The Forest

We are about to witness ‘the mad hysteria of a general election’. The feverish mood is already pretty repellent. Everyone is dead sure the Tories will lose – the Tories most of all. Meanwhile pundits speculate about what the Labour Party will do in office, how they will steer the economy, if they will be more radical than some think and what they actually stand for. 

The strategising or scheming of the political parties often enters public consciousness in ways that make it sound like political leadership knows what it’s doing. So much implies that, sensible or otherwise, this matters. In other words it assumes that sense obtains between a politician’s prospectus, and how they are understood by the electorate. 

Is this assumption justified? Is British politics as rational as the ‘national conversation’ often makes it appear? Or is it suspiciously hubristic? As soon as the first draft of history has been published, analysts are quick to start poring all over it, examining the data, carrying out polls and surveys, and reviewing all the available evidence – which can reinforce the impression that even if the meaning was partially lost in the moment, it is still there to be discovered.   

One way of reading our recent political history, however, suggests that the sense politicians attempt to inject into politics gets lost in the swirling chaos from which it is fashioned. Much was made of Jeremy Corbyn’s success at the 2017 general election – not least by Corbyn and his supporters. But had the outlying leader of the Labour Party inspired a sudden surge of socialist sentiment, or was he the beneficiary of the circumstances? Theresa May had (too tentatively for her own good, perhaps) ventured towards the sort of electoral strategy that ultimately brought her usurper success but this meant that many of the moderate centrists who found Brexit so unpalatable were prepared to vote any way that might halt or undo its progress. If that’s so, the Corbyn surge had very little to do with Corbynism. 

Does that mean that, two years later, Boris Johnson succeeded where Theresa May failed – that he managed to successfully pivot the conservative party towards the heartlands of Brexit support, encompassing former labour-voting areas, knowing that he could leave the rump of disillusioned metropolitans to fester? That has stood up as a strategic position, and won the admiration of politicos even where it makes them hold their nose. All the same, I have a sneaking suspicion that the 2019 election wasn’t half as rational as this makes it sound. Jeremy Corbyn’s stock had, by this point, plunged dramatically and the voting public only had to hear the word ‘Brexit’ murmured before they exhaled a loud moan. Johnson’s success may have owed as much to the abysmal choice before the electorate and sheer exasperation at the protracted and intrusive presence of the negotiations to leave the EU as it did to the ‘Red Tory’ strategy he was exploiting.  

The widespread expectation, fuelled by all the polls, is that Keir Starmer will win the election, even if the margin of victory narrows. To construe this forecast in the sort of ‘positivist’ tone that some commentators assume, you might expect this to mean that, in this political moment, the Labour Party has won the argument. The conservatives have had their chance to practise a vision for the country. This hasn’t worked, or the electorate are largely not convinced, and the Labour Party has countered with a more persuasive programme.    

Then again, is it really fair to say that the Tories had a vision for the country? And, equally, is it true to say that the Labour Party has defined a programme for government? Working out where the Tories lie ideologically is like trying to understand Schrödinger’s perspective on cats: this parliament they started out left-leaning on the economy with a tilt towards social conservatism, only for their last two leaders to embrace differing extremes of libertarianism. The Labour Party has road-tested a few ideas, notably in the flagship area of the economy, but it’s hard to know what their principles really are, except for tactical discretion as they wait for their opponents to complete a long cycle of implosion. In which case the Labour Party stands to win, not on the strength of its values, ideas or because it has captured the political zeitgeist, but because everyone is so desperate for the other lot to vacate the premises.  

Is this portrait accurate? Or an exaggeration? Is it a legacy of Brexit or has it always been like this? If it is true, it’s tempting to think that political debate in Britain is a theatrical masquerade that disguises its incoherence. 

Some sense must obtain. It follows that this little summary is, up to a point at least, slanted and hyperbolic. But I also suspect that it hints at a version of the truth.  Anyone with a long memory might say that Tony Blair’s third way, however qualified by political circumstance, followed a broad ideological or strategic purpose that found a constituency with the electorate.  And yet the third way could be seen as a modified form of a broader consensus established by the eighteen years of conservative government that preceded it. Both had an underpinning seam of loosely liberal ideas. 

With the inception of that consensus the ironies don’t stop. Given the ballsy and bold imprint that Mrs Thatcher has left on history, it’s tempting to think that she was swept into power in 1979 with a hurrah of support for monetarism, patriotism and anti-unionism. In fact her front bench was, at the time, crammed with moderate Tories shaped by the post-war political consensus, and her success probably owed as much to the jaded state of Jim Callaghan’s Labour Party and the pervasive sense – epitomised by the winter of discontent and the jibe that Britain was ‘the sick man of Europe’ – that things weren’t working (a sense that strikes a harmonic interval with the present political moment).   

Something similar could be said about the 1945 election. With the benefit of hindsight it’s easy to think that post-war Britain was voting for the radical measures of Attlee’s administration, that a country placed on a war footing and emerging from a martial economy was prepared to embrace the bold economic thinking in which nationalisation and state planning were to play a much greater role. Whereas the voting public’s political sense was just as shaped by the economic trials of the 1930s and perceived conservative mismanagement.  

If British politics doesn’t make sense, this may say as much about how it understands the word ‘sense’ as it does about the answers political parties tout under its banner. We live with a transactional view of power that is established through the exercise of choice. This, desperately and forcefully, wants to render power accountable in terms that are explicit or determinate. Reducing power to a discrete meaning – which is largely the job of journalists and an industry of marketing and communications professionals – makes it manageable; it suits a retail view of public life. 

Except even the most strident advocates of democracy are quick to acknowledge its shortcomings. Churchill’s famous quip that democracy is the ‘worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’, ought to make it clear that the words which alight on the hot air of public conversation are as flawed as the system itself. If that understanding is right, then it ought also to chasten the public debate and force it to realise that it often falls short; its gaze is not and can never be total – as the horrific record of twentieth century totalitarianisms demonstrates. 

Our politics might be a long way short of totalising, but in recent years it has become palpably intrusive. It has just made too much noise. That is a sign of it overreaching. More often than not the way it has overreached has not been through the lens of ideological conviction or the attempt to prosecute a policy but via a narcissistic adulation for the workings of power, as if the national conversation fetishises the exercise of power above everything else. Most of the big stories, and a good deal of national policy, have emerged from manoeuvring internal to the Tory party and it’s hard not to escape the impression that the media treats politics like a grand celebrity gossip column. 

The feeling is that politics is a genie that has been let out of the bottle and has wreaked havoc; it has been elevated to the level of a promise it simply cannot fulfil. A politics with more sense, it might be imagined, is one that doesn’t begin and end with explicit meaning, that recognises the transactional, shouty world of parliament is a mechanism that should sit alongside the richer and more implicit tapestry of life that goes on outside it. But like so much else about our current values, we fall for the delusion that meaning can be reduced, regulated and managed – that ‘liberal democracy’ is sufficient in itself rather a contingent expedient rooted in a dense historical, economic and cultural weave. 

A ‘positivist’ view of politics simply doesn’t work and yet it has become a working assumption of the way politics and politicians are held to account. To inflect it with meaning that is out of proportion to anything it can realistically deliver just leads to the sort of incongruous incoherence that lurks behind the veil of public life. Executive power is necessary but fundamentally unstable. A more mature form of democratic accountability might sit more seamlessly with its constitutional form. It would recognise that it occupies a place or function in the broader civic life of a people. That, however, requires a thoroughly unfashionable virtue and one that rarely comes naturally to politicians: humility. 

It also requires a cultural hinterland. In the past we might have turned to the monarchy, the church, charitable or voluntary organisations, among others. These all still exist but they are shadows of their former selves, and much of the civic hinterland in the country has been hollowed out by the rampant individualism that the last forty years of neoliberalism has extolled. 

In his opening speech of the campaign, Keir Starmer said something that showed a lot of sense. A vote for Labour, he said, is a vote for ‘a politics that treads more lightly on all our lives’. This has an echo of the old Anglican prayer book which solicits that under our monarch we may be ‘godly and quietly governed’. I would applaud any politician who can deliver that kind of politics but the overwhelming impression has to be that it would necessarily depart from the prevailing order.