With a charming lack of self-awareness, Iain Dale endorses Robin Harris's call to purge politics of spin. What both fail to point out is that this is impossible within our present political system. Spin is the heart of our body politic, not its appendix.
There are four reasons why I say this:
1. The two main parties are largely indistinguishable in policy: it's Blue Labour vs New Labour. Both believe big, hierarchical government is more of a solution than a problem. The main difference between them is the second-order one of who should run the machine. This naturally breeds spin, as Cameron and Brown compete to appear employable.
2. The contradiction of managerialist politics creates a need for spin. Managerialists claim to be able to manage society and government. But they can't, because government departments and society are just too complex to be controlled by humans with limited knowledge and bounded rationality. With politicians unable to appeal to an unbroken record of success and competence, they must spin, to embellish their few achievements and hide their many failures.
3. A grown-up politics without spin - what Danny calls the "politics of but" - is about a choice of different policies. But choice means cost; the two words describe the same thing. But our managerialist politics, with its reluctance to acknowledge trade-offs is unable to tell an infantilized electorate that policies come with costs, often uncertain ones.
4. In the modern world, there's an impulse to understand society in terms of individual personality and character rather than as the result of impersonal forces over which we have limited control - an impluse which encourages spin rather than social analysis. As Richard Sennett said:
We see society itself as "meaningful" only by converting it into a grand psychic system. We may understand that a politician's job is to draft or execute legislation, but that work does not interest us until we perceive the play of personality in political struggle. A political leader running for office is spoken of as "credible" or "legitimate" in terms of what kind of man he is, rather than in terms of the actions or programs he espouses. The obsession with persons at the expense of more impersonal social relations is like a filter which discolours our rational understanding of society. (The Fall of Public Man, p4)
What's more, this discolouring acts to the benefit of our rulers. It hides the importance of class, deskilling and alienation, and promotes the belief that the right leaders can transform society by force of personality.
In these ways, spin is inevitable. Little short of a revolution will remove it.
Chaps like thee and me might agree, grandly, that our countrymen are infantilized, but what's to be done about it?
Posted by: dearieme | April 05, 2007 at 10:59 AM
I dunno, while I admire a good bit of spin (I am a chartered tax advisor), might there not be an electoral advantage for a party that is COMPLETELY HONEST?
The problem is that first of all they would have to de-infantilise the debate by explaining what is really going on in simple terms.
Taking a recent example, the excuse given for tax relief for pensions contributions is that "it is better to encourage people to save so that they do not have to rely on means tested benefits in retirement".
Simple maths tells us that scrapping basic state pension and pensions credit and replacing it with a non-means tested, non-taxable and non-contributory Citizen's Pension of £114 for everybody over 65 would cost £3bn.
Compare that with the various tax reliefs for pensions contributions, which cost over £40bn.
Posted by: Mark Wadsworth | April 05, 2007 at 04:01 PM