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April 25, 2005
There goes the fear...
Hit-and-miss Spectator columnist Peter Oborne continues Channel 4’s election unspun series this evening, as he attempts to discover Why Can’t Politicians Tell the Truth?
It’s pretty much guaranteed to make interesting viewing, although the answers are unlikely to reveal anything too unexpected.
Politicians can’t tell the truth for the same reason that the Sun is the biggest selling newspaper in the country: the public has a disturbing tendency to be both cretinous and credulous in excruciatingly excessive measure.
As the previous programme in the series, What They’ll Never Tell You showed, trying to sell even mildly radical ideas to the public is asking for trouble. The insecure types that make up the hoi polloi are more trusting of the editor of the Daily Mail than they are of the country’s politicians – and woe betide the tabloid editor who tries to offer a thorough and well-argued piece about government policy to his readership.
This distrust of Westminster isn’t entirely misplaced, given politics’ sickening short-termism and necessity to distort the truth as much as possible, for fear that if they don’t their opponents will – a cruel implication of game theory decision-making. But paper-selling motives are no purer than vote-winning ones, leaving the whole thing in a big ol’ mess.
There is a solution, obviously, but implementing it would require getting through the same maladroit malaise that makes the political waters so murky in the first place. That is a problem to be dealt with later, for now I’m only concerned with how to make government more efficient, more representative, more accountable, eradicate the fear of radicalism, restore real intellectual debate – deciding policies through independent inquiry rather than political ideologies, mudslinging and pandering to the lowest common denominator and allow politicians to tell the truth.
PR would help of course, going a long way to solve the problems of accountability and representation, but to sell the public on big ideas means getting them to overcome their fear of the unknown, or at least conning them into the right decision.
It struck me while watching What They’ll Never Tell You that it was very possible that a number of people watching, who would’ve been instantly turned off by some of the suggestions, were probably won over in the course of the argument.
The power of TV in holding people’s attention long enough to persuade them of something is unique. If a government were to have a regular prime-time TV slot in which to engage with the populace and take the time to explain what they were doing, we could much more easily call this country a democracy. Someone would probably feel obliged to install Big Brother style text opinion-polling, but it would be a small price to pay.
The British people are not apathetic; they’re just disillusioned. If the powers-that-be were to take the time to explain and engage, power would sensibly shift away from tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappers and back to reason.
People may be stupid, but they still maintain a capacity to be educated, so long as they don’t have to do anything too taxing. We have the creative thinkers, we have a public willing to listen and we have the medium with which to connect the two. But sadly we still have the fear.
Posted by pauldavies on April 25, 2005
Comments
"PR would help of course, going a long way to solve the problems of accountability and representation".
I would say that a parliament that actually represents the views of the electorate is absolutely fundamental.For too long we have had a system that represents the views of a few floating voters in marginal constituencies who largely get their opinions from the Mail and the Sun.
But here we are up against the lack of awareness amongst the public at large - as distinct from the very few convinced reformists - of the grossly unrepresentative way we elect our "representatives". Here is a pargraph from the ICPR report issued last year:-
"Focus groups convened to test people’s reaction to different systems suggested that many citizens were unaware of any defects in first-past-the-post until they were pointed out. The attitude of surveyed respondents tended to change dramatically when they found out more about the operation of first-past the-post. MOST WERE CONVERTED TO SOME FORM OF PR."
Short of a special educational programme envisaged by Jenkins in his 1998 report the only means whereby the public are going to be better informed about electoral systems is through the press and the broadcast media - above all the
BBC.
And yet what do we find? In the press, journalists and commentators who regularly claim that they support PR but never mention the subject even when it is glaringly obvious that it is relevant in the context of the articles
they are writing. On BBC programmes in particular the subject is never mentioned by presenters - indeed it would seem that it is subject to a deliberate taboo. This despite the fact that the BBC's remit is to "inform, educate and entertain". I wonder why they are so shy about honouring the first two of these when the subject is the undemocratic way in which we form
our parliament?
It seems to me that unless there is widespread and strong public pressure for reform the government (assuming Labour is returned)is just not going to honour its manifesto commitments in this regard. (Indeed the "commitment" in the 2005 manifesto seems much more equivocal even than the 2001 promise, again scuppered by the Labour tribalists).And we are not going to get public pressure without the necessary public education on the subject. Not quite Catch 22 but deadlock nonetheless!
Perhaps our best hope of early reform is a hung parliament which might give the LibDems the opportunity of forcing reform.
Posted by: Joe Patterson at April 25, 2005 03:09 PM
great comment joe - i share your sentiments on the BBC entirely - i flicked on to the politics show the other day and they were runnning a cursory piece on the small parties, and went as far as mentioning that they struggled against the system, without any mention of why, or how, or anything that might inform the public about exactly how votes are counted.
Posted by: Paul Davies at April 25, 2005 03:21 PM
Absolutely spot on. The problem in this country is that there is view that you can only have strong, effective government through SMSP, or first-past-the-post. Its a dominant anglo-american tradition reinforced by the establishment and the political elite. So people tend to get all edgy when you mention PR because they assume its going to be party list, or they remember the last hung parliaments and claim nothing got done, which was true, but a) the political landscape has changed considerably since then, and b) no-one expected hung parliaments to last, whereas proper coalition bargaining would be more effective by necessity. You can't say it works on the continent because they tut and shake their heads and mutter, well, they're europeans aren't they...
The other inane comment I've heard trotted out is, "oh well the lib dems aren't very good in government because they've not had any experience." Right, so you remember the last time they were in power right? Politically active in the 1930's were you? My you've aged well...
Posted by: 'Lilburne' at April 25, 2005 04:59 PM
well the oborne thing was pretty good overall.
if anyone watched it and still thinks that our democracy is working, they're an idiot.
FPTP doesn't give good government, it gives government by mosaic.
sadly, he mentioned that everything was about the 2% and avoiding difficult questions over and over again but failed to mention why this is at all.
someone should tell him...
Posted by: Paul Davies at April 25, 2005 09:06 PM
and oh yeah - my *lovely* little home town of winchester, where Mr Oborne did most of his interviewing isn't really a marginal.
we certainly don't make up the 2%, but I guess if he had gone there to talk to Mikey H, he might as well talk to the *lovely* people there too...
Posted by: Paul Davies at April 25, 2005 09:08 PM
About the BBC: I’ve just heard John Humphrys interviewing Ruth Kelly. Once again we had a minister warning us all that a vote for the LibDems could be a vote for the Tories. John Humphrys could have jumped on this and pointed out that if Labour had honoured its PR commitments in 1997 it could have been virtually sure of "at worst" leading a left-of-centre coalition after the election, even if voters switched to the LibDems. But of course Humphrys was true to form and there wasn’t a squeak out of him about the vagaries of FPTP.
Ought not subscribers to MVC and ERS make a concerted effort to lobby the Director General of the BBC about this failure to meet their remit to "educate and inform" when the way we elect our "representatives" is being discussed (particualry during an election campaign)
Posted by: Joe Patterson at April 26, 2005 09:09 AM
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