This includes the BBC – which has had to absorb real terms cuts to its licence fee revenue since 2010. If anyone’s looking for ideas, the Master of Selwyn College Cambridge, Roger Mosey (a former BBC Executive) has some ideas.
Image – The Struggle for Democracy (1944)
‘I agree with von Bismarck – no not that one!’
The German historian and analyst of UK-EU politics amongst other things. This is one of the reasons why I try to follow English language feeds from non-UK/US outlets; you get a different perspective on what’s happening. The annoying thing in recent times is that the big tech owners have hotwired their algorithms away from things people choose to follow and instead bombard us with junk reels. So I get far fewer updates.
HvB is spot on. Part of the problem however is that the public has been de-politicised over time, whether by accident or design. I mentioned in my previous post at the end how in the 1980s the long form TV interview over 45 minutes would be the norm for Sunday afternoon TV. It bored us children at the time because all it looked like was two middle-aged/ageing chaps in grey suits using long words that we didn’t understand. And also ours was a generation not taught about politics or democracy less we got ‘brainwashed’ and ‘indoctrinated’. (But faith schools were – and according to the main political parties, are still fine).
Furthermore, the Political move towards compulsory outsourcing in the late 1980s (which I wrote about here) meant we moved from democratic accountability to ‘contractual accountability’ where politics struggled further to resolve day-to-day issues that people had. Because if it wasn’t covered by the contract, councils had to pay extra – which was hardly going to be forthcoming in an era of austerity.
‘It’s like they have forgotten what politics should be for‘
That point is all the more powerful by journalist and author Svenja O’Donnell given her own family’s background and her book about their flight from their home in what was East Prussia. War and violence happens when politics fails.
This is why the hustings are ever so important – but what can organisers do if some of the key candidates either choose, or as is more likely, ordered not to take part?
See Phil Rodgers’ list of hustings – I hope we have a couple more booked later this week. But what mood is the wider public in? One of my longstanding acquaintances who came back from Brighton to the Strawberry Fair at the weekend (I gave it a miss due to brainfog and the cold) said:
“Strawberry Fair was a mellow one this year, I think most of us are skint and bereft”
That mood didn’t surprise me. Furthermore, given the handling of a host of controversial projects mainly to do with the Greater Cambridge Partnership, there’s a sense that many have simply given up on politics as a means of achieving change. Which if you’re a hardcore neoliberal is splendid because the ‘through business and charity’ narrative dominates. Charity through benevolent provision rather than campaigning for change that is.
Charity instead of politics?
I was going to repeat the oft-quoted line from Attlee – but it turns out it was a summary quotation from his biographer.
“Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.”
…which Phil Taylor on his blog unpicks here, saying it is more an attempt by Beckett to summarise Attlee quoting Robert Louis Stevenson.
Comparing charitable giving to charitable campaigning also reflects why the latter come in for criticism not just from the conservative right, but also from working class activists and academics who (quite understandably) take issue with ‘middle class do-gooders’ – of which in one sense I have been guilty as charged. It was why I chose the economics course that I did – with a strong development economics strand in it, thinking at the time it would lead to a career in an institution that made nice things happen and people would praise us for it. It…didn’t turn out like that!
Yet had we covered some of the basics of civics, politics, and democracy at secondary school, I wonder if I would have chosen/been guilt-tripped into going down that route in the first place.
Staying with the issue of heading charitable organisations and not-for-profit quasi-state organisations, we found out recently that ministers more than made use of political patronage to install their allies into a host of decision-making/influencing posts. Will the next government seek to unwind those appointments? It’s something the Institute for Government looked at in 2022 here.
TV talking-heads keeping conversations inside safe zones
The standard model for BBC Current Affairs seems to be to have two party politicians – one Labour and one Conservative, and then two ‘more radical but still approved’ commentators – one on the left, one on the right, to provide faux confrontation/debate without getting into any depth of the issues concerned. That’s not to criticise those well-meaning people who want to make the case for the many on TV. If someone is going to pay you to do it, it’s hard to turn down in this ongoing cost of living crisis. It would be better (in my opinion) to have say an academic expert and/or someone with extensive ‘in the field’ experience of whatever the policy issue is – and have them speaking first, before the politicians put any party political context on top of it.
How much knowledge should broadcasters assume the public has?
This is part of the wider problem for me. For a start, there’s no co-ordination and no leadership in taking on the wider problems of our political system. No single action is going to resolve things. Furthermore, some of the financial and political interests in keeping the broken system in place are huge. Not in the conspiracy theory sense – it’s more straight forward than that. For example the University of Cambridge and its colleges have little institutional incentive to support the creation of a powerful local authority that can curtail its activities, tax its huge collective wealth, and compel it to undertake activities it does not want to. Far better for gown and government to support each other at the expense of local democracy.
It’s also one of the reasons why organising ad-hoc civics workshops or even a series of evening classes can only go so far.
Hope in the growing podcasting movement?
It depends on who is doing the interviewing, who is being interviewed and what the topic is. It’s a subject for a separate blogpost but for every one that someone like me might praise, there are ones that those in progressive politics find really disturbing. And even more so when a former PM takes part in it. Which reminds us of the problems of each of us retreating into our own political and social bubbles – creating the very polarised societies we fear.
I hope the BBC amongst others can come up with something better on political coverage after the election.
Time will tell.
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Below – from 1945: Is Britain a democracy? By Frank Hardie for the Association for Education in Citizenship. How does it read today?
The Cambridge Town Owl 