Saturday 9 January 2010

This is going to hurt.

With politics, as with relationships, there are certain times when you wish they'd just lie to you a little harder.

This week, for instance, with the election months away and the Tory campaign bursting onto billboards across the country in all its terrible definitely-unairbrushed glory, it'd be nice if someone in government was making some sort of noise to persuade the people of Britain that they really do have a choice in their political leadership. Amidst all the filibustering, the clumsy cloak-and-dagger backstairs plotting over a last-minute replacement for Gordon Brown, if it's too much to ask that we actually be granted a degree of democratic self-determination, then I'd like them to pretend. I'd like them to at least pretend they have anything other than contempt for ordinary voters. Unfortunately, this week's abortive coup against Gordon Brown's leadership of the Labour Party demonstrates that contempt perfectly.

It is impossible to truly know what Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon thought to accomplish with their secret ballot. Perhaps they genuinely wished to give the people of Britain the leader they deserved, the leader we have waited for for so long: someone worthy of the respect of his or her country and executive, someone who has earned the confidence of the people and the party, someone who would not, for example, demonstrate their utter scorn for the electorate and for parliament in a cheesy daytime television interview.

But whatever their intentions, they demonstrated, as so many sitting members of both the Labour and Conservative parties have in the past, the sincere conviction that it is the job of parliament to decide who should lead the people, rather than it being the right of the people to decide who should run the government.

David Cameron's new poster campaign is disgusting and fascinating, like a teenager's sock drawer, or tertiary syphilis. Once you manage to tear your eyes from the spooky, ten-foot-high head-and-shoulder-shot of the Tory hopeful that dominates the frame, an image that absolutely hasn't had its jawline articifially strengthened, its pores smoothed, its nose diminished, its hair filled in or its skintone adjusted to remove that pesky Eton flush that was so in evidence at the 2009 party conference, you start to notice the little things. Like the fact that the words 'Conservative Party' are not prominently featured anywhere in the design. Like the fact that, despite their utter ideological disinclination to factor the lives of ordinary people into their policymaking, the Tories have recognised that the people of Britain want to elect a leader, not a party.

The Tories understand that whilst the brand of their party remains tarnished, their prospective candidate for leadership is by far the strongest part of their case to make the next government - not because of who he is, but because of what he represents. He represents someone who wants the trust and respect of the people, and is prepared to put his touched-up face on a giant poster saying so.

Every opponent of the 'presidential' attitude adopted by Blair and now aped by Cameron bases their arguments on the fact that, technically speaking, no British leader has ever been elected by the British people: it's understood that the leader of the political party which gains the most votes will be invited to form a government by the queen. Unfortunately, apologism for our anti-republican state mechanisms doesn't quite cut it anymore in terms of the popular mood.

As Paul Sagar observed at Bad Conscience this week, what the British people appear to want is not just a change of leader, but a change in the type of political leadership Britain has become used to: "not any-old-leader emerging through ...back-stabbing, pole-climbing patronage structures, but a man (or perhaps woman) with charisma in whom they can believe and who is tested through the conflict of a national plebiscite."

Put simply, Shiny Dave has had himself definitely-not-airbrushed all to fuck, but at least he seems to care.

This is why we're going to start to see more dangerous smiling bastards like Boris Johnson and David Cameron getting elected to high office. In a climate in which the machinations of politics are so thoroughly debased, in a country in which the mechanisms of government are occluded and arcane, in a culture where we are no longer invested in the narrowing ideological difference between two ancient, stale political parties, charisma can count for a great deal. Charisma can replace concrete policies. Charisma can look very much like the change we so desperately need.

David Cameron is not the change that his poster promises. David Cameron is a smiling bastard in a nice shirt, which is why I will be voting against him and campaigning against his leadership bid over the coming months. But until the Labour party sit up and notice which way the political wind is blowing, until they stop filibustering and start to show the electorate something other than utter contempt, until they put strategies on the table that engage the public in at least the illusion of choice, we can point out the pixel-smears on Cameron's jawline as much as we like: the bastards are still going to win hearts and minds.

17 comments:

  1. "But whatever their intentions, they demonstrated, as so many sitting members of both the Labour and Conservative parties have in the past, the sincere conviction that it is the job of parliament to decide who should lead the people, rather than it being the right of the people to decide who should run the government."

    Yeah because it's not as though we elect Parliament, is it?

    This is as bad as the media's absurd "expenses scandal" - the true scandal being that this country is stupid enough to elect a legislature and then decide they hate the people in it, never once considering that perhaps this reflects badly on the voters rather than anyone else.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Exactly. It's as if Labour don't want to be elected. They need to get out there and make it absolutely clear exactly how horrific the Tory Government will be for the poor, the ill, the needy. That is the ONLY way they can expose them for what they are.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That's pretty hideous isn't it. I'd rather not vote for Gordon Brown and his grey hair, or David Cameron and his Dorian Grey hair, frankly.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Option 3. Vote (and campaign) Green. Labour have lost their way for at least two terms, and the Tories remain unacceptable.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Frightening, isn't it?

    Still, democracy is the idea that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it, good and hard. I've more-or-less given up on the notion that we the people want anything other than scapegoats and panaceas now. As long as we have someone to blame, preferably someone foreign, we seem pretty happy to go along with the indignities the ruling class pour on us.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Charisma can replace concrete policies. Charisma can look very much like the change we so desperately need.

    This is, of course, the American Way. I would have thought Britain knew better than to follow in their diabolical footsteps, but alas, no. SIGH. :(

    ReplyDelete
  7. "David Cameron is a smiling bastard in a nice shirt, which is why I will be voting against him"

    Tony Blair was a smiling bastard in a nice shirt, too. What did he get right ?

    ReplyDelete
  8. While considerably more eloquent, your argument against Cameron is basically the same as David Tennant's the other day: he must be evil, because he's a Tory. At least, that's the only sense I can make of your sentence "David Cameron is a smiling bastard in a nice shirt, which is why I will be voting against him". Tony Blair was a smiling bastard, Brown is a smiling bastard who can't even smile properly. Being a smiling bastard, or even just a bastard, doesn't make you a bad potential leader for the country, any more than it makes you a good one.

    My worry about Cameron, as it happens, is the reverse of yours: that he doesn't have it in him to do what is needed - which really would be bastard politics - to slash a state that has grown in the past decade from just over a third to almost half the national economy. That doesn't mean being nasty to poor people incidentally - not necessarily, anyway. It means being nasty to the parasite class that has grown up under New Labour, which doesn't produce anything except plans and press-releases, which imposes impossible burdens on the real wealth-creators, and which is entirely unsustainable in a world increasingly ruled by mean, lean countries like China. But don't worry, he won't do it.

    He may have to take it out on the poor, which I regret, because that's easier, because the poor don't have the lobbying power of your Guardian reading friends (who often claim to represent the poor and the marginalised, but in fact only represent themselves). And because the cuts do have to come from somewhere, unless you imagine a future for Britain as a kind of North Korea, and it's easier to cut benefits than otiose jobs.

    But until the Labour party sit up and notice which way the political wind is blowing, until they stop filibustering and start to show the electorate something other than utter contempt, until they put strategies on the table that engage the public in at least the illusion of choice...

    Why on earth should they do that, when doing the precise opposite delivered them three election victories?

    In what sense, incidentally, are the mechanisms of government "occluded and arcane"? On the contrary, they have never been more out in the open; that, of course, being what has produced this crisis of confidence. As the wizard said to Dorothy, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Neuroskeptic: I suggest you go and read Paul Foot's "The Vote". That will show you how deep-rooted in British history and society is the idea that the great and the good only should decide who is in charge; and it will show you how, even after universal suffrage was introduced, the high and mighty still managed to prevent there being any real democratic choice in this country.

    We, the people, are only ever presented with a Hobson's choice at election time - and not even that, since if we choose not to buy then we still get the same deal as offered!

    New Labour under Gordon Brown may be bad, but the Tories would be unbelievably worse, that is the only choice we get. Whether or not to go from bad to worse.

    ReplyDelete
  10. The problem is that the British people want a political leader.

    The nation is a completely defunct model with zero relevence in the modern world - what we need is a servant who will do the neccesary dirty work in the most efficient way possible.
    Ban members of the British government from taking part in international summits and deprive the scoundrals of the belief that they are here to lead us.
    Gordon Brown, Tony Blair - all the rest - are cyphers. Their tinkering makes scarcely a difference - the only significant thing they can do is take us to war, which has proven to be an absolute disaster.

    As always - real progress will continue to be driven by the innovations of a free people (supported by effective social institutions with broad based, ground roots support)
    Leaders can bugger off.

    ReplyDelete
  11. It's not parliament or the people who decides who runs the government, it's the Queen.

    Not sure what'll happen if it's a close run thing. Is it the convention to invite the leader of the party with the largest number of seats in parliament if they've got a lower percentage of the vote than the party with the second largest number of seats?

    I'm not convinced people currently are - or are likely to be - bold over by Cameron's smile.

    His main successful tactic, rightly, has been to aim to be fairly inoffensive so that Labour voters who are angry with Labour don't think he's bad enough to vote against. This is essentially a repeat of Blair's creation of 'New Labour' from a Tory point of view.

    Bizarrely, the slump in the global economy - including the bust which Brown claimed to have abolished and helped to create with his devotion to neo-liberalism - is probably the only thing that gives Labour any chance at all of emerging as the largest party.

    It's forced the Tories to propose real economic policies and they're the wrong ones for the majority of the population. If the economy was still going well, Brown would have no chance whatsoever.

    ReplyDelete
  12. "We, the people, are only ever presented with a Hobson's choice at election time - and not even that, since if we choose not to buy then we still get the same deal as offered!"

    If there's a Hobson's choice it's our own fault for only voting for two parties who are basically the same.

    We could, if we wanted, all vote for the BNP. Or Communists. Or independents. Or joke candidates. In fact, we've chosen to vote for Labour or the Tories.

    Saying we have no choice is like saying that someone who freely decides to go to a Chinese restaurant, has no choice - all the food on the menu is Chinese.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Ooooooh! Airbrushing - what a heinous crime!

    Not that Brown will ever appear on a poster, but if he did, airbrushing would be the least of his fking crimes. Or problems for that matter - they have to go to work on him with photoshop jus tto stop him looking like a scrotum with a face drawn on it.

    Anyway, before people go on ranting about how the Tories will cut benefits(which I hope they will, given that the benefits bill is now larger than the entire income tax reciept and is fostering a growing underclass) I thought I'd point out the xamples of a couple of other countries who cut benefits.

    Canada and Sweden (big govt socialists favourite nirvana) noth were forced to cut spending in previous decades, and both cut benefits. What they found was that not only did bills fall through this direct action, but the number of claimants itself fell - it made more people go and find work.

    Some people clearly don't have any choice about living on benfits, but of the 5.6m people in this country on them, some of them clearly do.

    ReplyDelete
  14. I'll take Cameron and the rest over Brown. They don't lack compassion for the poor, but they quite sincerely believe that little materially can be done for them, that it's mostly a matter of them picking themselves up and re-enacting their own families rise to "decency". They'll do little harm or good for anyone.

    Conceivably they shut down some of the worse excesses of the Brown/Blair years: 15% annual cost of living increases, paying Accunture money as if they're a tech firm and passing laws that let your local council freeze your bank account.

    I'll take a grey airbrushed future over a hopeless one. Not happy though...

    Anon of Not Searched

    P.S. That "adapted" poster is awesome.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Saying we have no choice is like saying that someone who freely decides to go to a Chinese restaurant, has no choice - all the food on the menu is Chinese.

    That almost works, except that this person is told that none of the other eateries in town are worth looking at, the only food worth eating is in the Chinese restaurant.

    We are constantly told that the current system of capitalism is the only horse in the stable we can take; even the smaller parties for the most part tacitly accept that.

    It is worth noting that, back when Labour actually were different and really were committed to changing how and who ran things, that the unelected men of power in business and finance set out deliberately to wreck the project (again, check out Paul Foot's book). If voting changed anything, they'd abolish it - or make it irrelevant.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Snowdrop explodes - the unelected men of finance answer directly to their owners and are urr... elected by shareholders.
    Otherwise they are enabled by the direct process of people giving them their money.

    The problem isn`t that we don`t already have power over business - it`s that we lack the knowledge or motivation to actually control our representatives. Exactly the same problem exists in politics.

    ReplyDelete
  17. I don’t think kombi servisi Aaron intended to die to free JSTOR, and I think what happened in this case made it far bigger kombi servisi than the initial political protest Aaron was attempting. It started out as being eca kombi servisi about who gets access to taxpayer funded research, but now it is about the way the Iron Heel of the State comes down, hard, on anyone beylikdüzü kombi servisi who dares to protest.
    This case finally showed the vaillant kombi servisi message, written in blood in ten foot high letters that our system i s evil, demirdöküm kombi servisi corrupt and brutal. I’ve known this for most of my life, and I’m sad that it took a suicide of a decent person to wake other people up to it. (Not everyone either. klima servisi I’ve noticed lots of people making excuses for the State here, but it is not nice to face up to what our system has become.) vaillant kombi servisi
    protherm kombi servisi , buderus kombi servisi ,baymak kombi servisi ,ferroli kombi servisi , arçelik klima servisi , vestel klimaservisi ,webmaster forumları , webmaster forumu
    arçelik klima servisi , vestel klima servisi , klima servisi , baykan kombi servisi , bosch kombi servisi

    ReplyDelete

Comments are open on this blog, but I reserve the right to delete any abusive or off-topic threads.