In Britain, Politicians Refused to Fight Harder Against Child Poverty…and then claimed they were the victims
It is an emotional response many of us are used to turning to. You have read a news item that has made your blood boil. It resonates with your very notions of what is right and what is wrong. You turn, as is the way, to social media to share your feelings, thus triggering similar responses in like-minded friends and followers who are equally appalled at the heinous act in the news item in question.
You have, of course, shared news that a politician seems to have called another politician ‘scum’ for refusing to extend support to millions of facing poverty.
The furore which greeted Labour’s Angela Raynor and her off-the-cuff response to a fellow British Parliamentarian, during a confrontation regarding the state extending funding for free school meals for the nation’s most unfortunate, resonated far beyond those wood-panelled benches. The condemnation of her criticisms, many from people who have continued to defend policy which threatens to see one million more children fall into food poverty, cuts to the heart of a disease at the heart of British politics. Namely, the triumph of civility over morality: the messenger over the message.
The root of this present political pestilence lies in the longer history of the mass media’s place within Anglo-American politics. This history can be most obviously traced back to Kennedy-Nixon debates, and the lingering idea of the former’s superior visual and spoken appearance triumphing over policy.
In truth, however, the lineage of politics-as-personalities goes back much further. It can be seen in the earliest roots of the British tabloid press, which launched with hugely-popular content that made news, including politics, about the ‘human interest’ and people within the story. The idea of the political celebrity has its roots in Winston Churchill’s early career after a stint as a war correspondent; the appeal of a certain kind of political face and voice was something also tapped into by the suffrage movement and Parliament’s first female members.
The idea that personalities mattered as much as policies has a history of democratic potential. Evolving political news from verbatim reports of Commons speeches better connected the traditionally-elite world of politics to the lives and emotions of millions who, increasingly into the twentieth century, were finally allowed a stake within the electoral system.
The modern era however, represents this ideal at both its endpoint and its most toxic. By making the political about the personality, the news cycle becomes not about an issue, but about contests between people. It becomes politics as soap-opera; politics as running back-and-forths between interchangeable actors playing roles of ‘acceptable’ opposing sides. This opposition, like a television drama, is one of people playing characters who, ultimately, are just playing roles within a game or a spectacle.
Therefore, no matter how horrible a role they are playing in the performance, everyone shakes hands at the hand and basks in a job well done. It has morphed into the pernicious idea that a message, however toxic, can be accepted into the mainstream if the deliverer is dressed in the right manner and remembers the script.
Picture Nick Griffin, the then-leader of the far-right British National Party, and his infamous appearance on BBC’s Question Time in 2009. The liberal dream was that, by exposing his bigotry to oxygen and the light of a mass public, it would falter and die. Instead, by wearing a smile and a tie, he articulated extreme-right politics as a newly-presentable alternative; a new character in the story.
Much of what we hear from the current government, performed across television and radio by politicians and commentators alike, is a tonal descendent of Griffin’s grandstand: lefty do-gooders thwarting immigration law; attacks on unpatriotic histories; the bigotry of calling out white privilege. The key in all of this is the tone and delivery of the message.
It isn’t screamed. It isn’t spat out. It is delivered with a smirk and a smile, in the same costumes and using the same vocabularies. It is the performer fulfilling their role to perfection. It is above all else ‘civil’: the great toxin at the heart of the media culture of personality politics.
When the medium is the message, it matters less how villainous you are. What matters is how the characters treat each other on stage. If one side snaps and calls out the other’s monstrosity, the offended is the real victim.
By keeping in role, they can play the sympathy card with a completely straight face. Members of Parliament can head to a sunny beach, take to Twitter and bemoan their ‘tough old week’, as some of their own constituents again go to sleep on empty stomachs.
It is through this prism that we should understand today’s political reality. One where being ‘uncivil’ in the defence not hardening your heart or shutting your hand is worse than sitting back and watching your brothers, or children, starve…
