Having a debate over a beer, as one does, my friend (who works in politics) firmly believes that people enter politics with a desire to do good in the world. I, well, don't.The heaviest penalty for declining to rule is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.
Their argument was that most MPs try their best to do good, it is just that there are different ideologies about what is good and what should be done to achieve it. They argued that the disgust at the MPs' expenses scandal may well do more harm than good, as only the rich and powerful will be able to afford to be MPs. Not so much the housing expenses, I should add, but the office and staffing expenses which seem to get lumped in with the duckhouse nonsense. I can very much empathise with the argument, I just think it is wrong.
My view has always been that those who have a desire to go into politics should be prevented from doing so. Really, when all is said and done, politics is just showbusiness for ugly people. And just like Liza Minelli or Elizabeth Taylor seem to have a diva-desire to own all the shiny-shiny for themselves, the same seems to be true for the fine upstanding people in the House of Commons.
The typical way into the Houses of Parliament now seems to be:
- Go to public school
- Go read PPE at Oxbridge or LSE
- Go work as a researcher at a "think tank" favourable to the party you wish to join.
- Become an MP.
Political parties have centralised candidate lists, and if you don't get on those lists you don't even get to stand as a candidate. You don't get onto those lists if you're not already in the political circle, and you don't get into the political circle if you don't network like hell at university. So you get the kids straight from university going to some think tank like Policy Exchange, lecturing us all on why we're wrong WRONG I TELL YOU, then coming into Government with exactly the same attitude.
I know things have always been like this, but I'm not so sure politics ever used to be seen as a career aim in itself. Politics was something you did when you'd achieved something in your life, it wasn't something you did when you'd just left school. And I think this is what is causing the rest of us to disengage from politics, to dismiss them all as just thieving liars out for themselves.
These people now, supposedly the brightest brains in Britain, enter politics for their own self-aggrandizement. It's not a way of giving something back to the country, it's not a matter of civic pride, it is a career like any other. It's a matter of doing as well as you can for yourself and your employer and not a great deal else. And like most graduate trainees, to say they have seen nothing of the real world is something of an understatement.
I think it is this which is causing the corruption and incompetence in Parliament to escalate beyond all control. The Houses are full of people who've done and known nothing else, and want everything to be about them. This means you get the myriad MPs claiming expense after expense without thinking it is wrong; this means that you get them demanding an extra £20k a year because they are "underpaid". Perhaps if more of the bastards had spent five years living in London on the minimum wage they'd actually understand what underpaid really meant. This means you get the likes of Iain Duncan-Smith, who reckons he shouldn't have to pay for his own £39 breakfast, claiming that he could live on £50 a week "if he had to". If we didn't have the political structure that excludes everyone who didn't do PPE at Oxbridge and didn't get a job at the Adam Smith Institute through nepotism, perhaps he would actually understand just how hard it is to live on so little. He lectures on rewarding failure without having enough self-awareness to understand that he was the one who was the most resounding failure when he attempted to lead the Conservatives.
I really don't have a coherent idea about how to resolve this problem given that nepotism and self-protection is so prevalent in the UK now. It isn't just Parliament; look how many MPs are dating journalists. Look how many BBC directors play at the same golf clubs as the senior Party officials. And then wonder why the BBC never quite get around to outing the Government (of whichever hue) as the thieving stealing scum that they are. Essentially the political class are now all as one, with no scrutiny and no way of making them accountable. It is precious little wonder that most people no longer want anything to do with politics or politicians, that they are all dismissed as liars and thieves and cheats. It is precious little wonder that all MPs are despised, that they constantly get verbally abused by people in the street. They have created this climate so they can deal with it.
Plato's quote at the start of the blogpost says it all, really. We are all governed by people who are inferior; not inferior intellectually, but certainly inferior morally. The solution is to take back control for ourselves, rather than disengage from the process entirely. But that's a difficult thing to achieve. I've always been interested in politics and even I can really no longer even be bothered to get angry about the corrupt cabal of scum that are in Parliament these days. If the choice is between Gideon Osborne and Ed Balls, I'd rather go to the pub and drown my sorrows in gin.
