Distrust in politicians? The answer lies in ourselves

PA Media, Reuter’s, AFP 

Whatever the result of this election, it will be greeted mainly with foreboding outside the ranks of the winning party, an interlude rather than a denouement  in the tortured saga of Brexit. Trust will remain as elusive as ever as another chapter of story is opened.  The campaign is riven by lies and fantasy. There is a chorus of comment along these lines in the London papers today.

What impels politicians in these directions?  We can hardly expect candour from them as such a moment if ever. But perhaps the answer lies in ourselves?  No longer are main parties competing for an agnostic soft centre. They are fighting for a workable majority in a country split in several directions, north and south, prosperous and poor, young and old, and not always on grounds of economic self interest.  With four days to go, Labour’s diversions from splits over Brexit to the legacy of “ austerity “ don’t seem to be cutting through fast enough. The Conservatives’ apparent success for the endless repetition of  “getting Brexit done” may  prove to be a triumph of spin  over substance, but it contains a grain of truth and even hope: that if Johnson wins a decent majority, Parliament  will not be in endless deadlock on the News.

This would be a modest achievement if it lasts. But even the natural backers of both parties are unconvinced, as Chris Johns laments in the Irish Times.  

The sight of the left-leaning New Statesman refusing to endorse Labour (nobody can recall that ever happening) is consistent with a broader picture of a country still hopelessly divided and deeply cynical. The Financial Times, naturally pro-business, is anti-Tory: a remarkable perspective when you think about it. Considering the choice between Johnson and Corbyn, the Economist captured the mood of at least half the country when it stated that, come Friday, unlucky Britons will be faced with “one of these horrors in charge”.

That deep cynicism is fuelled by the lies. Those PR handlers have got their Trumpian message across: say whatever you like, it doesn’t matter. Cerebral commentators lament the total abandonment of even a pretence to truth-telling. They describe a political class returning to a pre-Enlightenment world where truth is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is power, not how you attain it or even what you do with it.

Welsh hairdressers light up social media with their fondness for Johnson: “His lying shows he is human.” People queuing up at food banks explain why they too will be voting Tory: Johnson is, apparently, the best liar of them all. And, of course, all politicians lie, don’t they? The thing about those lies is that they obviously work.

The big question focuses on what Johnson will do with power. The fear is that an ultra right-wing government will unleash the horror that the Economist fears. The hope is that political self-interest will prompt Johnson to use a parliamentary majority to tack to the centre.

Unaligned  commentators  like Anand Menon of the UK in a Changing Europe and Phil Collins in the Times are among those who hope that Johnson will be forced to tack to the centre if the Tories make inroads into former Labour heartlands.

A hard Brexit does not come close to meeting that test. Neither will a shift to Rees-Mogg style right-wing demagoguery. A thumping Tory majority will, potentially, allow Johnson to ignore his swivel-eyed loons..

If “ all politicians are liars”  don’t their lies  catch up with them? Is  it just a lust for power than motivates them?   During election campaigns  they almost always  aim to please and refuse to admit the need to make tough choices. Wold Jo Swinson be faring better if she had slain the Lib Dem dragon and admitted that a degree of austerity had been needed in the days of  Con- Lib coalition? I heard her floundering this morning  when asked if trans people should be allowed to self identify as female. I sympathised at first but then  I thought, ” nobody  asked you to be a politician much less a party leader, Jo,  and politicians aiming for government have to decide”.

However desperate they are for votes, the one taboo that survives is blaming the voters themselves.  Journalists like Robert Crampton of the Times have no such inhibitions. He asks, “Why do politicians  lie? Because voters don’t want the truth”

The reason being that unlike you and me, a great many of our fellow countrymen and women aren’t that bothered about the democratic process. They don’t take it nearly as seriously as we do, partly because they genuinely feel disempowered and overlooked, and partly because, in the face of adversity, people learn that if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. And partly, I think, satire and scepticism have long been a feature of our national character — and there still is a national character, even in these schismatic times — not to take very much, least of all politics, too seriously. This attitude has served us well in rejecting extremism. As George Orwell remarked in England Your England, the military goose-step is not used on this island “because the people in the street would laugh”…

I thought: do politicians lie all the time? If so, would it be better if they told the truth?

The short answer to the first question is No. The data suggests British politicians are rather good at fulfilling their manifesto pledges compared with those of other countries. Yet it cannot be denied that our tribunes do have a habit of shying away from telling the electorate the full story. That’s because the answer to the second question is an even more emphatic No. It would not be better if politicians told the truth because the electorate doesn’t want to hear the truth and it would be political suicide for whoever was doing the telling.

Consider the fate of an aspiring politician who made a speech incorporating the following inconvenient truths. You, the voters, simultaneously demand a low level of tax and a high level of public services. You don’t want personally to look after your elderly relatives, as people do in Spain and Italy, but you’ll be damned if you’re going to pass up inheriting the parental home in order to fund state provision. (Theresa May proposed this very policy, the so-called dementia tax, at the last election and lost her majority as a result.)

Moving on, large numbers of poorer people don’t want to do low-paid jobs in health and social care, hospitality or agriculture but don’t much like immigrants coming here to do those jobs instead. Large numbers of richer people want the state to subsidise their children’s higher education and their commute to work by rail. And also, of course, pay them pensions for 20 years or more after they retire. Pensions that a lot of them don’t really need.

We’re living longer but many of us don’t want to work longer. We want to feel safe and secure but don’t want to pay for more police officers. We want to rule the waves but don’t want to pay more for the armed services. We hate every new bypass except for the one which benefits our village. We want more houses, wind farms, prisons and railways — only not where we live. We want unlimited free healthcare while greedily eating and drinking quantities of food and booze that will make us ill. And so on.

Good luck to the death wish candidate who tells these truths to the electorate.

 

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