1000 Brussels

I’ve just finished reading John Lloyd’s new book, What the Media are Doing to Our Politics. Although I agree with Lloyd’s general thesis – that the media, particularly in the UK, have too much unchecked power – the book itself is not altogether a satisfying read. It makes a convincing case that parts of the media are behaving irresponsibly, but doesn’t really offer much of a plan for change.

One of Lloyd’s main worries is that the media, particularly the press, are now taking an automatically hostile line against politics and politicians, and that they are setting themselves up as arbiters of truth and public opinion, making themselves out as superior to mere elected politicians or scientific experts.

As if to confirm this, tonight’s Newsnight began with Kirsty Wark standing in front of her desk and excoriating the Government. This quote is not exact, but is a fair approximation of what she said.

The Government has not banned smoking in public places, or forced the food industry to reduce the amount of fat and food in the food it sells. Are they really concerned about accusations of the nanny state? Or are they more worried about the interests of big business?

No-one who heard the introduction would think that the Government could possibly have a good reason for not cracking down on salt and smoking – is that really the way to introduce a news (rather than a comment) programme?

The message here is “everyone but us is stupid and evil”. The unintentional message is “and we are insufferably smug and self-righteous”.

Jon Lebkowsky rightly points out the moral element of democratic reformation in this post.

Morality is a tricky topic – perhaps more so in agnostic Europe than in the US, where religious morality is still politically important. Democracy is not a religion, requiring moral orthodoxy from its adherents, but if a more participatory democracy is going to be possible, it needs an agreement between its participants on standards of honesty and debate, as well as shared values of equality, openness and personal liberty.

The term “50:50 nation” – meaning, one that is evenly divided along party lines – is sometimes applied to the US at the moment. Surely, in this fraught election season, this is far too centrist a name. The trench warfare nation, or the pyrrhic victory nation, perhaps. 50:50 implies everyone is near the centre. That may be true about the American population in general, but as the Washington Post discusses today, the arguments between the different sides of the political spectrum are bitter and personal.

There is great danger in too much attack politics. Every political system depends on a certain level of trust – the idea that we are all good chaps, and good chaps know what good chaps are expected to do and will never push things too far, in the words of Peter Hennessy. Without that, politics becomes a zero-sum game, popular respect disappears, and factional interests grow in importance until they overtake national interests.

As Orwell says in Notes on Nationalism:

For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible.

Are the politics of hate a permanent feature of American life, or just a reflection of the attitude to the current President?

(Thanks to Doug Masson for the pointer)

It’s clear that the people as a whole have become disengaged from politics in recent years. There’s no need to multiply examples – from falling turnouts around the world, to endless polls showing politicians and journalists vying for last place in the trust stakes. People have become less interested in taking part, and less trusting of those who speak for them.

If you’re interested in politics, as I am, it is hard to understand how people can fail to appreciate the central importance of politics, and beyond belief that people can’t see the difference between George Bush and Bill Clinton, or Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. But then, I love cricket, and I can’t see why people don’t appreciate the attractions of a game that lasts five days and takes breaks for lunch and tea. The truth of the matter is that for me, politics is a career and an interest. My interest in it is no more surprising than the interest of a doctor in medical advances, or a computer engineer in a new operating system. The general mass of people, who don’t have politics as part of their working lives, have many other competing interests – their own careers, their families, football, computer games, music. Politics is just one hobby among many – and not a popular one, at that.

Those involved in politics, whether politicians, journallists or civil servants, feel that they are involved in the decisions being taken – or, at least, that they understand the reasons and the manoeuvring behind them. For those outside the political class, their involvement is restricted to an omnibus vote every four years or so, and perhaps a focus group or opinion poll in between. Even the interested layman can’t really feel like an insider just from reading the papers or watching the news.

The irony is that at the same time, the political class want to understand the people, but can’t. As a result, they commission opinion polls, focus groups, and other anthropological research to find out about the strange and capricious people they serve. One of Tony Blair’s closest advisors is a pollster – Philip Gould. Blair has been criticised for this, but how could it be otherwise? Representative democracy has taken us this far, that the people’s desires must be sated, but those whose job it is cannot know what those desires are from day to day.

Two changes have deepened the division between politics and the people over the last few years. The political involvement of those outside the political class has shifted away from mass-politics towards single-issue organisations. At the same time, the political class has closed and become more self-contained.

Low-level political involvement has shifted from party and trade union membership into single issue movements. Parties and trade unions are inherently part of the Parliamentary process. Single issue lobbies are inherently outside it, trying to influence the processes in their direction.

Second, the political class has become more closed, and politics more a life-long career path. It is a common point, but in the ’50s and ’60s, it was usual for people to come into politics late in life, after a career in unionism, industry or the law. That still happens, occasionally, but a look at the front benches of the two main parties in the House of Commons today shows that the majority of them have been politicians for most of their working lives. As politicians grow younger, they remain in politics for longer – closing off the political world from everyday experience of life outside. No-one expects Stephen Twigg or Ben Bradshaw to leave politics and become union convenors at a factory. They will remain – one way or another – in the political world and for all their undoubted skills, they will understand the rest of the world less.

There is perhaps no better illustration of the decline of politics than the rise of Big Brother. I don’t mean that as a criticism of Big Brother.

That original show was one of the innovations in the last ten years of television, and I imagine that with some planning it would now be possible to watch reality TV from morning till night without a break (other than for advertisements). It has been much criticised – with John Humphrys and Bob Geldof being two of its most recent opponents. John Humphrys thinks that it is shallow, exploitative television, which it is. Others have said that telephone voting is less audience participation than a revenue stream, which is also true. But one of the most interesting recent criticisms was from Bob Geldof, who said that people are tired of reality television and want to see more reality. I don’t want to disagree with Mr Geldof, but I think that he has missed one of the most important aspects of reality TV – that it is reality. The things seen on screen are actually happening.

I’m not going to defend Big Brother against its critics, but I am a great fan of reality. For me, the real nature of the show, and the real people displayed on it, are the principal draw of the whole programme. The voting element is interesting, in its way, but if you watch the programme, it is only a small part of the show in terms of airtime. The prize money is, frankly, entirely irrelevant. I would think the producers could reduce the prize to a matter of pence, and they would still be oversubscribed by twenty or thirty times.

No, the real appeal of the show is the fact that real people are put through extraordinary things on television, for our benefit. They may not be a representative cross-section of society – indeed, they may be self-obsessed bundles of insecurity, desperate to secure C-list celebrity status – but people understand that. No-one thinks that Big Brother is some sort of demographic study, but they appreciate, I hope, that the show is a true picture of what people like that would do in a situation like that.

It should be said that in that respect, at least, Big Brother is a richer and more real experience than many soap operas, dramas or novels, or any other form of popular entertainment that is patronised by the elite. In any Shakespeare play, for example, the most eye-stretching assumptions are accepted as perfectly normal, and behaviour that would have most people under restraint and heavy guard is seen as illustrative of the general human condition. Timon of Athens goes and lives in a hole, but finds a pile of gold. Macbeth meets three witches. Hamlet and Laertes between them kill most of the Danish royal court with no intervention from outside. All these things are wonderfully written, beautifully crafted and of great applicability to the human condition, but they are not reality.

And so we come back to Mr Geldof’s point about reality. I am not sure what sort of reality Mr Geldof believes that people want, but I assume he means political reality. But what reality is there in a statement like, for example, “British school children’s performance is more strongly correlated with birth inequality than in any other country in the West”? That statement is true, as it happens, and a major concern for the Department for Education and Skills. It is real for students of the topic, real for the civil servants who are trying to do something about it, real for the Ministers who have to defend themselves on the issue, but entirely unreal for almost everyone else.

It is unreal for several reasons. First, it is a statistic, and so people are understandably greatly suspicious of it. Second, it is a political issue, and so people might plausibly believe that it could be presented in a different light by a different political party. Third, it is a matter over which the generality of people can have no influence whatsoever – who could possibly be interested in something like that?

This lack of reality, while a problem in itself, is really the symptom of a wider split between politics and the people, which leaves us prey to irrationality, and open to the most dangerous and anti-democratic elements in society. The solution, I believe, lies in a transformation that makes politics more personal, and shows people that their actions can change things, and thereby change the world.