When people miss the point

There’s nothing more embarrassing than when people miss the point.

We’ve all seen it. The one guest who turns up to a theme party in the wrong kind of fancy dress. (My dad insists a friend of his once turned up to a party dressed as a giant rodent after mishearing ‘gangster party’.) The relative who says The Thick of It would be better without all the swearing.

Perhaps the most legendary (if apocryphal) point-miss of all time was Marie Antoinette’s ‘let them eat cake’. But over the last week we’ve seen some pretty strong contenders to rob her of that title.

On Tuesday, the Prime Minister opined that ‘Protesting is something you should do on two feet rather than lying down.’

On Friday, Armistice Day, the Public Order branch of the Metropolitan Police used their Twitter account to inform the public that ‘There is a policing operation in place to preserve the dignity of the 2 minute silence.’

And on Saturday, Francis Maude, the Minister for the Cabinet Office, suggested that the public sector unions should express their frustrations with the proposed vandalism of their pensions not by carrying out a full day’s strike, but instead downing tools for a token 15 minutes.

It’s all very embarrassing. One can’t help but wonder how one gets to be Prime Minister, for example, not only without having heard of a sit-in – which is of course by no means a new concept, as the Guardian have patiently tried to explain to him – but all the while apparently labouring under the impression that protests are to be carried out for the convenience of those being protested against. It all makes sense when you think about the pre-Occupy protests he has witnessed as Prime Minister – the marches from A to B, past him, with no risk that he might trip over them. They have all been so much easier to ignore.

Francis Maude, likewise, seems to have somehow come by the notion that when workers go on strike their first concern is how best to avoid annoying their employer.<

The Met tweet was a little different, but I think it still comes under the ‘missing the point’ heading, and not only because of an apparent misreading of the word ‘dignity’. When we decide to take two or four minutes out of our year to give some thought to people who were sent and are still sent to die in circumstances of unimaginable horror, then that moment of reflection and remembrance is quite a beautiful if an insufficient thing.

When the police promise ‘enforcement’, however, all they are doing is briefly keeping people quiet. This is a quite different thing, and one which, I would tentatively suggest, the fallen did not necessarily have in mind. The Kohima poem, after all, reads ‘When you go home, tell them of us and say/For your tomorrow we gave our today’, not ‘When you go home, do shush’.

The real theme of this last week seems to have been that our establishment will allow us to keep the rights that make this country what, at our best, we are – in these examples, the right to protest, the right to withhold labour, the right to pause and remember those who have died as a result of catastrophic political failures here and worldwide – so long as we use those rights in a manner that suits them. There’s no threat of legislating those rights away, of course – nothing so impolite. Just a few gentlemanly hints. “If you only strike for 15 minutes, you know, you might not have to lose a day’s pay. Just sayin’.”

God help us if the rest of the cabinet catch on to the trend. Lansley would love to float the idea that the right to free treatment on the NHS could be conditional on never getting sick. Iain Duncan Smith is probably dying to suggest that women maintain their right to work as long as they only take jobs that men don’t want (“I have this rather quaint view,” Cameron could explain, “that working is something women should do in a little cake-shop…”).

I don’t know about the trade unions and the protesters, but this all just makes me want to get more creative. The Prime Minister wants minimum hassle – I say we give him maximum inconvenience. Let’s put locks on all his toilets, or build a full-scale model of the Great Pyramid of Gisa in front of his telly, or tie some ducks to his leg. In fact – did anyone click on that link I posted in my last column (here it is again), about cacerolazo protests? They involve making as much noise as possible, usually by hitting kitchenware with other kitchenware.

Cacerolazos have been going since the 70s, shall we see if that’s quaint enough for him? Preferably when he’s hungover. Come on, let’s try it. The worst he can do is send the Met to make us be quiet.