The Dream Of Change Trumps Rational Debate, As Voters Pin Hopes On A Tory Party Whose Policies They Oppose: Column 31.10.08

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JOYCE MCMILLAN for The Scotsman 31.10.09
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AS I WRITE, I have no idea whether Tony Blair will emerge as the new President of the European Council, or not; but his prospects are not looking bright.  It’s hardly surprising, after all, that the European leaders gathered in Brussels should think twice about appointing as their new Convenor a former British Prime Minister who squandered most of his political capital on a hapless mission to give unquestioning support to United States foreign policy, come what may.

It’s also worth remembering, though, that just 12 years ago this autumn, the now much-mocked Tony Blair was the UK’s shiny new reforming Prime Minister, at the start of a media and political honeymoon that would last for almost five years.   The hopes of the nation were pinned upon his new administration, which had promised not to reverse the Thatcher revolution of the previous 20 years, but to combine it with a new commitment to fairness and high ethical standards in public life.  And after the scandals of sleaze and alleged incompetence which had surrounded John Major’s dying government, it certainly felt like a new beginning, with a brighter, better government, founded on far stronger moral values.

Well, you may laugh.  But that was the mood of the time; and even as a woman of the centre-left, I remember feeling slightly uneasy about the sheer irrationality with which the London media pack, and a large proportion of the voting public, had somehow convinced themselves that smooth-talking Tony and his project would solve all problems.  For in truth, the contempt with which John Major’s ministers and their policies were treated during those months had nothing to do with serious debate about the relative merit of Conservative and New Labour policies; and everything to do with a kind of playground mobbing of a group who had been labelled as losers, and who were being scapegoated for every problem under the sun.

And now – well, blow me down if we are not going through exactly the same ritual again, with Gordon Brown’s government now the scapegoats, and David Cameron’s Conservatives benefiting from the dangerous tendency to project all the nation’s hopes and dreams onto the most likely alternative government.  All across Britain – although particularly, it seems, in the southern counties – people are happily hounding the Labour government from office, baying for the blood of any government minister who shows ihs or her face in public, and signing up to support squeaky-clean David Cameron and his friends in inaugurating a new age of decent, patriotic government in Britain.

Admittedly, most of these supporters seem to want much more money spent on the armed forces, which will not be possible given the scale of planed Tory spending cuts; most of them are devoted to the cause of retaining rural postal deliveries, which will certainly not be possible when the Cameronians privatise the Royal Mail.  And almost all of the more recent Conservative recruits seem to want a fairer, less divided, and more compassionate Britain, with a more equal distribution of opportunities; yet the attitude to “big government” now adopted by the Cameron Tories has all but precluded any progress towards that goal, as any decent historian of progressive Conservatism could tell them.

What is happening, in other words, is that the debate about who should form the next government of the UK has become almost completely divorced from the question of which party has the best policies to meet our aspirations, and almost entirely focussed on the ad-hominem question of whether the existing government is morally and intellectually fit to rule.  Hence the weird focus, particularly in the Westminster village, on finding some actual physical or mental ailment that can be pinned on the Prime Minister.  Hence the obsession with the expenses scandal, particularly as it bears on Labour ministers.

And hence the near-total failure – very similar to the media’s failure with Blair, after 1997 – to challenge David Cameron on the glaring inconsistencies between the values he says he embraces, and the policies he is beginning to adopt.  For in this dumbed-down, ideology-free and policy-ignorant form of politics, the hard fact is that nobody cares.  Instead, it seems that both the public, and large sections of the media, would rather simply act on the “gut feeling” that everything will somehow be better, once Gordon and Sarah are kicked out of the Downing Street Big Brother house, and David and Samantha are placed there instead.

Now of course, there is a sense in which power corrupts, and a change of government is therefore – all else being equal – a good thing in itself.  But it’s something else for voters to start believing in the brilliance, competence and superior morality of a party with policies they dislike, simply because they are so desperate to get rid of the existing government; and we need to analyse the reasons for this growing hatred of incumbent parties.

It may be that the traditional rhetoric of change employed by national politicians, in an age when national governments have less and less real power, eventually makes frauds and hate-figures of all politicians who use it.  It may be – as the persistent expenses scandal suggests – that governments and parliaments are now so aggressively lobbied by the mighty princes of the commercial world that they genuinely do become corrupted, not least in their assumptions about whose priorities are “normal”, and whose voices should be heard.

Whatever the cause, though, we should be concerned about the effect.   If good government has become impossibly difficult at UK level, then we need to ask ourselves why.  And if good government is still sometimes taking place, but we have lost the capacity to see and value it – well then, we also need to ask ourselves some tough questions about that; before our next shiny new government begins to seem as tarnished as the last, and as quick to lose whatever moral authority it had, on the glad, confident morning of its election.

ENDS ENDS

~ by joycemcmillan on October 31, 2009.