No One Cares—Until You Take The Piss

A counsel of healthy despair

MARGE SIMPSON: “We can’t afford to shop at any store that has a philosophy.”

The Newsagents is of one of the most successful podcasts of the past few years in the UK. Here, one of its presenters, Lewis Goodall, joins a lament about the sort of people who go into politics these days; specifically, he addresses his co-presenters’ disappointment at how few scientists choose to become MPs (about 1’30” in).

GOODALL:

“We saw during the pandemic … there are lots of very, very accomplished [scientists]—they’d be terrible in politics, terrible. Because, like [sic], they can’t communicate properly; they have no sense of political vision.”

So Goodall, the sort of man I’d have to invent if he didn’t exist, neatly summarizes an outlook common with members of our media establishment that’s the perfect opposite of mine—and, even more neatly, I hold my opposite view because I spent years doing science, several of them employed by an odd quasi-civil-service research entity. Earlier on in the discussion, Goodall points out that he did History And Politics as an undergrad—as opposed to PPE, an Oxford degree disproportionately common among MPs—and dismissed by his colleague in that clip as “useless”, implying that the Oxford-PPE-to-professional-politics pipeline is part of the problem with UK MP recruitment. It is, but, as a history graduate, you’d think Goodall would know that quite a lot of human beings living in the twentieth century died in the twentieth century because of leaders with “a sense political vision”.

I bang on for Britain about “binnism”: my political-philosophy-that-isn’t: In a mature liberal democracy, the greatest contribution politicians can make to the well-being of their constituents is to empty The People’s bins, and otherwise get out of their way.

“Empty The People’s bins!” is a metaphorical imperative and literal one. Once a state has developed to a certain stage, peak performance isn’t about “political visions”; it’s about Getting Boring, Important, Dirty Shit Done:

• protecting the country from enemies abroad,

• protecting its citizens from enemies at home,

• providing universal health insurance (because markets can’t),

• educating children (synthetic phonics, numeracy, and knowledge-based direct instruction of course),

• building and maintaining infrastructure,

• and, yes, sanitation. Few state interventions have saved more human lives than the safe and timely disposal of rubbish and sewage.

These core activities should be more than enough to keep politicians busy—busy enough to stop them getting in the way of voters, who, funnily enough, are trying to make things better for themselves already, because that’s what people want to do. When working people improve their and their families’ lives, that mostly makes the country better for everyone. When politicians create five-year economic plans and “regional development boards”, they mostly don’t.

Me, on Russia’s losing the war it started with Ukraine

Goodall also makes his case by invoking the pandemic: a more recent historical event, one which I’m sure—if I could ever bring myself to listen to his and his colleagues’ show at any length—he and I also saw in different ways. There were many times during the pandemic (and during the Brexit process that immediately preceded it) when I watched UK journalists on television behaving either like shameless partisans or tantrumming children, abandoning their supposed factual approach for telenovela levels of moralising melodrama, moments when broadcasts took on an hallucinatory quality. “Are these supposedly educated and informed adults really spouting these ridiculous and easily debunked lies in front of millions? Do they think they’re in The West Wing or that they’re the hero reporters in a bad science-fiction film?”

A striking thing…

If you felt the same way at the time, subsequent events have shown you to be right. Not only have much of the press pack been proved wrong about the science; they personally turned out to be hypocritical about the practicalities.

But at least tackling COVID-19 was of great material importance to the UK’s citizens. Since big issues like this and leaving the EU have faded into the background—as is often the way when the media consensus turns out to be wrong and attention to its record might be embarrassing—we’ve been treated to multiple examples of media-enhanced hysteria about nothing at all.

If you care about politics, stop reading now

If you’re reading this, you’re probably more interested in politics than most people, and you probably think politics is more important than most people do. If so, there’s a good chance you won’t like what I have to say—except the bit at the end.

If you usually come here to get away from argument-from-anecdote, I’m about to disappoint you. What I have to say flows like a stream down a mountain from the daily differences between the real people I interact with at work—skilled manual workers, who have better things to obsesses about than politics—and the imaginary people I interact with online—middle-class, graduate-degree-holding office workers, some of whom obsess about politics for that work. Most of you reading this of you are in the latter category, but you’re part of a smaller population than you think.

In contrast, The Real People remind me every day that, if I were a political commentator—that is, the sort of person The Imaginary People take seriously—I’d consider my very existence absurd. Because, not only would no one (statistically speaking) in the real world care about what I do for a living, but no one should care about what I do for a living. Because what I would be doing for a living—talking about “visions” for example—doesn’t matter. What matters is that The Real People are as free as possible to make their lives better without the interference of people who think they know better than they do what “better” means.

Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell podcast live at the O2 cartoon by Stephen Collins [click through to original]

The very opening of my own article, however, undermines my case: The Newsagents is—within its niche of Centrist Dad politics nerdery—extremely popular, and that niche includes at least one podcast popular enough to fill a stadium. But I’d counter that, once a phenomenon reaches this level, it’s not a reflection of real life; it’s become just another fandom: a small fraction of the whole population, a fraction with a large disposable income, is obsessed with it. No one else cares. Politics podcast stadium sell-outs are as weird to most people as Slipknot ones. Indeed, as with perhaps other O2 headliners this year, Nickelback or Celine Dion for example, part of the obsession is driven by fans’—in this case post-Brexit Centrist Dads—feeling that everyone hates them, or at least that all those Real People out there don’t understand. In one sense, they’re right: For the Real People, punters who pay between £40 and £170 to watch live a politics podcast presented by two men who are no longer in front-line politics are in the same Venn circle as Furries. Even people who work in the media are mystified:

The cartoonist himself boggles at podcast stadium gigs.

No one cares about politics until they have to vote

The frequency with which the subject of UK party politics comes up in my conversations with other Brits, all of them of voting age, on the Anonymous Midlands Industrial Estate where I rent my office¹ is low. I would guess less than one-in-fifty, perhaps as low as one-in-a-hundred of these conversations addresses politics. This is the case even though we mostly talk about things not happening on Anonymous Midlands Industrial Estates and even though I am myself interested in politics and happy to discuss it on the slightest pretext.

I’m also happy to concede that most people who qualify to vote in the UK do, in fact, vote at national elections and referendums (but only just).

But I’m also happy to claim that most voters don’t think very much about politics outside the campaigns leading up to those elections.

No one wants to think that what they care about is politics

Voters’ are turned off by politics-the-thing and “politics”-the-label: They don’t want any issue that does attract them to be associated in their own minds with the thing that repels them. To be fair, when you are paying large sums of money in tax every month in the hope that some of it will give your children a better education (which you care about), but you suspect that the politicians responsible for this are sending some of it to an overseas non-governmental organisation that’s been infiltrated by international terrorists as a ransom (which you definitely don’t care about), you might resign yourself to accept that, regardless of your priorities, this is what politicians do, so that must be at least part of what politics is. If you believe that, then you might, reasonably, decide you want nothing to do with it.

In such circumstances, the well-worn and hokey “If you care about your children’s future, then you care about politics; if you care about the state of your neighbourhood, then you care about politics” gambit is more likely to insult them then it is to persuade them. Because they can see that, even if they believed that the stuff that matters to them is the stuff of politics, their politicians don’t.

And that political issue you care about probably isn’t political

I’d go further: People often are correct that what the media and politics-addicts are gossiping about when they gossip about what politicians do isn’t politics. Because even so-called political correspondents are human beings, they are more interested in gossip than they are their actual work. We all are. But, if you work in a place that makes widgets, spreading gossip is obviously not part of your business; if you work in a place that makes words, and hopes to generate outrage (because outrage generates clicks), spreading gossip is less obviously not your job.

“Boris Johnson Resigns As MP With Immediate Effect Over Partygate Report”, “Angela Rayner Says She Will Step Down If Found To Have Committed Crime [breaching electoral law/avoiding tax]”

There’s a big exception here: It’s often the case that something that is just “gossip”—or something even more inconsequential in the lives of normal people—about politicians does have profound political consequences, and, by that, I mean it either forces the politicians’ colleagues to remove them or sways votes in public elections. So, little as such things might have to do with ideology or even with the bin-emptying end of politics, elections are fought or won on the margins, and moral marginalia—breaking bylaws, dodging taxes, romantic affairs, personal feuds, addictions, debts, and petty criminal offences—can matter.

But, more often than not, this is not the case. The purest form of the non-political being touted as political is when commentators claim that some words said by a politician are poorly chosen, and therefore hurtful to some party, then further claim that the wider public or some other hypothetical constituency disapprove of the hurtywords being hurtful and then—still with no material outcome or even causation having been demonstrated at any point—further claim that the supposed negative reaction to the hurtywords has caused a crisis “close to” the politician who hurted people with the hurtywords.

I bet even the politics nerds reading this can’t remember what “trans jibe” the PM is supposed to have made, let alone construct a plausible reason why his making it was more of a “disaster” for the Conservative Party than anything else he’s done since starting the job.

No one cares that their own politics are a mess

Political visions and ideologies are, at least in theory, meant to hang together. A vision is meant to embody an overarching goal, one your policies are supposed to bring closer; an ideology is meant to inform policies that share a common philosophical inspiration, or it’s at least meant to lead to policies that are consistent within that system of thought. But, when you survey voters and collect a list of their most popular political views, you find that real people cherrypick from all over the political compass. To the irritation of political “scientists”, the centre of UK politics, for example, falls somewhere near: “Hang The Paedos; Fund The NHS”.

All Right-Thinking People are expected to look down on these kinds of chaotic preferences: To them, views like this coalesce into the vulgar “populism” of Brexit and Trump that Right-Thinkers have spent years condemning as a “threat to democracy”. But these views are, by definition, closer to what voters want than anything those doing the condemning have to offer. The real question is: “Who is ‘threatening democracy’? The people freely (and messily) exercising their right to vote or the people claiming that those votes are based on views so incoherent that the electoral outcome should be overridden by Those Who Know Better?”

The charge of incoherence derives, once again, from the anti-scientific belief that views that might turn out to be right in practice should be rejected for being wrong in theory², that ideas are more important than implementation, a belief that Steve Jobs attacks persuasively here.

Indeed, ideological inconsistencies are a bit like manufacturing trade-offs. You would love your product to be a perfect, seamless monocoque of pure function-as-form, but the real world won’t let it. It’s only once you accept this impossibility that you have any hope of building something that will turn out to be insanely great and insanely popular.

No one cares about politics—until politicians Take The Piss

Even if political correspondents are writing about politics, the politics they are mostly likely to be writing about at any given moment is the politics that’s happening at that moment. This is, to be fair, the definition of “political news”.

But the political issue that sways the median British voter in the polling booth is the political issue that is most important to that median voter at the time when they are voting. This will be biased toward their own personal long-term concerns, and it will also, inevitably, be affected by recency bias, both because voters don’t think much about politics outside election time and because they find it harder to remember the politics that was going on in all those other moments, the moments when only politicians and political commentators were interested in politics.

The issue that prompts politicians to remove another politician before the voters have a chance do it directly is often one that few voters have been paying attention to. For example:

Voters had paid a great deal of attention to the Poll Tax—in a very un-British rioting-in-the-streets, mass-civil-disobedience way. It was literally an Empty The People’s Bins issue, because it literally paid for The People’s bins to be emptied. But it was EU membership, then more widely considered to be a settled issue, and branded by the media an unhealthy obsession of weirdos within the Conservative Party, that triggered Thatcher’s downfall.

Gender self-identification laws affect a tiny number of people in Scotland, but they give us one of the purest examples of how commentators’ and politicians’ focus on ideology, on politics over practicalities, can make them look silly when reality finally slaps them in the face. The consensus was that Scottish voters were more-or-less on board with the way that gender ideology had become embedded in public institutions. Last January, the pundits agreed that Rishi Sunak was foolish to block new self-ID laws:

16th January 2023—James Ball, writer for the New European:

“I absolutely cannot understand why – *purely politically* – Sunak has intervened on the Scottish gender recognition act. Seems destined to cause him running headaches for months now, while before it just didn’t need to be near his radar.”

“It’s every one of Sturgeon’s Christmases at once. Total idiocy.”

---

15th February 2023—BBC News Website:

Nicola Sturgeon has announced she is resigning as Scotland's first minister after more than eight years in the role.

The Scottish National Party leader said she knew "in my head and in my heart" this was the right time to step down.

Ms Sturgeon said she would remain in office until her successor was elected.

She is the longest-serving first minister and the first woman to hold the position.

Ms Sturgeon insisted her resignation was not in response to the "latest period of pressure", which has included controversies over gender reforms, trans prisoners and the strategy on independence.

The problem here isn’t with James Ball; he’s just a convenient example. The problem here is that many of his peers thought much the same as he did. They were as wrong as it was possible to be. All these professional prognosticators, many of whom had been seduced by Sturgeon’s “visions”, were wronger than the people they were prognosticating at.

And it wasn’t subtle complexities or the conflicts of rights and freedoms between, say, girls and trans women that persuaded the SNP that the game was up; it was its leadership having to defend their calling this rapist a woman and arrange to have “her” put in a prison with other women:

UK General Elections are rarely decided by foreign policy, so, when the Labour Party was under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, a man unusually obsessed with international politics, it seemed that his, er, not-mainstream foreign-policy positions wouldn’t be his biggest liability; but, when Jeremy Corbyn was tested over the Skripal poisoning incident, even as commentators assumed his views on this would be of limited interest to voters, he chose to Take The Piss. Normally, foreign policy is about quarrels in faraway countries, between people of whom we know nothing, rather than chemical weapons attacks on sleepy English market towns. Telling voters that maybe they should wait to condemn this kind of domestic horror until they’ve heard the verdict of Vladimir Putin—about whom voters have heard enough for long enough to judge him something of a rum chap—was a clear-cut case of Taking The Piss³.

This is one of the glories of the British: They can be “intensely relaxed⁴” about policies they disagree with, right up until the point when some real-world test prompts them to think someone is Taking The Piss. No one cares about politics here until they suspect they’re being treated as mugs. Britons are so committed to patriotic whimsy that thousands of them spend hours crocheting fancy hats for Royal Mail postboxes...

…and so contemptuous of racist, authoritarian, nationalist demagoguery that they laugh it out of public life…

Humza Yousaf, Scotland’s soon-to-be-ex-First Minister, complaining about white people

This is the right way round. This is one reason why, unlike too many of its European neighbours, the UK never experienced totalitarian government. Spare us politicians with a “vision”, leaders with “passion”. Bring us competent pragmatists who can Empty The People’s Bins. Those who live here are blessed that this attitude persists.

Britain trails the rest of Europe… in support for populist/authoritarian parties

God help any leader—Jezza over Skripal, Nippy over female rapists, Boris over office parties—when voters decide that they have been guilty of Taking The Piss, perhaps the “political” crime that UK voters—once roused from their half-conscious indifference to politics—are keenest to convict politicians and political parties for.

Yes, this very British attitude has given us an unusually rapid rotation of Prime Ministers and First Ministers over the past few years. That clear-cut examples of Taking The Piss by various leaders in the EU during the same period has has led to no significant corresponding change in its leadership is one of the reasons why Britain is no longer a member thereof.

But, here, if a political party isn’t first to punish a leader who Takes The Piss, then people so uninterested in politics that they think political-podcast-stadium-gig attendees are weirdos will use their votes to punish that politician’s whole party. This is democracy in one of the oldest democracies: No one cares until you Take The Piss. And this is A Good Thing.

Coda

As I type this, the SNP continues its implosion. Since we started with him, we should give the last word on their previous ex-leader to News Agent Lewis Goodall:

GOODALL, January 2023:

"One of the few constants in British politics. She resigned at the moment of her choosing doing an unprecedented thing in British politics. Just a bit better at politics than some of these people"

1. Or on any of the other Anonymous Midlands Industrial Estates where most of my local clients have their premises

2. Thought it was an amusing aspect of the elite Remain case against Brexit that even supporters who had studied economics were forced to discard well-supported theories about tariffs and competition and human behaviour to make some of their central claims about the supposed consequences of leaving the EU.

3. For non-native speakers of English, “taking the piss” has a simple meaning—of “mocking or insulting” or “not being serious” or “being sarcastic”—and a more complex meaning: “doing something (bad) with such gross contempt for others that you insult them”.

4. Also “quietly seething”.