So, you’re an only slightly tarnished young thing, not yet world-weary and about to graduate? You were thinking of some sort of career in public service, perhaps with a view to elected office one day? Who wants to be a banker any more, eh? Child molesting seems only marginally less attractive.
Actually no. When I was at the other place -on the Cam-last month the dons said their students are still gagging to become greedy bankers. For heaven’s sake, concentrate. Where do you think MPs got their misplaced sense of entitlement to their little expenses fiddles, but from businessmen, TV execs, senior civil servants-the people they mingle with every day-all sucked into the City’s bogus, bonus culture?
Let’s start again. I was at the Oxford Union the other evening and my audience seemed admirably high-minded. So let’s assume you’ve been only mildly put off by politicians’ shabby behaviour lately and by the new series of The Thick of It. You glimpsed it through a Halloween hangover and thought that Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker/Alastair Campbell figure was even more cynical and offensive than before?
Don’t give up. Politics is not that bad, it rarely is. I don’t deny that Cambridge graduate Alastair bullied and swore a bit, but deep down he remains idealistic, even vulnerable. Honest, why else would he drink the way he used to do?
As for the expenses row, squalid and demeaning though it was for many MPs (how many? We still don’t really know), it can be seen in a faintly positive light. Rather like the nuclear waste industry we’re better off for knowing the murky stuff than by remaining in ignorance.
By global standards (are there any others nowadays?) there is also something comically modest about the size of British MPs rascally ambitions. Moats? Duck ponds? Did no one think of stealing UK Plc’s pension fund? After all, Robert Maxwell was once an MP. Why do our EU neighbours do their trousering with such finesse?
Besides, there will be an election soon, probably on May 6th. Gordon Brown’s government is all but certain to be ejected, though few detect much positive enthusiasm for whatever it is (it varies from week to week) that Bullingdon Club’s Dave ‘n’ George are offering the voters. This is no 1997 moment, no mass misplaced infatuation with a new leader, one doomed to sour as it did.
But democracy’s removal van is always a cathartic moment, cleansing the body politic and offering the prospect of a new beginning. The present parliament has made mistakes and will pay the price. Be gone! The new government will end in tears too, eventually, though not before it’s done some good things and a few really STUPID ones.
Politics isn’t a morality play, all the good or bad on one side. It’s a bunch of egotistical, but mostly well-intentioned chaps (usually chaps, it’s contact sport) struggling to master the relentless torrent of events and impose fragments of their vision of the good society. All this in an age of heartless, value-free 24/7 news channels which would transmit their own granny’s murder if the pics were any good.
Yes, I know all sorts of people have all sorts of ideas about using the crisis to create a ‘new politics.’ But that’s like wanting to create a ‘new football.’ You can amend the rules, stamp out bad practice, seek to make management of the game fairer. But at 3 o’clock on a Saturday it’s still 22 blokes on a muddy field slogging it out for the ball.
Just so politics, a noble calling. After all, who is probably the most admired person on the planet today? Nelson Mandela, I suspect, a very wily old politician who succeeded in reallocating society’s goods on an heroic scale with minimal bloodshed. That’s what great politics is about.
So an elected House of Lords, an STV voting system for the Commons, select committees with more teeth or MPs paid the average manual wage, may all contribute to a better politics – or may not. Beware of panaceas, they usually do more harm than good.
But do get involved. And by the way, it would be helpful if you first got elected as a local councillor. They need your talents badly.
