On the personalisation of politics

A few days ago, the Conservative member of parliament Nadine Dorries once again made some impolitic remarks for which she wont be loved by her own party. Dorries described the Prime Minister and the Chancellor (members of her own party) as ‘posh boys who dont know the price of milk’. What she presumably meant by that is that Cameron and Osborne are ‘out of touch’ with ordinary people in this country. This is a line that has been relentlessly pushed by the Labour leader Ed Miliband and which culminated in his prompts to the ministerial front bench to reveal whether they would benefit from the reduction of income tax to 45% which is to come into force in April 2013. 

The public demand to reveal the income and assets of politicians has become stronger over the last months and you may think that this is the way is should go. However, I think it is mistaken for two reasons. 

First, it is a deflection from the real arguments that we should have: what are the benefits to society of particular policies and which groups may be disadvantaged or may inordinately benefit from them. Knowing whether any particular politician falls into one or the other group is of little use when assessing the overall impact of a policy on society. It does however personalise the debate. This focus on alleged individual benefits can only strengthen the suspicions of the wider public that politicians are engaged in conspiracies to further their own interest. This does not exactly serve anybody, given the low esteem politicians are held in right now. 

But personalising political debates also hints at a paucity of alternative arguments and it is a sign of the floundering tactics of Ed Miliband and his team that he favours this road. The facts of the last budget were portrayed in the public debate on a curiously lop-sided fashion. The centre-piece of the budget was the raising of the income tax threshold, instantly lifting the tax burden for 23 million people in the UK and taking thousands of the poorest families out of income tax altogether, a step that should resonate with Labour and its supporters. 

Yet it is probably a sign of the frustration that the coalition government has delivered some of what speaks to the core principles of the Labour Party that the shadow front bench have been left with little else to suggest in the public debate. Their fall-back strategy is to personalise some of the more marginal aspects of the budget (Labour leader Ed Miliband made much of a tax on pasties and visited a pasty shop on the day after the budget to drive his point home). Yet all this does is to bring about an unfortunate shift from debating policies to debating personal circumstances of politicians. Miliband and his supporters should be careful what they wish for.  

Once, and this is my second point, you start suggesting that it is the personal background of politicians which guides them in making national policy, this bandwagon may not be able to stop. If you argue that personal income guides taxation policy, why not reveal whether they are straight or gay when it comes to legislation on gay marriage? Or their medical records where health policy is concerned? 

It is also a terrain Labour would not necessarily do well in, given that Harriet Harman is one of the richest aristocrats in Britain and almost the entire front bench of Labour in the House of Commons has been educated privately (which puts them in the top 6% of earners in this country). And why stop there? Would the religious affiliation of politicians matter if they come to legislate on the reform of the House of Lords and whether or not the Bishops of the Church of England should retain their seats? Miliband is Jewish and I am sure he would agree that, say, discussing the religious affiliation of parliamentarians when legislating on the dis-establishment of the Church of England provides little to the public debate? 

So it seems the personalisation of politics is a dangerous path and does a monumental disservice to the conduct of political dispute in this country. Questioning the motives of politicians in making policy appears to run counter to the principles of mutual respect and rational argument. Let us hope that Labour turns its backs on this risky strategy. If they don’t, we all can only lose in the process. 

Vote Plaid get Labour!

Today the new leader of the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru reiterated her offer to work with Labour and ruled out any co-operation with the Welsh Conservatives in local councils or in the Welsh Assembly. Leanne Wood, who belongs to the socialist wing of her party, said in an interview with the BBC that co-operation across party political boundaries had to be based on shared values and that Plaid certainly shared many values with the Labour Party. 

Her statement, coming close to the local elections in Wales, will create problems for some local councils where Plaid councillors have been working with their Conservative counterparts to bring about much needed change for local residents. Wood who seemed to categorically forbid Plaid councillors to work with their Conservatives colleagues has thus completed the shift of her party to the extreme left. 

The immediate beneficiary of this move is the Labour Party under Carwin Jones, whose Labour government has failed so far to present a legislative programme and who maintained a low profile since his re-elections last year. Jones, whose party does not have an outright majority in the Welsh Assembly, can now count on Plaid votes in the Assembly without offering the nationalists anything in return. 

As many of Wood's colleagues across Europe can tell her, ruling out political co-operation with specific parties can only reduce the party's flexibility for future party political negotiations and worsen her party's position with the electorate. As Wood makes her party increasingly indistinguishable from the Labour Party, voters across Wales will ask themselves what the point of Plaid really is. 

Deja vu in France

Francois Hollande (left) and Nicolas Sarkozy (right)
Picture courtesy of  BBC

There you have it: Francois Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, the candidates of the main centre-left and centre-right, are through to the second round of the French presidential elections. While Holland, the candidate for the Socialist Party does not exactly promise milk and honey to his French compatriots, he does want to roll back the modest reforms put in place under Sarkozy. In particular, the rise of the pension age from 60 to 62 (in Germany the pension age is 67) attracted the ire of some of the French electorate. 

We have been here before. The last Socialist President in France, Francois Mitterrand, equally promised a lot. After being elected he dramatically expanded the state sector to reduce unemployment, yet found that there was little money left in the state coffers and had to back-paddle very quickly to avert economic disaster. 

There is a significant difference between Mitterrand and Hollande however. As Mitterrand promised to commit more public money to correct the ills of the French economy, he only gambled the money of the French. Now France has the Euro and any public spending commitments that cannot be met from taxation and public borrowing within the rules of the austerity pact signed with other Euro member states, will have to come from somewhere else. 

Hollande thinks he has solved the dilemma. He announced that he wants to renegotiate the recently signed Euro stability pact to allow the European Central Bank to lend directly to the French government. In other words, he wants to be able to tap into the cheap money underwritten by a more competitive German economy and German tax payers while delaying or reversing the much needed economic reforms in France. 

Whatever he thinks he can achieve by increasing the already enormous mountain of debt of the French state, the past should be a reliable benchmark of his chances of success. Mitterand’s actions triggered a rocketing inflation that threatened to spiral out of control and throw the French population into a deep economic crisis. He reversed course within a year. It seems that Hollande has failed the test of any responsible politician even before he wins his right to move into the Elysee Palace: learn from past mistakes. 

How not to tackle crony capitalism

In the public debate there are largely two different types of arguments about how to tame ‘rampant capitalism’. Both approaches share the same diagnosis of capitalism's main problem: a managerial class taking more than their fair share of rewards while socialising the risks of entrepreneurial activity. Banks are an often cited example, but other large quasi-monopolistic service providers such as water, power and gas suppliers have come in for criticism too. 

The two arguments essentially run like this. For one class of observers and commentators, the excesses of capitalism are a symptom of poor regulation, insufficient oversight and lack of transparency in company governance structures which make it difficult for shareholders to exercise control over managerial decisions and pay. This type of argument is cumbersome, complex and not very sexy. 

The other argument offers a more simplistic account of the economy and the ills of capitalism. It goes like this. Large companies are run by a clique of evil selfish managers promoting their own narrow interests, are motivated by greed and ride roughshot over societies and communities.  Ed Miliband’s intemperate word about the ‘energy companies ripping off ordinary people’ is in this vein. 

Who is right? Essentially the opposing arguments offer differing interpretations or perspectives on the same phenomenon, a dysfunctional, insufficiently regulated capitalism that seemed to have produced considerably disparate results for honest work across the world. So in the battle between interpretations, observing the results of actual economic policies may help us to adjudicate. 

Argentina offers just such a case. In a unashamedly populist move, Argentina’s president Kirchner, suggested to push legislation through parliament that will allow her to nationalise a controlling share in YPF, the oil production company of Argentina, without compensating the Spanish shareholder, Repsol. 

The initial reactions across the world was condemnation on the right and widespread applause on the left. If Kirchner will get her way, this is the first large scale nationalisation of an oil company since the 1970s. 

The initial approval on the left has now however given way to some more balanced assessments and some serious reservations about Kirchner’s policies. The Observer’s Will Hutton, while broadly supportive of the move, calls it ‘clumsy and unfair’. 

However, the most significant hesitation about this re-nationalisation is articulated in between the lines in a different article the same edition of the Observer. Outlining the reasons for the original privatisation of the national company in the 1990s, Uki Goni writes that Argentina's ‘national economy was largely closed to the outside world and all utilities were state-owned, inefficient and overstaffed.’ Following privatisation, many jobs were lost as companies had to become competitive and eventually Argentina entered a boom phase. Year later and with the economy booming, Argentina started to engage in public spending largesse under the government of Kirchner’s husband, financed by government debt. Now Argentina faces the consequences of this profligacy, trying to rid herself of public debt by driving up inflation. 

In this context, Kirchner’s policy of nationalising YPF can only lead to disaster. Putting herself and some close advisers in charge of the oil company will allow her to avoid the difficult choices she refused to make so far. No doubt, she will now expand the number of employees on the government’s payroll, trying to alleviate the impact of mis-management and rocketing government debt. 

Sadly, Kirchner is not alone in thinking that nationalisation somehow permits her to escape the harsh realities of economic laws. Ed Miliband argues along similar lines in the UK. The fact is however that state companies, operating as monopolies in utility markets, are the worst of all worlds for customers and societies. 

Nationalisation means that governments arrogate an enormous amount of economic power in their hands, strengthening clientelistic (or outright corrupt) ties between government officials and company directors, and reducing transparency and independent oversight. As state owned companies expand their workforce at the behest of government officials who want to bring down unemployment, creating phantom jobs, prices for utilities actually increase, driving up inflation and exacerbating poverty and deprivation for the lowest paid in society. 

Will Hutton hints at his doubts about this policy as he dubs the nationalisation programme of Kircher ‘a move form crony capitalism to crony statism’. Or, to put it more bluntly, sexy solutions to complex problems are rarely the right ones. 

Pessoa once again...

I recently travelled to Italy for a conference and in a small bookshop in San Marino, high up on the shelves stocked with English language books, there it was again: Fernando Pessoa’s ‘Book of Disquiet’. On the cover, the editors assembled an impressive cast of commentators praising the book as ‘a masterpiece’, ‘like nothing else’. 

I have already mentioned that I do not think Pessoa’s writing works as well in prose as it does in poetry. The almost compulsive introspection and hyper-sensitivity may have predisposed him to wonderful poetic phrases, but did not capture my imagination when put into prose. The main flaw of the book is that it fails to tell a story and lacks any consistent narrative of personal development. There is some disagreement about whether Pessoa’s notes are autobiographical or whether his choice of pseudonym reflects his desire to distill his observations into a fictional account at a later stage (Pessoa did not publish the book or prepare any manuscript for publication). 

For me, Pessoa’s own voice is clearly articulated throughout the book, and it is the lack of cohesion or personal development which I think reveals it as autobiographical notes. There can be no doubt that Pessoa at times surprises with beautiful turns of phrases, fascinating observations and telling flashes of ingenuity. Yet, the constant introspection which uses mainly pseudo-psychiatric talk must wear any reader down. 

Consider this passage: ‘All I’ve ever done is dream. That, and only that, has been the meaning of my existence. The only thing I’ve ever cared about is my inner life.’ (194) How true, and yet Pessoa does not develop a suitable language to tells us anything about this inner life. The book oscillates between contradictory positions that are articulated with gusto but with little justification. He continues to dwell on the surface: 

‘Day by day, in my deep but ignoble soul I record the impressions that form the external substances of my consciousness of myself.’ (142) If he only had! In fact, he does not tell us anything about these impressions that clearly would be good to know if we are to judge his ruminations about his consciousness. One of the most revealing passages comes when he talks about tedium, a concept he wrestles with endlessly without ever getting close to any satisfactory description: 

‘No one has as yet produced an exact definition of tedium, at least not in language comprehensible to someone who has never experienced it.’ (122). One is tempted to say: well, go for it! But the nature of words is such that conceptual understanding is best done through the recognition of feelings that are set within real life contexts. Instead of providing us with an example of what he believes tedium may be like, Pessoa tries to define tedium by using other similar words. It is a process of hermeneutic approximation, championed by others in philosophy, but ‘tedious’ (excuse the pun) when used in prose. 

Yet Pessoa’s book does have its moments of insights. It seems fitting that those are mainly of the type we know from other writers in the inter-war period. The topos of the ‘misunderstood’ writer is much laboured by him as it was by others, claiming that he was way ahead of his time. Pessoa’s intellectual arrogance is also quite disturbing when writing things such as: ‘Between me and a peasant there is a qualitative difference, deriving from the existence in me of abstract thought and disinterested emotion; whereas between him [the peasant] and the cat, at the level of the spirit, there is only a difference of degree.’ (249)

What a breathtaking misperception of his own abilities. 

Pessoa doesn’t seem to have had much contact with other people and he comments on it throughout the book. If there is a lesson to be drawn it is this: a stunted social life may allow you to engage in some navel-gazing, but don’t expect much insight from looking there. 

How much do we need to know about our politicians?

The London Mayoral contest has brought us some novelties in the way candidates present themselves. The most significant change is probably the disclosure of the candidates' income  statements. Although the Labour candidate Ken Livingstone has been less than forthcoming about his income, the leader of the Labour Party Ed Miliband has argued that income tax submissions should be made public by all prospective candidates in UK elections. Miliband's intervention in the Mayoral election has form. It was the Labour leader who started this wave of revelations by asking the frontbench of the coalition government in his response to the budget whether they would personally benefit from the reduction in income tax. 

If all candidates for public office are in future required to reveal their income and the tax they pay, the UK would only follow in the footsteps of the US where income tax disclosure is common practice in elections. 

However, the argument put forward so far to support income tax disclosure strikes me as odd. Ed Miliband once again articulated the rationale behind this on the Andrew Marr Show last Sunday. Voters, he said, should know if legislators would benefit from the laws they vote on. Asked by Marr whether this should include their medical history, Miliband tried to backpaddle, suggesting that medical history was an entirely different matter. 

But it seems to me that this position lacks coherence as well as plausibility. Such a policy can only be coherent if all aspects of the personal lives of legislators are revealed so that voters can see whether or not they benefit from legal changes they enact. Hence Miliband would be wrong to arbitrarily limiting disclosure to income and taxation. Clearly the rule of transparency would apply to all aspects of legislators' lives. 

Yet, the proposal also lacks plausibility in the first place. Legislators are human beings, living in the society on which they impose legal rules as part of their daily routine. The disclosure of whether or not a parliamentarian could potentially benefit from legislation applies to all domains of her or his personal life, and, according to Miliband, complete transparency is taken to be critical for public debate of proposed legislation. 


But why should that be the case? What does it add to our understanding of the proposals for, say gay marriage, whether or not a particular legislator is straight, married, single, gay, or divorced? Legislation is enacted on the merits of laws for the whole of society, not whether or not a specific individual benefits from it. 

The point becomes clear when we examine more closely how we discuss legislation in public debate. A particular focus of deliberating on the merits of proposed legislation is whether or not particular groups of people are being disadvantaged or disproportionately advantaged. But we do not inquire whether any specific individual is set to gain from it. The latter would be a clear indication that we believe the legislative process is corrupted, say by passing laws that only benefit one individual rather than society. Clearly Miliband does not want to suggest that legislators on the government benches are corrupt? 

So, focussing on personal gain or loss is  either indicative of a notion of a corrupted legislative process or it is simply a fishing exercise for party political gain. As the latter, it lacks plausibility. Needless to say, it may deter people from entering politics and shift the focus from assessing the effect of legislation for the whole of society to individuals. 


Watching Miliband's budget response, the main intention of this move becomes clearer. It is a piece of political theatre which remains one of the few avenues open to him as he is struggling to win arguments. Personalising politics is always a poor choice for any politician but with a leader who regularly fails to put in convincing performances, the Labour Party may have few other options than muck-racking. 

The virtues of First-Past-The-Post

As the expenses crisis hit the political system in Britain, the new speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow said his main objective was to strengthen the role of the backbench politician. Less than a year later, the British public voted to retain the first past the post voting system with an overwhelming majority. About two years into the new parliament, parliamentarians and observers agree that Speaker Bercow, though hardly liked by his colleagues, has delivered. Backbenchers have been allowed to call debates at short notice and the speaking time granted to them, to the chagrin of the party whips, has increased significantly.

Contrast this with the recent developments in the German parliament where a spat between the speaker of the lower house (Bundestagspresident) Lammert and the chief whips of the main parties threaten to lead to new rules for parliamentary debates, potentially removing the right of the speaker to call backbenchers for debate at his own discretion and curtailing their speaking time to 3 minutes. 

The German and British parliaments differ in many things but probably nowhere more so than in the power of the party whips. While disenchantment with the main political parties is rife amongst the publics in both countries, the responses of the political classes has been markedly different. In Britain, it has led to a silent revolution in the distribution of power between backbenchers and parties, with the chief whips losing much of their say over who speaks in parliament at which debate. Coupled with the retention of the first past the post voting system, this seems to have strengthened the role of individual parliamentarians with backbench revolts against government backed legislation at an all time high. 

The story in Germany could be more different. Although Germany does elect a substantial number of parliamentarians through the first past the post system, overall it operates a mixed electoral system which puts the political parties firmly in charge of candidate selection. Smaller parties like the Greens and the Left party which traditionally have few parliamentarians elected with outright majorities in their constituencies, have only tenuous links with their voters, something that solidifies the power of the party whips. 

The spat between Lammert and the party whips reveals this trend of strengthening political parties over parliamentarians voting with their consciousness. In a recent debate, Lammert allowed some parliamentarians to articulate their misgivings about legislation brought by the government. The chief whips of the main parties, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Christian Democrats, took that as an assault on their god-given right to determine who speaks in which debate. Consequently they now propose new rules which curtailed the discretion of the speaker to call individual members of the parties in any debate. In effect, through the new rules, party whips put themselves in charge of deciding who can speak in parliament and who cannot. 

The response of the party whips is telling in the wake of some devastating defeats in recent state wide elections in Germany. The Pirate Party, a motley crew of individuals who either reject parliamentary politics altogether or party politics in particular, has enjoyed some phenomenal success in Germany over the last year, seriously threatening the dominance of established political parties. You would think that the message of voters would have been clear: conventional parties are losing their connection with the concerns of ordinary voters. Yet the reaction is one of tightening the grip of political parties on their members rather than permitting more diversity of opinion to be reflected in parliamentary debate. 

Although this was rarely discussed when Britain voted in the referendum last year, it seems that the first past the post system is still the better system to guard against the overbearing power of political parties. Or perhaps, thank God for Speaker John Bercow.