After email-gate, a last chance to get real?
I ought to have lots to say about ‘email-gate’ as it is being called. After all I write a blog, I used to work in Number Ten and I was once the subject of a nasty smear allegedly circulated by Damian McBride (that I had leaked a letter from Adair Turner to Downing Street). But what is there to say? In a prescient article some weeks ago the Guardian’s Martin Kettle developed the ‘good Gordon – bad Gordon’ thesis that is now being picked up by every other commentator. I’m not sure whether GB’s bad side is that much worse than anyone else’s but it feels so because of his carefully cultivated image as a man of unblemished high mindedness.
The game of politics is like any other sport. In a perfect world we would win playing beautifully, but if it takes a last minute dive in the opponents’ area – ‘well, after all, we did deserve to win really’. Who knows whether Red Rag really had been abandoned but if it was it would have been for tactical rather than ethical reasons. The contents of the McBride e-mails were nasty and puerile but the political classes are no less prone to inappropriate and childish humour than any other in-group. But it’s best not to get caught.
The problem for the country is not the damage to Brown’s reputation or to Labour’s (more senior ministers will no doubt now be wondering how they might decouple the latter from the former) but to politics as a whole. Friday sees the release of the apparently hilarious ‘In the Loop’, the film based on the characters from ‘In the Thick of It’. This will confirm the impression that politics is a game played by unprincipled, talentless, weirdos.
To say our country (which means us) faces big issues is an understatement. From the economic crisis to climate change, from civil liberties to pensions, there are huge choices to be made. There is a documented tendency in political journalism over the last two decades to focus ever more on the political game at the expense of exploring the issues behind the contest for power. Away from the froth there are important debates emerging between the centre left and right, not just on economic policy but on the role of the state, family policy and Britain’s relationship with Europe. Many other issues – most obviously climate change – are being suppressed as neither of the main parties wants to confront us with the full implications of an adequate response.
Somehow, all of us who want the next election to be a chance to open up rather than close down the issues, who want the choice we focus on to be about policy options not brand propositions, need to find ways of making this happen. Maybe we had to get to the absolute nadir before we could demand a different frame for our political choices.
This is Labour’s scandal. The answer lies not in handwritten letters or ministers scuttling round studios with the latest ‘line to take’ but in an authentic attempt by the Government to make the next twelve months of politics about policy choices. To do this would involve taking risks, sticking to them even when it meant telling difficult truths. It would mean sending a completely different kind of message through the political system – one that people would initially assume was just a tactic.
It isn’t likely, especially in an administration whose political motto should be ‘all tactics, no strategy’, but in as much as it often takes desperation to inspire genuine change, who knows, we could end up being grateful for email-gate.
New times, new politics?
There is a brilliant piece by my old friend Martin Kettle in today’s Guardian. In all the political breast-beating about the world after the crisis he sees something I sensed but could not name (though it echoes the thesis of my first annual RSA lecture).
The political classes are arguing about which of them and which of their ideologies is best suited to manage the post-crisis world. What none of them seems to get is that any plan that understands people as the object (whether they are the object of markets or the state) rather than the subject of change is doomed to failure. The current argument between left and right about how best to empower people is like a man with a fork and a man with a sieve fighting over how to bail out a sinking boat.
This is a problem of social buoyancy. Politicians can only steer a boat that has the capacity to float. But over recent decades we have thrown too much civic ballast over the side and we have dragged on too much individualist cargo in its place.
This sounds like a counsel of despair. And if we had to rely on an ontology derived from an admixture of Cartesian dualism, neo-liberal economics and our flawed intuition, so it would be. Now is the time for us to call on a wealth of powerful analysis derived from neuroscience, behavioural economics, social psychology and moral philosophy to recast our very notion of who are and how we thrive as human beings.
Take just two insights and imagine, really imagine, how different our world would be if we lived according to them.
First, our personalities are less fixed and more dependent on the context in which we place ourselves than we think. While the things that make people feel good (family, friendship, altruism, good health, fulfilment in our work) are much more universal and constant than the booming messages of consumer capitalism beg us to believe.
Second, our brains are much more plastic (changebale and adaptable) than we imagine. All of us have huge scope to develop as human beings throughout our lives. What matters to that development is to do with inner reflection and social connection more than material success or hierarchical status.
This may sound pious and irrelevant to today’s scramble out of crisis. But one of the reasons the new world will see the West decline and the East rise is that, all in all, the citizens of the East have a more realistic and sustainable (which to some extent means humble and resigned) idea of what life involves. The simple fact that most of the West consumes more than it produces while most of the East produces more than it consumes is a powerful symptom of cultural difference.
We cannot simply abandon our own cultural traditions, and there is much of the West to cherish and preserve. But for leaders to construct a feasible future for our societies means citizens reimagining a feasible and fulfilling way of life for themselves.
But when will politics get anywhere near questions like this?
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