For something which knows so much about me, Facebook seems to know very little about me. It knows where I went to university, but deluges me with posts from the alumni associations of different institutions, some of which I would not have deigned to go to, some of which did not deign to allow me to go to them… I get adverts for restaurants hundreds of miles from where I live and property listings for houses thousands of miles from anywhere I have ever been.
It should be no surprise, therefore, that despite nothing I ever post being to the left of Genghis Khan, from time to time it chooses to dollop some Labour Party propaganda into my lap. So it was a few days ago when it decided to show me the government’s latest video, a ten second or so montage called “This is what a patriot looks like”. Henry V, perhaps? Nelson (it’s not that long since Trafalgar Day, after all). The Duke of Wellington, boot resting on a mound of dead Frenchman?
No. A paramedic, a nurse and a policeman shown in a loop. Useful people to have around of course. But so are plumbers, car mechanics and professional investors (you may have to trust me on this one…). Be that as it may, they didn’t make the cut; the implication being that they were, in some way, not patriotic. True patriotism, the advert seemed to say, involved being paid by the state. You may volunteer at your local British Legion, have a car festooned with England flags and passages of Henry V tattooed on your back, but if you don’t work for the government, “you ain’t no patriot, bruv”.
That some might object to this; that some might find it offensive seems not to have crossed the party’s mind. Of course it didn’t, because the advert (inadvertently perhaps, but accurately certainly) depicts the underlying conception of society which informs the country’s current rulers.
For Labour seems to conceive of society as a mediaeval monastery. At the top are the godly monks who are in charge of everything. Next up are the lay brothers, not quite as good as the monks but still doing God’s work, and beneath them are the peasants. Their function is purely to supply the resources their betters require – and if they don’t like it, well Eternal Damnation is just a step away. Having chosen not to take Holy Orders, they deserve everything they get.
But Labour’s “government paycheque good, government limo better” understanding is every bit as flawed as an abbot would have been, who thought he could survive without the peasants tilling the fields. For society is not a series of layers which float on top of each other with declining merit as you go down through them, but a messy amalgam in which each constituent part plays a role in the success of the whole. Those government cars won’t work very well if the evil brutes in the tyre factories see the light and decide to retrain as teachers. Nor will nurses, however patriotic and well-intentioned, achieve much if the evil exploiters in the drugs industry decide en masse to become firemen.
For there are few who do not contribute to society – not just through their activities, but through the tax they pay, taxes the monks recycle to their favoured causes. Who is more virtuous, the person who puts the money in the collection plate, or the priest who hands it to a local charity?
This points to an uncomfortable (for some) conclusion: for some people, the best way they can serve the public is not to be in public service. Take, for example, Sir James Dyson. Has he added more to the nation by inventing numerous gadgets and paying large amounts of tax than he would have done had he gone to work for the DVLA? The answer, I think, is clearly yes.
But the argument works the other way too. Take Rachel Reeves.
The Chancellor makes much of her belief in public service. That is why she is in politics. The daughter of teachers, public service runs through her like a stick of Brighton rock. How’s that working out for us so far? She couldn’t really add any value as a backbench MP, that is the nature of the system. As Chancellor? Well, it is widely believed that having been dealt a bad hand of cards, but she has played them poorly. Her choices in her first budget leading in large part to the £20bn/£30bn/£40bn black hole she will endeavour to fill in her second.
Ms Reeves claims to be “proud” of her previous effort, but she was proud of the book she wrote which plagiarised Wikipedia, so we should not perhaps regard her as a reliable compass…The rest of us are left to pick up the tab.
There was, of course, another way. Ms Reeves, she says, had a job offer from Goldman Sachs. Let’s have a think about the alternative universe in which she took it. She would have made more money certainly. She would have paid more tax definitely. The cost of her mistakes would have been borne only by the clients who chose to follow her advice. Taken in the round, would the country have been better off? Almost undoubtedly.
It is possible to feel a degree of sympathy with Ms Reeves. It is difficult to mistake her for a happy person. In the words of one commentator, she has “the face of someone who has looked into the abyss”. But it is an abyss, in part, of her own making. She went into politics because, at the age of eleven or so she decided she wanted to be the first female Chancellor. Eleven year-olds are renowned neither for their self-awareness, nor their grasp of economics. No matter, she persisted and now we get to pay for her tweenage ego-fart. As a cardinal in Godfather III tells Michael, “You suffer. And it is right that you suffer.”
She is not, of course, unique. Theresa May made much of her commitment to public service. Theresa May decided at school she wanted to be Prime Minister. Theresa May led her party to its lowest ever (to date) vote share in a national election. Like the current inhabitant of No. 11, a toxic combination of ego and a narrow definition of public service led to disaster. A disaster the rest of us must pay for.
Ms Reeves is merely the latest politician to meet her destiny on the road she took to avoid it. She won’t be the last. “Only he who has no use for the Empire is fit to be entrusted with it”…
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.
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(Photograph: Kirsty O’Connor / Treasury, OGL 3 <http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3>, via Wikimedia Commons)
