Bloggers4Labour Summer Essays #2 Part II - 1 comment

As promised yesterday, here's the second part of Talk Politics' article on political myths, for our essay series.

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Myth-making and Politics (Part II)

For all that we regularly complain that politicians, and indeed Parliament itself, seem somehow remote and distant from the people, the 'Information Age' has actually brought us closer than ever before to our political leaders and the closer we get, the more apparent it becomes that we're coming to like, less and less, what we see. Where, only a matter of fifty years ago, we would have relied almost exclusively on second-hand reporting of politics and the activities of politicians; on newspapers and the radio, mediums which provide, at a narrow vision of reality, today with 24-hour television news, cameras in the Houses of Parliament and the Internet, we can see everything more or less first-hand, we are, for the first time in the history of modern democracy, in a position to make the same first-hand judgements about our political leaders that the electorate of Athens could make about the Sophists.

Such judgements are not always rational; to give a perfect example, Richard Nixon went into the last few weeks of the 1960 US Presidential election campaign with a small but solid leader over Democrat challenger John F Kennedy. It is, today, a matter of political and media folklore that the turning point in this campaign came with a televised 'head-to-head' debate between Nixon and Kennedy, a debate which turned around Kennedy's fortunes and carried him to a narrow victory.

You may well think; 'what of it?': such debates are almost routine these days in US election campaigns, but what is of most interest is that, at the time, US political commentators 'scored' this debate as, at best, a draw for Kennedy; most, in fact, thought Nixon had just about shaded a win, yet when it came to polling day the result was a swing against Nixon from the point he was at in the polls prior to this debate. This, naturally, led researchers to wonder why this happened, why the sudden turnaround in Kennedy's fortunes and what, exactly was it that made the difference.

The answer, when it came, was not only a complete surprise to the researchers but also provided the springboard for the development of modern media-led political campaigning. Yes, the swing-voters who were interviewed afterwards agreed, Nixon has just about won the debate in terms of politics and policy - but sat next to Kennedy he looked 'shifty' and untrustworthy, he sweated a little too much under the studio lights, giving the impression that he may not have been quite so 'honest' a politician as his rival. Nixon lost in 1960 for no better reason than the fact that a relatively small number of 'undecideds' were left feeling, by a televised debate, that Kennedy looked a bit more 'the part' than he did - and so, gave birth to modern 'image politics' in the process.

With television and the rise of 'image politics' brought political myth-making and propaganda to its apex, the height of its powers. Where myths were once made largely after the fact and at safe distance from historical fact and with no one around to say; 'hang on, things weren't really like that you know', now we create our myths in advance and on a daily basis. The Sophism which lies like at the heart of modern political culture and which is eating away at democracy itself, has become all too obvious to, at least, a substantial part of the electorate; the myth-making has become too obvious, too contrived - these days we just call it 'spin' - the people, or an increasing number of them, have become too aware that what they see is not what they get.

The real paradox here is that all this has come about in little more than 10-15 years and accelerated rapidly over the last eight years, the current lifespan of the Blair government and the 'New Labour' project, a government which has, more than any other, traded on image.

The cracks first started to show towards the tail-end of the Thatcher government when, for the first time in living memory, a Prime Minister succeeded in outstaying her 'welcome' and making it obvious not only that she, personally, had lost touch with the British people but also that they was an obvious 'reality gap' between life in the narrow confines of 'Westminster Village' and life out here in the real world. The Major government was, in reality, could do little more than try to place sticking plasters over a gaping wound that was beginning to open up between politicians and the people; its descent in high farce resulting from numerous bouts of 'sleaze' served to do little more than remind people of the adage that 'power corrupts...'

Nevertheless, come 1997, the 'New Labour' project seemed to offer hope of improvement; the country was ready for a change and the Labour Party, under Blair, having changed dramatically itself and cast of the divisions, splits and infighting of the 1980's as well as largely swathes of outdated and unpopular policy - unilateral nuclear disarmament, 'clause 4', seemed, like the Attlee government of 1945, to offer not only a new set of faces in government but a new agenda. The message, pushed relentless by what was, pound for pound, the most ruthlessly efficient media machine in British political history, was 'modernisation', a return to the effervescent spirit of both the 1960's and the pre-'Great Depression' dreams of modernity of the 1920's.

There's a terrible irony here for the Labour movement; it's own government, something it took eighteen years in the political wilderness to realise, has, if not killed the goose that laid the golden egg, at least put the goose into intensive care is the space of a mere eight years. After eighteen years and four General Election defeats, winning the argument by any means possible - the Sophist way of thinking - became so important that we were prepared to overlook the reality of the New Labour project, that it was only ever a thin crust of, admittedly, well-constructed propaganda over an intellectual void, a wholesale abandonment of principles in the name of power, that we were prepared to go with the flow - anything so long as it meant the removal of the Tories from power. Re-reading 'The Prince' in anticipation of writing this essay, particularly chapters 9 and 15, one couldn't help but feel that not only is Machiavelli's masterpiece the ultimate manual of statecraft, it's also the 'manual of New Labour' as well.

With the Blair years due to come to a close during the life of this Parliament, we're left with a number of unpalatable truths to face.

Whatever else this government has achieved, Blair is leaving us with a terrible legacy; a government elected on the lowest electoral mandate in more than a century, a cult of 'managerialism' within government that has meant that some Ministers have 'gone native' within Whitehall so rapidly that its difficult, these days, to tell the difference between a politician and a civil servant, and an intellectual void which comes from eight years of government by press release and an overweening concern for populism over principles, a belief amongst many of our leaders that we can sell the people almost anything as long as we sell in the right way. How else can one interpret Home Office Minister, Tony McNulty's, recent comment that the only problem with ID card was that the government had spent too much time selling its benefits to the state at the expense of selling its benefits to the people in light of the Home Office's recent 'rebuttal' of the LSE's alternative proposals for a less-intrusive ID card system which completely ignores 90% of the LSE's proposals and argument - by any rational standards such a statement is pure Sophism: why bother to analyse the alternatives properly when one can simply trade on the public's fear of everything from terrorism or identity fraud and win the public argument, as long as we sell it properly it'll become the truth soon enough.

To cap it all, the New Labour media machine has succeeding in making the whole process of 'spin', or myth-making and propaganda so glaringly obvious that its damaging not only the standing of Labour Party but the very standing of politics and even democracy itself. The people are, increasingly, getting wise to the the way that politics and politicians 'play' the media and, indeed, the way the media plays politics - media moguls like Rupert Murdoch, who have come to believe that elections can be won and lost on the political endorsement of his newspapers and television stations are as much engaged in Sophism as the politicians themselves. The media is not only the arena in which the latter-day Sophists hold court but an active participant in that arena as well; in fact, as he owns some much of arena one can't help but feel that Murdoch sees himself as the biggest player in the game, bigger by far than the politicians themselves.

Our one saving grace in all this is the abject failure of the opposition to produce a credible challenge to Labour, mainly because both opposition parties have been sucked into fighting in the same arena as Blair under Blair's own rules. The Conservative Party went into the last election with the slimmest manifesto they've produced in many years and fought a campaign based almost entirely on rhetoric, making gains only where Blair had 'dropped the ball', on Iraq, tuition fees, etc. badly enough to allow an opposition challenger to sneak though.

This, however, does not mean that we can be complacent, there are lessons to be learned here, not from Labour's victory but from the Conservatives' defeat. We won the last election not because we were the 'best' option but because we were 'least worst' option, which is long way from being a satisfactory platform on which to build for the next General Election. The lesson of the last election is that rhetoric will only take you so far and with each successive term of office that distance tends to diminish. If we carry on as we are then, at some point in the not too distant future, probably not the next election but the one afterwards, we may lose not to the popularity of the opposition but because our own lack of popularity, because, as was the case in 1997, the public felt the Tories had run out steam so badly that a change, any change, was needed - and if we hit that point then one thing is certain; the one thing we won't be able to do is 'sell' our way out of trouble no matter how much time, effort and money we plough into a media pitch to the electorate.

We stand, today, at the same point that Plato stood in framing his critique of the original Sophists and with a truly Herculean task ahead of us. Blair's legacy to the Labour Party is not only the task of retaining our position in government once he has gone but one of rebuilding the credibility of politics and political culture - and of democracy itself.

That we have reached this point is, of itself, proof of the validity of Plato's analysis, if not his ultimate conclusions. No one has consciously set out to rediscover or reinvent Sophism as a coherent modern philosophy or ideology, other than in a purely academic context and out of academic curiosity, rather its the case that in markedly similar social conditions to those of Athens at the time of Plato, the same traits and failings which came to fore and brought the original Sophists into public disrepute have re-emerged and taken hold in our own political culture. In that, Plato seems to have been correct in ascribing to Sophism the status of it being a fundamental flaw in democracy, itself, and its interaction with human nature.

Although Athenian democracy would ultimately be swept away under Macedonian and latterly, Roman rule, it survived intact for more than a century after Plato, Sophists or no-Sophists. The ancient Greeks found something of an answer to the increasing discredited and discreditable influence of Sophism in the philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, exchanging rhetoric for logic and intellectual rigour. It's an answer that the Labour needs to take on board if it is to meet the challenges of the post-Blair era.

If we are to meet those challenges and consign the opposition to yet more fruitless and ineffectual years on the 'wrong side' of the House of Commons then I am convince that we need to revisit and reinvigorate an 'old friend', one who's been pushed to margin of the Labour Party over the last 10 years - Socialism.

I'm not suggesting here that we can simply wind back the clock to the socialism of Attlee or Bevan, the socialism of our political antecedents was born in and very the product of an industrial society and the world has moved on since then; things have changed and we now live in a post-industrial society that is very different for that which shaped the roots and heritage of the Labour movement.

But that does not mean that we've necessarily outgrown our socialist roots or that we need slavishly follow Blair's 'Third Way' and leave socialism ever further behind in our pursuit of political power. Our core socialist principles; equality, social justice and collective responsibility for society remain as relevant today as they were to the the founders of the Labour Movement. We need to get back to those principles, to revisit them, re-engage with them and work out exactly how we need to apply them to a post-industrial society, one in which the old divisions and power structures with which socialist once concerned themselves, have now changed and moved on.

To give those on the left who supported the invasion of Iraq some credit, their efforts to mould a new doctrine of 'humanitarian interventionism' in the aftermath of the war at least represents an effort to apply socialist principles to a new, and very modern, situation - their attempts to rewrite history and construct the myth that this was in some way a prime motivation for this invasion is, of course, yet another example of latter-day Sophism but then that is further evidence of the 'Sophist blind-spot' in modern political culture which places them in the position of defending the indefensible in order to sustain an argument which, fundamentally, does not actually depend on proving the decision to invade Iraq to have been the 'right' thing to do. Foreign policy is still exclusively within the eminent domain of the 'realpolitik' and such an analysis applied to the situation on Iraq prior to the invasion simply does not support or sustain an interpretation of the war in terms of humanitarian intervention, however some would appear to wish it would.

This is nothing more that the difference between Robin Cook's espousal of 'foreign policy with an ethical dimension' and its misquoting as an 'ethical foreign policy' - the two are very different things with the former recognising limits on the ability of politicians to operate ethically in matter of foreign policy that the latter fails to recognise. Cook clearly understood the difference, evidence of the intellectual rigour with which he approached the role of Foreign Secretary - its rather a pity that others seem so caught up in their own Sophist battles with the Socialist Worker's Party that they fail to acknowledge this same distinction; Cook saw Kosovo in a very different light to Iraq with good reason, the realpolitik of Kosovo supported intervention on humanitarian grounds, Iraq didn't. The pro-war side are actually damaging their case for future humanitarian intervention by tying it into Iraq, if only they'd step back for a second and realise it.

Still, much as I might disagree with the many of specifics of the pro-war camp's current analysis, their position in infinitely preferably to sad and intellectually vacuous efforts of RESPECT et al to constantly reinterpret everything in terms of an ongoing 'class struggle' which no longer exists. The nature and dynamics of power in a post-industrial society are very different from those which existed in the industrial society which spawned Socialism in the form to which some still doggedly cling, even if today, all they're doing is clinging to a rail on the deck of Titanic. Right up until, really, the late 1970's one could be poor, and more importantly unskilled, and still be part of the 'working class' - mass industry; manufacturing, construction, etc. still provided jobs for the unskilled, however unsteadily by the late 1970's. Today, in post-industrial Britain, those jobs, those opportunities have gone by the way side, shipped out to the Far-East at the developing world. To be poor and unskilled today means that you belong not to the working class but to one of several social underclasses; the bottom rung of the ladder which, at one time, anyone with a will to work could get on, if only the economy could provide enough jobs, has been taken away. It a different world, a different society and the dynamics of power are no longer what they once were - if you want to wage an old-style class war these days then move to China, India or Indonesia where there's a mass working class to work with, just don't try it here, those days are gone.

And, anyway, I've never been able to take the Socialist Worker's Party seriously, mainly because most of them never seem to like they've ever had a job - a little personal prejudice here, perhaps, but if you're going to champion the cause of the worker then you might at least try being one first.

The point I set out to make and which, hopefully, I've arrived at even if it has taken a few 'James Burke-ian' circumlocutions to get there is that while myths and propaganda have their uses in political life; that certainly not a point I would argue with Machiavelli, we have to approach them care and not come to rely on them, almost exclusively, as a means to political power. That's the lesson we need to learn from Plato; style is, ultimately, no substitute for substance and, moreover, an over-concentration on style leads inevitably to intellectual laziness which, if left unchecked, will eventually leave you incapable of producing anything of substance at all.

Blairism - for want of a better term - and the New Labour project is rather like a Hollywood film set; the exterior may look impressive, convincing even, but step behind it and all you find are a few unfinished timbers propping up the whole edifice. In fact Hollywood is a good analogy for the current state of the Labour Party, and of politics as a whole, not simply because of the major role that the media now plays in political life but because, whether you're watching a film or television show, unless you're the kind of unfortunate who has a propensity for attacking actors in the streets for maltreating 'that nice girl who runs the Rover's Return in Corrie', then , deep down inside you know that what you're watching isn't real at all: its a fake, an artifice, it works only because it engages you sufficiently to allow you to participate in a willing suspension of disbelief for as long as it remains interesting and entertaining.

And as is the way of such shows, there inevitably comes a point when it starts to run of stream, when you sit there and realise that you've seen it all before, or a new character or situation is introduced which somehow doesn't seem to fit, which breaks the internal logic and veracity of the show sufficiently to remind that its all just a fake, a myth, after all. If you're a TV producer then you have two options open to you, you can cancel the show and look for a fresh idea in the hope that you'll have another hit, or you can try and drag it out until ratings drop so far that that the TV station cancels, either way when the audience loses faith its beginning of the end.

From the last general election it seem increasingly obvious we reached that same point in politics. It's not something that I would ascribe solely to Blair and New Labour, public patience with politics and politicians started to unravel before Tony's rictus grin even made it to the main stage, but the onset of disillusionment with politics and politicians has certainly accelerated over the last eight years - the electorate are becoming increasingly unwilling to continue suspending their disbelief with each successive election campaign and if we're not careful, we could eventually find democracy, itself, slipping into a terminal and inevitable decline.

Fortunately, where TV producers lack a way out of such a crisis, politicians can turn things around. There's more to politics than simply maintaining a credible fiction, in fact people expect there to be much more; for there to be some real substance to underpin the style. If, as seems apparent, people are losing their respect for politicians and, in turn, turning away from engagement in the democratic process, then its because politics, today, lacks real substance and sense that politicians are applying themselves to the task of running the country with any real intellectual rigour. There are just too many fads, too many initiatives, too many think-tanks and self-styled opinion-formers - too many myths and all of them too obvious to stand up to the scrutiny of a wary and increasingly sceptical electorate.

Labour's media-machine and the disarray and ineptitude of the opposition with probably sustain us through the next General Election short of the government doing something amazingly dumb over the next three to four years or something wholly unexpected happens; a global economic crash of 1929 proportions, perhaps, but beyond that I suspect the New Labour project, and the New Labour approach to politics will have carried us as far as it was ever possible to go - which means that we need to put away the myths and the 'spin doctors' now any start planning for the future, building a new approach to politics based on policy, principles, a rigorous intellectual understanding of, and case for, the things we want to achieve.

Today we may have New Labour. Tomorrow, what we need is a new Socialism to go with it, one which bring through the core principles of the Labour movement fully into the 21st Century. If we can do that, if we can give substance to our aspirations is such a way as to meet the electorate's growing desire for politics with real substance then not only are election victory numbers 4, 5 and 6 a realistic proposition but we may also finally bury the Tories in their own ineptitude once and for all.

Nye Bevan was right all-along, the Labour movement is at its most effective best when it has a real and principled programme to take to the electorate, not when it plays the game of "who's got the more convincing bogeymen?", with the opposition.