this. Somewhere the next great leaders are watching the TV and with a “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more” they propel themselves forward, blow away the incumbents and get things moving in the right direction.
I know this analogy is perhaps flawed. The Piper ends up leading all the children away too. But this is exactly where we find ourselves now, a generation of young led away. There are good pipers and bad ones. Some offer £350M for the NHS knowing it doesn’t exist. We need better pipers than that. I just hope we find them soon – or ever.
