We appear to live in an age of media games, of rhetoric, of the sound bite and the one-liner. An age of Brexit, of Boris and of a Britain that everyone seems to agree isn’t going so well. An age of identity politics, the Ben Shapiro’s, the TikTok debates, and of Elon musk buying twitter in the name of “free speech”. Through all this, I wonder, have we lost the point?
It seems like we have forgotten what matters: the actual governing. When Boris claims he’ll “Get Brexit done”, what was it he was really doing? Was it the customs union? As if the average voter knew what that meant. Was it the immigration? As if they’ve achieved that. Or was it in fact £350 million that would fix our NHS? Nearly 10 years on I’m not sure that’s been done either. It’s all well and good to speak in grand terms, to promise big things and make bold pledges, but the reality of government seems especially boring. Should we be taking politics more seriously?
The problem is that boring stuff doesn’t get people interested, and in a democracy, that’s quite important. Besides, what’s politics without emotion; that’s like politics without a soul. If we want to get people interested in politics, maybe this lack of seriousness is necessary, this constant din of noise, of scandal and story.
Despite this - or maybe because of it - people don’t seem to be engaging in politics when it counts. Keir Starmer, despite his many criticisms of Corbyn, received 2 million fewer votes, and won the support of less than 20% of the electorate. Politics seems too confusing; government is complex, it needs to be, it is the job of managing the entire running of a country. But this complexity makes democracy challenging, it becomes ever harder to tell the charlatans from the sage, and that matters, it is how governments get held to account.
Perhaps more concerningly, while we all discuss how immorally dashing Keir Starmer looks in his newest suit, the world moves on. When politicians are caught in the political minefield of the day, how can they continue to legislate effectively? This means those in places of power, like Mr. Musk, like Mr. Murdoch, like big tech become less and less accountable, each and every day, in a world that needs regulation more than ever. Government must hold this power to account, or in time there may be no government. Moreover, there seems to be an unsettling rise in political movements dependent on this misinformation, that use this confusion and emotion as their fuel.
Politics has never been simple, but today it seems more complicated than ever. Politics needs emotion, it needs values and principles, but the name of these things, our democracy is being broken down. We are led, ever closer to corporate capture, to poor governance and the breakdown of our liberal order. Politics is confusing, but we need it, we need to think about it, to talk about it, to engage in it, and I really hope we can do that without the scandal, without the poll, or the story. Politics is complicated, but it can work, we need to make it work, or we must live with the consequences.