Legitimation rituals and managerialism

Watching BBC4’s The Lavender List last night, two supposedly minor points leapt out.

One was that, on his first night as PM in 1974, Harold Wilson went out to walk the dog. The other was that, when Wilson complained about being heckled, he did so dolefully, seeing it as a sign of his waning popularity. And Mary replied that: “you used to enjoy being heckled.”

In both respects, much has changed in the last 30 years. Neither Blair nor Thatcher would ever have done something so homely, on their first day in office, as walk the dog*. And a heckler today is a threat, not a cause for introspection.

In both respects, our rulers today are more isolated from the people – symbolically and practically – than Wilson was.

They’ll claim this is for “security reasons.”

Nonsense.

The change happened for a different reason. The distancing of government from people is what Rodney Barker calls a “ritual of self-legitimation.”

Whereas Wilson wanted to present himself as a representative of a class – hence the pipe, public profession for beer, and exaggerated accent – New Labour presents itself as a managerialist elite. Apparently conflicting values – justice and efficiency, freedom and security – can be reconciled, they claim, if one understands society and modernity well enough.

Introspection tells us this is absurd; no-one can have such omniscience. Hence New Labour’s distancing itself from the public – it wants to give the impression that it is different. Priests wear robes, New Labour has security. The reason is much the same.

New Labour can’t differentiate itself from the rest of us by its superior intellect or integrity. It can do so only by ritual.

* Go on - admit it, you thought about Cherie.

Comments

[Backword Dave]

Harold Wilson famously silenced a man who demanded why he supported "savages" in Rhodesia.
"My friend, we don't support savages, we just allow them to come to our meetings," Wilson replied, to great applause.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4296784.stm

[chris]

I'm not sure about this, but it strikes me that part of this is that Wilson was an enormously brilliant man on his own terms, as were Heath, MacMillan, Churchill and Atlee, and most of their predecessors. Eden wasn't, and failed conspicuously.

The point is that for most of the 20th century, the country expected their leaders to be the best and the brightest and punished those who weren't, and their leaders by and large returned the complement (at least in theory) in how they engaged with the electorate. Beginning in the 1970s, it became fashionable to regard high intelligence as slightly disreputable. Callaghan, Thatcher, Major and Blair have shared the characteristics of being singularly unimaginative, uncreative and non-empathetic, but they have got away with it by not intimidating their base (partial exception for Thatcher, but she played a comfortably predicatable role which which the lower middle class could identify).

If your political identity is bound up with being better than no one (and no one is better than you...) you only have administrative measures left to keep hoi polloi at arms length. It probably also predisposes you to managerialism, as you haven't got the mental apparatus for anything better.