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As the UK General Election draws near, the economy has again been the over-riding feature of the campaign. Yet the debate itself has been pretty narrow, being principally framed around ‘austerity’ and the reduction of the size of the government’s budget deficit. The major political parties are all committed to eradicating this deficit, with the main question being the time-frame in achieving this goal.
Ed Miliband spent a year-and-a-half in the Cabinet between 2008 and 2010, and spent more than five years working as an advisor in the Treasury before he entered parliament in 2005. If he does become Prime Minister after May 7th, then, he will start the job with far more familiarity with government at the highest level than some of his recent predecessors, not least Tony Blair and David Cameron.
Anti-politics is in the air. There is a prevalent feeling in many societies that politicians are up to no good, that establishment politics are at best irrelevant and at worst corrupt and power-hungry, and that the centralization of power in national parliaments and governments denies the public a voice. Larger organizations fare even worse, with the European Union’s ostensible detachment from and imperviousness to the real concerns of its citizens now its most-trumpeted feature. Discontent and anxiety build up pressure that erupts in the streets from time to time, whether in Takhrir Square or Tottenham. The Scots rail against a mysterious entity called Westminster; UKIP rides on the crest of what it terms patriotism (and others term typical European populism) intimating, as Matthew Goodwin has pointed out in the Guardian, that Nigel Farage “will lead his followers through a chain of events that will determine the destiny of his modern revolt against Westminster.”
At the height of the media interest in Wootton Bassett, when the frequent corteges of British soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan wended their way through the high street while the townspeople stood in silence, its organizers claimed that it was a spontaneous and apolitical display of respect. “There are no politics here,” stated the local MP. Those involved held that the national stratum of politicians was superfluous to the authentic feeling of solidarity that could solely be generated at the grass roots. A clear resistance emerged to national politics trying to monopolize the mourning that only a town at England’s heart could convey.
Academics have been drawn in to the same phenomenon. A new Anti-politics and Depoliticization Specialist Group has been set up by the Political Studies Association in the UK dedicated, as it describes itself, to “providing a forum for researchers examining those processes throughout society that seem to have marginalized normative political debates, taken power away from elected politicians and fostered an air of disengagement, disaffection and disinterest in politics.” The term “politics” and what it apparently stands for is undoubtedly suffering from a serious reputational problem.
Tottenham Riots, by Beacon Radio. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.
But all that is based on a misunderstanding of politics. Political activity and thinking isn’t something that happens in remote places and institutions outside the experience of everyday life. It is ubiquitous, rooted in human intercourse at every level. It is not merely an elite activity but one that every one of us engages in consciously or unconsciously in our relations with others: commanding, pleading, negotiating, arguing, agreeing, refusing, or resisting. There is a tendency to insist on politics being mainly about one thing: power, dissent, consensus, oppression, rupture, conciliation, decision-making, the public domain, are some of the competing contenders. But politics is about them all, albeit in different combinations.
It concerns ranking group priorities in terms of urgency or importance—whether the group is a family, a sports club or a municipality. It concerns attempts to achieve finality in human affairs, attempts always doomed to fail yet epitomised in language that refers to victory, authority, sovereignty, rights, order, persuasion—whether on winning or losing sides of political struggle. That ranges from a constitutional ruling to the exasperated parent trying to end an argument with a “because I say so.” It concerns order and disorder in human gatherings, whether parliaments, trade union meetings, classrooms, bus queues, or terrorist attacks—all have a political dimension alongside their other aspects. That gives the lie to a demonstration being anti-political, when its ends are reform, revolution or the expression of disillusionment. It concerns devising plans and weaving visions for collectivities. It concerns the multiple languages of support and withholding support that we engage in with reference to others, from loyalty and allegiance through obligation to commitment and trust. And it is manifested through conservative, progressive or reactionary tendencies that the human personality exhibits.
When those involved in the Wootton Bassett corteges claimed to be non-political, they overlooked their organizational role in making certain that every detail of the ceremony was in place. They elided the expression of national loyalty that those homages clearly entailed. They glossed over the tension between political centre and periphery that marked an asymmetry of power and voice. They assumed, without recognizing, the prioritizing of a particular group of the dead – those that fell in battle.
People everywhere engage in political practices, but they do so in different intensities. It makes no more sense to suggest that we are non-political than to suggest that we are non-psychological. Nor does anti-politics ring true, because political disengagement is still a political act: sometimes vociferously so, sometimes seeking shelter in smaller circles of political conduct. Alongside political philosophy and the history of political thought, social scientists need to explore the features of thinking politically as typical and normal features of human life. Those patterns are always with us, though their cultural forms will vary considerably across and within societies. Being anti-establishment, anti-government, anti-sleaze, even anti-state are themselves powerful political statements, never anti-politics.
Headline image credit: Westminster, by “Stròlic Furlàn” – Davide Gabino. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.
First it was football, now its politics. The transfer window seems to have opened and all the main political parties have recruited hard-hitting spin-doctors — or should I say ‘election gurus’ — in the hope of transforming their performance in the 2015 General Election. While some bemoan the influence of foreign hands on British politics and others ask why we aren’t producing our own world-class spin-doctors I can’t help but feel that the future of British politics looks bleak. The future is likely to be dominated by too much shouting, not enough listening.
Dante is a fifteen-year old African-American teenager with a big Afro hairstyle. He looks into the camera and with a timid voice tells the viewer ‘Bill de Blasio will be a Mayor for every New Yorker, no matter where they live or what they look like – and I’d say that even if he weren’t my dad’. This was the advert that transformed Bill de Blasio from a long-shot into a hot-shot and ultimately propelled him into office as the 109th and current Mayor of New York. De Blasio also benefitted from a well-timed sexting scandal and an electorate ready for change but there can be no doubting that the advert in which his son, Dante de Blasio, featured was a game changer. Time Magazine described it as “The Ad That Won the New York Mayor’s Race”, the Washington Post named it ‘Political Advert of 2013’ — “No single ad had a bigger impact on a race than this one”.
Such evidence of ‘poll propulsion’, ‘soft power’ and ‘data optimization’ has not gone without notice on this side of the Atlantic and a whole new wave of election gurus have been recruited to help each of the main three political parties (Nigel Farage, of course, would never recruit such blatant overseas talent, ahem). The Liberal Democrats have recruited Ryan Coetzee who played a leading role significantly increasing the Democratic Alliance’s share of the vote in South Africa. The Conservatives have appointed the Australian Lynton Crosby with his forensic focus on ‘touchstone issues’, while last month the Labour Party revealed they had hired one of President Obama’s key strategists, David Axelrod, to craft a sharp political message and re-brand Ed Miliband.
It was David Axelrod’s former Chicago firm — ‘AKPD Message and Media’ — that had made the Dante advert for Bill de Blasio.
Of course, such spin-doctors, advisers, and consultants have always and will always exist in politics. The existence of new forms of off-line and on-line communication demands that political parties constantly explore new techniques and opportunities to improve their standing but I cannot help feel that with the recruitment of such powerful electoral strategists we risk losing touch with what politics is really about. We risk widening the worrying gap that already exists between the governors and the governed. ‘Resilience’, it would appear, seems to be the buzzword of modern party politics as a General Election approaches. It is about who can promote a powerful narrative and deliver an aggressive onslaught; it is about a form of ‘attack politics’ in which a willingness to listen or compromise is derided as weakness, and weakness cannot be tolerated; it is a form of politics in which family and friends become political tools to be deployed in shrewd, cunning and carefully crafted ways.
But does turning to the masters of machine politics from Australia and America bring with it the risk that the campaign will become too polished, too professional, too perfect?
David Axelrod’s role in relation to Ed Miliband provides a case in point. Apparently opinion polls suggest that poor Ed is viewed as too ‘nerdy’ and more than a little bit ‘weird’. The strategists suggest that this ‘image problem’ is a weakness that must be addressed through a process of re-branding. The danger, of course, of course is that by knocking-off all Ed’s quirks and peculiarities you actually end up with just another production line professional politician. Personally, I quite like politicians that are a bit different, even weird. Isn’t that why people find Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage so annoyingly refreshing?
A really smart election strategist might dare to think a little differently; to turn the political world upside-down by focusing not on who can shout the loudest for the longest but on the art of listening. As Andrew Dobson’s brilliant new book — Listening for Democracy — underlines the art of good listening has become almost completely ignored in modern politics despite being prized in daily conversation. Were any of the foreign election gurus employed for their listening skills? No. And that’s the problem. That’s why the future feels so bleak.
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Image credit: Ed Miliband. UK Department of Energy. Crown Copyright via WikiCommons.
Such evidence of ‘poll propulsion’, ‘soft power’ and ‘data optimization’ has not gone without notice on this side of the Atlantic and a whole new wave of election gurus have been recruited to help each of the main three political parties (Nigel Farage, of course, would never recruit such blatant overseas talent, ahem). The Liberal Democrats have recruited Ryan Coetzee who played a leading role significantly increasing the Democratic Alliance’s share of the vote in South Africa. The Conservatives have appointed the Australian Lynton Crosby with his forensic focus on ‘touchstone issues’, while last month the Labour Party revealed they had hired one of President Obama’s key strategists, David Axelrod, to craft a sharp political message and re-brand Ed Miliband.
