THE IDEOLOGICAL SWITCH-OFF
The press: Paul Johnson
asks if politics has had its day
LAST week I spent some time watching the TUC debates. A few years ago I would actually have gone down to Bournemouth. Now it was as much as I could do to drag myself to the television. I wondered how many other people were watching and why BBC-2 bothered to transmit the event at such length. That in turn led me to ask myself why the TUC's doings had lost all interest. I decided it was not entirely due to the fall in union numbers and the loss of power. For after all about half the work force belongs to unions even today and they still possess the ability to influence our lives, at any rate in a negative sense, as the postal dispute shows. Moreover, the actual subjects under discussion, such as the role of nuclear power-stations in our energy programme, or how the unemployed should be trained to get them back into work, were interesting in themselves. What produced irresistible cafard and the itch to switch off was the way in which these topics were debated, the mind- numbing predictability with which they were placed in a stereotyped political context, the suffocating inability to see life at the workplace or the future of our economy except in terms of politics. It is not so much, or not just, that unions are old-fashioned, it is that politics too is gradually coming to seem out-of-date.
I don't think most people in the media have yet taken aboard this significant shift. One reason I find BBC radio's Today programme so irritating, and tend to switch to the music programme as soon as I have heard the news, is its obsessive preoccupa- tion with political issues at the expense of other things that are happening in the world. Most editors and current affairs producers still act on the assumption that politics is the premium subject and takes precedence over everything else. Political writers and commentators continue to get vast numbers of column inches and we are about to witness once again many hours of television time devoted to the party confer- ences. Yet it is becoming harder than ever to gouge real news and worthwhile views out of the political scene. I sometimes detect on the faces of colleagues who write regular political columns a haunted look —
such as, say, the Times stage-coach corres- pondent must have worn towards the end of the 1830s.
The decline in political interest is in part due to the Thatcher phenomenon, which is having a bigger effect on our lives than anyone has yet realised. Thanks to her supremacy, nothing significantly new has occurred in politics since she first took office in 1979, the best part of a decade ago. There have been plenty of nine-day wonders and the media has made the most of them. But there has been no political event of the kind which will make the history books as a chapter in its own right. The only exception to this flat calm was the surfacing of the SDP, and that itself has now subsided again into the turbid waters, leaving scarcely a ripple. No one can say how long the Thatcher anaesthetising of politics will last. An unforeseen event could end it tomorrow. The likelihood, however, is that it will endure for some years.
Moreover it reflects a deeper and more permanent phenomenon. One reason Mrs Thatcher has been so successful is that she shares a widespread disillusionment with the usefulness of politics as such. The unifying factor in the whole thrust of her actions is not monetarism or anything so theoretical: it is a desire to reduce the impact of politics on our lives. She wants to de-politicise the unions: that is what she means by 'giving the unions back to their members'. The poll tax is part of a much wider effort to de-politicise local govern- ment. The largest education bill ever to go through parliament has the underlying, unspoken aim of de-politicising the schools. Where Mrs Thatcher cannot kick the politics out of an institution, she seeks to shrink its scope. That is why she is reducing the public sector, indeed govern- ment itself. It is not that Mrs Thatcher is against choice, or anti-democratic. On the contrary, she feels that in trying to de- politicise our public life she is responding to a strong popular desire.
Who can say she is wrong? Throughout most of history, the majority has rightly assumed that the power of politics, work- ing through the state, to make life better is very limited. Dr Johnson summed up this prevailing view: 'How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!' The notion that politics could transform or improve every aspect of society — that there is a political solution for every human problem — dates only from Rousseau. But the idea was eagerly taken up because it is as attractive in its own way as the vision of life after death, and it provided a powerful substi- tute for declining religious faith. Politics as panacea underlay all the great utopian philosophical systems of the 19th century, especially Marxism, and has been responsi- ble for all the calamitous experiments in social engineering which have made the 20th century the bloodiest in human his- tory. Hitler, Stalin and Mao, Dr Verwoerd and Pol Pot, and countless others, each under a different label, have tested Rous- seau's theory to destruction. All our cen- tury has proved is that, while politics cannot make things better, it can some- times make them considerably worse.
Disillusionment with politics is probably the widest-spread intellectual phenomenon of the late 20th century. It is to be found all over Africa, where politics replaced col- onialism and has produced falling living standards, war and famine. It is very marked in China, where that ultimate manifestation of political zeal, the Cultural Revolution, has left deep scars. It is also marked in Britain in those unfortunate areas, such as Brent, which have been subjected to a virulent infliction of utopian politics at the level of local government. But throughout Britain there is, to put it no more strongly, a general scepticism about the value of politics. Those who put their faith in it, the academics, philosophers and writers as well as the practitioners, have pitched their claims too high; the results have been meagre even when not actually disastrous. To give only one example, think of all the waste, over so many decades, just to prove that nationalisation — a typical political 'solution' — does not work. Ordinary people, while valuing the right to elect and dismiss governments, and aware of the marginal improvements they can bring about, are looking to other ways to better their condition, chiefly their own exertions. Mrs Thatcher's efforts to de- politicise Britain are an intuitive response to this profound public mood. What we shall observe over the next few years, I believe, is a corresponding de-politi- cisation of the media. Indeed it is already happening. Why is it that the New States- man, which insists that politics is the only thing that matters, falters, while The Spec- tator, which has reverted to Dr Johnson's view, flourishes?
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