The Parties did not, as someone once put it, send their best. Lower tier cabinet and shadow cabinet members turned up, along with the Lib Dem Deputy Leader. To the Greens and Reform, the event did not even merit an MP.
But if the audience at Channel 4’s Local Election Debate (more of a Q&A session, really) felt let down, they did not show it, the event passing off with surprising good humour for a country regularly described in focus groups as “effed up”. For an hour they asked their questions, and for an hour the panel answered them.
This was easier than it might seem, each audience member merely finding a different way of asking the same two questions – Can I get more stuff? And can I pay less for it? Everyone wanted something and everyone wanted their Council Tax to go down. Like Augustine asking for chastity – as long as that meant other people not having sex.
It was not entirely to their credit that the panellists played along, differing only in the branch of the magic money tree they proposed to lop off to fund the land of milk and honey the audience demanded – and they, and only they, could bring about. Labour touted the growth that would be along any minute now, presumably in Godot’s pocket. To the Conservatives, the answer was cost cuts. As it has been since about 1960. The Lib Dems were going to tax the millionaires and billionaires. The millionaires and billionaires currently leaving the country, leading to a collapse of Capital Gains Tax receipts.
No-one felt able to suggest, no matter how gently, that delivering the impossible might not, actually, be possible, so round and round we go, electorate and politicians locked in a dance to the death, choreographed with the precision of an Ancien Regime quadrille – we want it all, they say they can give it to us. They fail, we blame them, choose another partner and moan about declining trust in the system. It is never Us; it is always Them.
We are not alone. Every recent French President has seen a Starmeresque decline in popularity on taking office, the electorate coming to realise that the promises of the campaign trail come with a bill attached, a bill it is unwilling to pay. Americans voted for tariffs to rebuild industry and moan about higher prices.
For it is Us too, not just Them. Politicians merely respond to the incentives the voters give them, they say what they need to say to be elected. If polls say that the public wants better public services and are willing to see tax rises to pay for them, as long as those taxes are paid by others, that is what politicians will promise, reality be damned. Those who suggest that the fiscal Emperor may be a little underdressed are either talking Britain down or in the pocket of evil millionaires and billionaires who won’t pay their fair share (the ones who haven’t moved to Dubai, of course). Voter’s hand prefers not to open voter’s wallet, as Theresa May discovered with her Dementia Tax.
We have, thus, developed a system in which, to gain power, politicians must either not understand the situation (in which case, they are too stupid to be at the top), understand it but believe they uniquely can escape its constraints (in which case, they are too arrogant to be at the top) or understand the situation, realise that they cannot fix it, but pretend otherwise for the baubles of office (in which case, they are too compromised to be at the top). And we wonder why nothing works.
Politicians may not be blameless – had they the insight and integrity they proclaim, they would refuse to be politicians – but they do not deserve all the blame. The electorate must take its share, its ability to believe several impossible things before breakfast playing its part in getting us to where we are. And where we will go.
In Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, the nobles shut themselves in an Abbey to escape the plague stalking the land, planning to wait it out in luxury and debauch (similarities to the Covid-era Downing Street purely coincidental). After six months, a figure in a blood-spattered robe appears at a ball to the horror of the revellers. Affronted by this reminder of mortality, the host pursues the figure through the rooms, finally cornering it, only to die when it turns to face him. As do his guests, irresistibly drawn to the commotion. That’s the problem with dances: the music always stops.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.
If you enjoy The New Conservative and would like to support our work, please consider buying us a coffee or sharing this piece with your friends – it would really help to keep us going. Thank you!
Politicians seem incapable of responding to the things that voters don’t want (illegal immigrants, overseas aid, EU membership, unaffordable energy etc.) but are always game for promising to give voters what they, the voters, say they do want (lower taxes, housing, health care etc.) yet still always fail to deliver. Perhaps the solution is for voters to stop asking for anything except curtailing the things they don’t want. Somehow I think failure to deliver would still be the result, given the disdain politicians feel for the electorate.
“A people can vote themselves into slavery, though they cannot vote themselves out of
it.” Frank Chodorov
Yes , by and large, we get the politicians we deserve. Though it is odd that the politicians we deserrve give us so much of things like immigration and multiculturalism that — I must say — I don’t think we do deserve.