Sunday National, Herald on Sunday, 8th January 2023.
“People are tired of politics. Tired of parties focusing more on what separates us than brings us together. I passionately believe there is more that unites us in this great country than divides us. Yes or no, Brexit-backing or Remainiac, vegan or carnivore, right or left, up or down, high tax, low tax, working or unemployed, sick or healthy, alive or dead – know that we are on your side.”
I’d ask you to guess who I’m quoting – but this kind of nebulous plea for unity could have tumbled from the mouth of any centrist dad politician roughly any time in the last half decade, delivered with all the sincerity of a Mississippi riverboat gambler. Extra credit if you guessed Anas Sarwar.
If you stand ready to take both sides of every conflict, backing both sides of every division – you aren’t demonstrating a worldly capacity for compromise or an uncommon empathy: you’re just a political weathervane with full 360-degree rotation. Sermons about peace and love are bad enough from ministers of religion. Political homilies about the lion lying down with the lamb are even worse.
Christmas is supposedly the “season of goodwill to all men.” This January, the leaders of the two UK political parties have taken these festive bromides to heart. Not content with leaving their hosannas in December, this week both Sir Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak launched their New Years with political appeals – to put politics behind us. Both leaders have been rewarded by the commentariat, which has concluded “the adults are back in charge.” No phrase better captures the fatuousness of what passes for political coverage in this country.
What Sunak has in mind is “a future that restores optimism, hope, and pride in Britain.” “People don’t want politicians who promise the earth and then fail to deliver,” he says – so far, so profound – but the new PM has also concluded that the public “want government to focus less on politics and more on the things they care about.”
It’s a theme he’s warmed to before. In his first speech after Liz Truss had been safely defused, Sunak immediately draped himself in this suspect neutrality. “I stand here before you ready to lead our country into the future,” he said, standing ready “to put your needs above politics.”
Because the public doesn’t care about politics. And their needs, apparently, aren’t political. If the government is going to “talk less about politics,” what precisely does the Prime Minister think he is going to spend his time nattering about? Will PMQs be replaced by a gentle meditation about the merits and demerits of Taylor Swift and this season of House of the Dragon? Will government and opposition spokesmen exchange Commons speeches, discussing their favourite storylines from Eastenders and summer holiday plans?
For Sunak, “politics” seems to be shorthand for the snarky, ego-led, savagely personalised, self-basting, point-scoring, debating-club nonsense, where the opposition criticises the government for policies it might easily have adopted, and the government blames the last opposition regime for the structural issues it hasn’t managed to get a handle on. It’s what David Cameron dubbed the “Punch and Judy” side of politics.
But unless you’re the most facile political correspondent gossiping your way through the parliamentary lobby, you must know this isn’t what politics is. Only the most astonishingly privileged people could mistake Westminster parlour games and popularity contests for the real deal. Which I guess is unfortunate – because the greater part of our political media report on politics in exactly this way.
I’ve been trying to work out why I find this kind of anti-political rhetoric from politicians so irritating. Some of what triggers me is the insider-outsider dynamic it implies, where “we” – the savvy, the engaged, in-the-know people talk down to a baffled and ignorant public. This fundamental framing of what politics is about is fundamentally disempowering.
Second, politicians trying to make a virtue of being anti-political just valorises apathy, patting low-information, terminally-disengaged people over the head, reassuring them that their unstudied uninterest in the life and death decisions affecting their fellow citizens demonstrates an admirable ordinariness rather than suggesting they’re incurious, unreflective and dumb as a brick. There’s nothing zen or authentic about being uninformed – and there’s something profoundly cynical about people who care deeply about politics colluding in the idea you should feel free to switch off and leave them to it.
Third, Sunak’s cynical attempt to depoliticise himself for political advantage undersells what democracy is for in a free society. There are sufficient unfree societies in the world not to give encouragement to the authoritarians promising simple solutions to complex problems without the inconvenient consultation democracy demands. Democracy is about the peaceful resolution of disputes, collectively deciding where the burdens and benefits of our shared life should fall and resolving the inevitable conflict between the winners and losers those choices create. The conflicts are real and often healthy. We can and should work through them seriously – rather than wishing them away in a kumbaya chorus which pretends they don’t exist. Democratic politics without division is barely democratic politics at all – and you’d expect democratic politicians to have some elementary appreciation of that.
And fourth, Sunak’s schtick is obviously manipulative. It seems astonishing that after Truss’s ideological smash and grab turn in Number 10, enthusiastically endorsed by the party membership and the Tory press in solemn chorus, we’re now supposed to believe that Rishi Sunak isn’t some kind of Goldman Sachs ideologue with a preference for a night watchman state and an abacus for every child. Instead, he’s just a common-sense chap with common sense solutions for Britain’s ills who you could have a friendly but awkward chat with at your local foodbank. Will sir be having two or three buttons for the back of his head?
I think more of politics than the Prime Minister apparently does. What Sunak can’t seem to fathom is that people’s needs are political. If you are beggared by the government, your beggary is political. A decent standard of life is a political demand. Provision of an effective health service isn’t a private matter but a public thing – an achievement of politics – which political decisions fundamentally ground. The ability through the education system to realise your potential is fundamentally a political one, which countless generations of ordinary people were historically excluded from until politics intervened.
Leaving families hungry because your government has a policy of balancing the books on the backs of the poor is a political choice – not just good housekeeping and sound money. If you truly believe this is justified, have the courage of your convictions and say so. Is the UK government really going to try to persuade us that this government’s fast-tracked, full-frontal assault on public sector workers’ right to strike isn’t rooted in his party’s bone-deep hostility to the idea of working people organising to defend their interests? That it’s all just plain cooking? Give us a break.
In Italy in recent years, supposedly unpolitical technocrats like Mario Monti and Draghi were summoned from EU and central bank gigs to serve as Prime Minister. The technocrats were tasked with tackling everything from the sovereign debt crisis to the onset of Covid-19. In UK politics, by contrast, the elected leaders of both UK parties now seem determined to make administrators of themselves, relieving the public from the chore of thinking about how the benefits and burdens of our society are ordered and promising to knuckle down quietly. There’s nothing vital, popular or energising here – no insurgency.
Perceptions of competence matter, but there’s no shiftier kind of politician than one who tries to persuade you they bring no ideological freight to their jobs. If you want to be a functionnaire, join the civil service fast stream. If you want to preach, go to church. Being a political eunuch is not a virtue in a politician. Politicians promising to end divisions are, ultimately, promising sterility. They’re making a desert – and calling it politics.
Andrew Tickell 