So two days after the election I feel the need to expunge some words of wisdom (please note I am very aware that what I am about to write will probably be nonsense but it is my blog!)
I am one of those sad sad people who sits up on election night and watches the vote come in…only on this election night not many of the votes did come as many of the councils saved money and counted the vote the next day. We were left with an awful lot of talking heads talking to one another. For the first hour it was acceptable but by the third hour I had had enough and went to bed.
The next day at lunch I switched on again and the heads were still regurgitating the same nonsense from the night before – the only difference being that they were different heads, other than the redoubtable David Dimbleby. At one time they were talking to Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, and a spokesman (no person here – that would Political Correctness gone Mad) for UKIP and suddenly it struck me why our current crop of politicians are so despised – they don’t talk they recite a liturgy whereas the UKIP spokesman appeared to entering into a conversation – even though he was talking what I believe to be nonsense
How did we get to this point? How is that people, who I suspect are perfectly normal in their private conversations when they are taking to friends and family, as soon as a microphone thrust under their noses turn into robots and answer every question with a language that resembles a powerpoint presentation being read by some one on speed? It has got to the point whereby politicians with a bit of spark of humanity and whit suddenly become stars – in this group I include Boris and the mini me boris Jacob Rees-Mogg, who looks like a bad Groucho Marx body double but I predict big things for – just as they have been for Boris the conservative major of a very un conservative Greater London.
This question was also asked by John Lloyd the other day in the context of TV production and commissioning and his answer was that we now have a series of experts in charge who are experts in nothing. They have never actually made a TV series or programme but are experts in what should be made or more to the point experts in how to avoid making a dud and thus avoid the embarrassment of having a failure on their hands. Perhaps that is it – our politicians now are so sacred of failure they have let the experts tell them how to avoid them and thus suck the air out of the political debates. At times during the last two days I did get distinct impression that it would have been easier if each taking head had just put up the ‘talking point’ power point slide up on the screen for each question. This really does start to sound an awful lot like 1984.
Now it is all very easy to blame the politicians but we should also look at our selves. I read somewhere that we get the politicians we deserve and I think that is very true. We are all too happy, and I count myself in this, to moan and grumble yet haven’t really got a clue how things actually work and quite frankly don’t care. We love to take to Twitter, Facebook and Blog (yes I know the irony) and say how crap they all are. We refuse to see anything in a good light and are never happy unless there is some dark conspiracy to unearth and then tweet about.
For Britain the real low point was the so called expenses scandal when MPs were caught charging for many dubious things to bolster their earnings. The biggest element of the scandal was how the politicians were generously interpreting the rules on mortgage repayments so that they could buy second homes in London which in fact turned out to be their real homes. Didn’t we all enjoy giving these politicians a real good kicking, some of it well deserved, and laugh when one or two went to prison for fraud. The result of this continual kicking is that we get the auto quote politicians we have today whereby they are schooled by so called experts on how not to put their foot in it by answering any question with one of the ‘talking points’ drummed into their heads. The apogee of all this is that we now hear that friends of Ed Milliband want to ‘…Let Milliband be Milliband…’ – a reworking of a quote from the fictional series The West Wing which appeared just as the real life David Axelrod, you know Josh Lyman or Sam Seaborn from West Wing, graced these shores with a visit to tell Ed how to do things.
Do I think that we have a good set of politicians? I don’t know. I’m, sure that they are a mixed bag just like the rest of us although they must be a bit odd because they want to stick their head above the parapet and try and get into the House of Commons. I’m also sure if they ever get into Government they will be faced with a series of intractable problems whereby their is no easy solution and the best solution is not one that is popular with the fickle public. Some of them are good at what they do whilst most of them are ‘alright’ and some down right scoundrels but what I’m really sure is that they are the politicians we deserve. So perhaps the next time we ‘have a go’ at what this politician or that politician has done we should first acknowledge that we put them them there mainly by our own inactivity and indifference.
Simon Marchini
www.simonmarchini.co.uk
Simon's Blog 