Unreal politics

Are you a ‘real person’? Do you live in a ‘community’? In that case you can’t be a politician

Am I a ‘real person’? Are you? What was once a question for Cartesian philosophy is now a matter of public politics. For I keep reading about ‘real people’ who are getting ‘real help’ in this recession. Some are even getting ‘real help now’, the lucky devils. Then I keep wondering if there is a difference between real and unreal help. I had always assumed that one either helps or doesn’t help, and that questions of falseness don’t need to intrude. But I am always wrong these days, especially on the internet, where any thinking defence of politicians slams up against sentences containing the words ‘expenses’, ‘snouts’ and ‘trough’.

Maybe it would be easier to work out what political ‘unreality’ is. Certainly easier, in fact, because the public have already done it. ‘Unreality’ is the 1997 flag-waving, Cool Britannia stuff when Peter Mandelson would twirl his finger adventitiously and Tony Blair’s goodwill grimace would beam out. It didn’t last long. Little cracks started appearing around Blair’s mouth, cracks showing the responsibility of office. His hair went authority-grey and the smile became a moat around his face, keeping the ignorant and unimportant at a distance. So once ‘unreality’ had, so to say, ‘got real’, there was the difficult choice between admission and maintenance. Could the government admit it had stopped the theatric(k)s? Not exactly, but they could keep using ‘unreality’ to their advantage. Hence, the invention of ‘real people’ – with its corollary, ‘unreal people’.

This wasn’t the intellectual property of the governing Labour Party. Much of it derives from the Conservative Party, who were the first party to politicise ‘common sense’ (now extended to ‘unity’ or, especially in America, ‘bipartisanship’). ‘Common sense’ eliminated the need for ‘division’ so everyone started to have it, at least as a canopy to enshade different approaches to government. Those who dissented from ‘common sense’ could not be ‘real people’ since they had forfeited the vague feeling of commonality with establishment opinions that all ‘real people’ have. You see where this is heading, I hope: backwards, to the 1930s. From 1920s Recession to 1930s Repression – these are movements that can be easily re-done.

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I am also unsure how ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ people work alongside ‘communities’, which are Obviously A Good Thing. Sometimes ‘communities’ are geographically arranged, sometimes ethnically arranged, sometimes religiously arranged, but they are always approvingly arranged. ‘Communities’ appear to be refractions and distillations of ‘real people’. The ‘unreal’ people sit outside ‘communities’, presumably resentful about not being included (which is the impulse of the age). After all, that is what ‘unreal’ people do: sulk and don’t join in.

But the brainchild has boomeranged. One community that is not made up of ‘real people’ is that at Westminster, variously known as ‘the Westminster bubble’, ‘the political class’, ‘the political elite’ and, on the internet, as ‘troughers’. (The internet, by the way, is the most obviously unreal community – but it keeps marketing itself as representing those ubiquitous ‘real people’.) In perpetrating and perpetuating myths about themselves, politicians are now having to self-abnegate like a huddle of fallen saints. No one was prepared to defend their expenses as the price for doing a good and difficult job. Everyone was willing to accuse everyone else of ‘divisive’ politics, of ‘spin’ (as though manufactured lying was as routine as a washing machine cycle), of not providing ‘real help’ to ‘hardworking families’.

But no one realised that the public has no special talent for discriminating between the accuser and the accused when the House of Commons is involved. Everyone is, we are told, as bad as each other. (Oliver Cromwell gets quoted approvingly here, always a bad sign.) Once the Daily Telegraph had hit the newsstands with duck houses and moats, there was no sustained sense of public shock. Rather, a confirming tone set in – as though this was to be expected. And it was, because no politicians like to admit they have feelings that can be hurt, families to be protected, and kindnesses that have been put to good use. How could they have such things? They are not ‘real people’.

There has been nothing especially cynical about such silly contortions of language. The ‘political class’ has not been reading Machiavelli or Marx; they have not been reading at all. When Members of Parliament rally round and defend their collective reputation – as when the Sun dumbly attacked Dr Gordon Brown of the University of Edinburgh for supposedly making seven spelling mistakes – they get applause rather than abuse. If only they could do this more often… The impending problem is not MPs’ snouts down low in the trough. It is MPs’ heads hung low in the expectation of public shame. They will not be on the look-out for the ensuing dangers.