Artifice

I have been thinking about this for a while now, and it's one of those topics that seems to have greater significance than one might first imagine.

Take The West Wing.  I'm about half-way through the seven-season box set now, and it is striking the extent to which - perhaps because it is being watched mainly for entertainment value - the subtleties of artifice do not emerge in bolder colours.  Another way of putting this is that a bunch of people going 'er, not sure, I'll find out', talking over each other, dropping pens on the floor or doodling on a notepad, i.e. the things that go on in almost every meeting, never happen in The West Wing.  Showing people doing that would not make them look impressive, and since the object of the show is to demonstrate how impressive the real West Wing is (or ought to be), what you get instead are a series of talking heads - in effect a group of characters, who periodically have their turn to produce the most relevant statistics, in the right order, at the right meetings.

This is, I suppose, part of the object of The West Wing - to be a drama about policy and politics, perhaps more than about politicians and advisors.  And the compromise is the requirement to get as much factual information into the dialogue without swamping the characterisation; I suspect that on the whole - with the exception of 'republican' characters within the drama - there is a bit of sacrifice of character to make this happen.  But the effect is to create characters that seemingly know everything relevant about everything, and buried within all this attempt to crowbar fact into discussion is realism - I doubt anyone has ever worked anywhere that resembles The West Wing, and the reason is that such places, and such people with the facts always at their fingertips, simply don't exist.  If you don't believe me, I challenge you to watch 6 episodes, and note all the topics for which cast members seem to have all the relevant facts ready, and think whether such people really exist.  Nobel Laureate or not, the President knows way too much to be real (charming though Martin Sheen is).

At the other extreme, a recent comment on Twitter read something like 'Anyone who believes that the civil service is capable of conspiracy has clearly never worked in it'.  This is the West Wing antithesis - the perception of government by people who don't have the facts at their fingertips, who are simply not as capable of achievement as one might think.  I doubt, in fairness, either position is quite true, and the comment  on Twitter was almost certainly meant as a joke.  But it reminded me of the extent to which my viewing of The West Wing is noticeably unsubtle - perhaps it's because I want to believe that West Wing people exist.  A similar thought occurred to me reading Clive James latest autobiographical volume, and he described how a chat show was put together, specifically that guests were 'prepped' so they knew which stories to come out with, because they knew the questions being asked.  I had always thought, with complete naivete, that it was spontaneous.

There is, I think, something of an insidious quality to these things.  What purports to be real is, in fact, artifice.  But not simply something made to look like it is real; it is something that is made to look people better than real.  The consequence is that we view such actors as more talented than they are (or, in the case of The West Wing, the thing their acting is trying to represent), and the reality as consequently less impressive.  Watching, for example, a parliamentary committee in action next to an episode of The West Wing, does not make our politicians look particularly good; but in practice they probably are doing a good job.

Reality is often to hard to watch - both in the sense that it is less impressive, but also in that it is more awkward.  It's not so much the shining brilliance we miss, as the absence of embarrassment.  It's what makes programmes like The Office hard to watch - there's a memorable scene where Tim, Gareth, David and Ricky are trying to outdo each other with jokes about jelly, Tim having started things off by suspending Gareth's stapler in bright yellow jelly.  The awkwardness of no-one being able to think of anything funny, after a couple of gags, and the realisation that this has broken up the conversation and means everyone needs to go back to their desk, is exquisitely done.  But it's almost unbearable viewing.

Of course, you could just see this as a version of Hollywood make-believe.  Ever wonder where Jason Bourne gets all his weapons, ammunition, and money from?  Why do bad guys drop after the first gun-shot wound, when our heroes stroll around with half a magazine lodged in parts of their body without so much as a limp (see Last Action Hero for a parody of this).  But I think we know to suspend disbelief for such shows - they are, after all, not really trying to be real, just the right side, in aggregate, of believable.  TV shows like The West Wing, I think, are trying much harder to be real, and the danger is therefore greater that we will take fictions like it as how reality should be, and how people should be.  Reality, and real people, tend to be much less impressive, but no worse for that.  It is what makes them real.

The wider scandal in cash for access

Perhaps it is because cash scandals in politics are relatively common that they attract such interest; or maybe it is because a 'scandal' doesn't have to mean actual wrongdoing, just the appearance of it: either way, they tend to create a lot of comment.  In doing so, discussions of 'what can we do to prevent this?' bump into some profound questions around how civil society operates.


The BBC's Nick Robinson tweeted this earlier today:
Why no statesmanship? asks @EvanHD Politics = power. Power = elections. Elections = £s . Parties fear less £s = less power. Solution anyone?


The key point (and without wishing to blow my own trumpet, one I picked up in an earlier blog) is the last one: 'parties fear less £s = less power'.  The logic, taken apart completely, is that the ones who spend the most at election time will ultimately win (or will have the best chance of winning).  In that sense, it's almost a 'hygeine' factor, a sort of 'necessary but not sufficient' influence on elections.  In other words, having money won't necessarily win you an election, but not having it will almost certainly mean losing.


Nick's tweet was in response to a question about statesmanship, and one point to make would be that a statesman/woman probably wouldn't believe in that logic.  If politicians merely think about power, it is arguable that statesmen/women think instead about concepts such as change, reform, or the 'greater good'.  So the existence of the narrative leading to the need for money is itself a symptom of a lack of statesmanship in our politicians.


It is, of course, possible that the party that spends the most wins the election.  It would be bleak if it were true, and I'm not sure how one would separate out the influence of good ideas and general spend levels to establish its truth.  It may be a coincidence; it's also possible that the parties with the best ideas generate the most political support, giving them the advantage in terms of advertising spend.


But to get back to the issue of statesmanship, it seems to me to come down to a choice.  Statesmanship, in other words, is something that you choose to be; in that sense it is not created, so it's not about the conditions in which people are born, raised, or live.  One could equally substitute 'statesmanship' for 'moral courage' or 'ethics' here.  So why aren't we seeing more of it in relation to political funding?


Ultimately, these attributes have to be a choice, I think (in part because their essence is taking control of events, and not allowing excuses to flourish).  But are there things that influences this choice?  It is often said that people know the cost of everything but the value of nothing.  Statesmanship could be argued to fall into this category, a sort of moral attribute where, because it cannot be tied to increased salary or power (quite often the reverse, I would think), it is discarded.  Society is bombarded with these kind of 'wider choices' - ethical products vs cheaper products, for example.  It is part of a process whereby 'values' come up against the limits of tolerance, and society can choose to accept the bare minimum from its members rather than the potential full quota.  It would be good, for example, if people put others first: limiting noise pollution, picking up litter, waving others through, offering to help.  But if we don't count these interventions directly, and as a society we place value on what we can count, then such actions will become more rare.  It is common in some parts of the country, for example, to let someone ahead in a queue at a supermarket if they have only one or two items; do that in other parts of the country and you will generate a strange stare.


Our society does not value the things it professes to believe in, as a rule, and one conclusion we can draw from that is that society doesn't actually believe in them anymore.  It just likes to think that it does.  On that basis, should we be surprised that political parties might want to sell access?  I can't see why we would.  It is just another example of society holding up a mirror to itself, not liking what it sees and blaming the image for looking the way it does.  If the latest political scandal teaches us anything, it is that we need to place more value on our values; fully to appreciate the things we can do either at no cost to ourselves, or even at our personal cost.  Because the converse of this would also hold true: we would place less value on actions that did not support our values.  If we started to do that, we may yet see a return of phrases like 'this was the wrong thing to do'.

Cash for access?

I'm in danger of being topical here, but there is a very big storm in a teacup happening today about who gave how much money to which party in order to go and talk to them.  It's a curious story, if only for the amount of coverage it is generating, but also because I think it is missing the point (to a very large degree), and not really providing a useful angle to explore what is a serious issue behind it.

The first point is that anyone seriously committed to a political ideology, at least one aligned to a particular party, pays for it.  How much they pay will vary - from membership of the Conservative Party to the political levy I declined to pay when I was a union member - but everyone pays.  What they are paying for is not, obviously, access, but something more important: they are supporting a cause that they hope, through their actions, will control the political agenda as a government.  The editor of Conservative Home, Tim Montgomery, suggested on The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that there is a difference between funds given in opposition that reflect a particular viewpoint, and those given in office that are about more general influence.  But I'm not sure this is a particularly big distinction; it is all about influence ultimately, and the best way to get influence is to get access.

Crudely put, what is being funded and argued over in all this are votes of electors in the UK.  To some degree, this could be seen as a commodity that is going for the highest price - the discussions around budgets at election time in the UK, as with the super-pacs in the USA, suggest that votes are there to be won largely by means that can be paid for with hard cash.  It seems it's not as important to have the best argument, one that voters can rationally make up their mind about through balancing their own direct interest with that of others, as to have the right 'message'.  And messages are advertising, and advertising is bought.  And what isn't directly bought can be influenced through actions that don't need paying for in cash - message boards, letters pages, phone-ins and so on.  To some extent therefore, this story only works if you believe this narrative - that big spending is what matters.  The fact that political commentators and politicians believe it is unfortunate and evidence of that rare thing, a self-fulfilling fallacy.  It's also symptomatic of a wider problem with politics - no-one seems to want a fair fight anymore.  We are losing track of the idea that the most rational argument should win, and weak arguments are carrying the day, held up by a deluge of coverage.  That is wrong, but it's not the argument that's being had today.

The other issue here, I think, is one around representation, taxation, and influence.  We like to think that we have a government made up of elected members, answerable to those electors.  In reality it is not so simple: wars have been fought over issues around representation and taxation, and it seems to me to be self-evident that bodies that find themselves handing over taxes will feel the need to influence the discussion around those tax policies.  So whilst we have a 'one person, one vote' democracy, we are taxing institutions such as companies that cannot directly influence that debate.  There are two ways around this under the current system: use everyone's 'one vote' to reflect the interest of the company, or (to put it more colloquially) go straight to the top with a cheque book.  Neither is ideal - why should employees of company X feel they have to reflect a specific economic interest in voting, when it might not chime with their other viewpoints - but both are symptoms of the problem of getting a business interest (which should really be in everyone's interest) into the discussion.  Oddly, the one area in the UK where this does happen - the Corporation of London - is seen as profoundly undemocratic as a result.  Well, it is democratic; it's just a different type of democracy.  In the same way that having as your MP the Leader of the House of Commons will also feel like a different type of democracy (in that no-one will stand against them from the major Westminster parties, by convention).

So, what is to be done?  Actually, a lot is done already.  A policy obviously devised to benefit a narrow group of stakeholders will in all likelihood be exposed by the Impact Assessment as such.  It's quite hard to get through a policy without having some assessment of what it will do - government is not, in that sense, arbitrary, and therefore policies that are specifically targeting an interest group will appear as such.  I suspect that the argument over the 50p tax will show that it didn't raise much money - taxing the rich is never as easy as it looks - and therefore the argument that the abolition of this rate can be linked to companies paying for access, will look correspondingly weak.

What, I think, should not be done is to make a distinction between seeing the head of the Conservative Party in someone's private home, and seeing the PM at 10 Downing Street, or even at Chequers.  You would have to be quite mad to believe that this solved the problem, and all it would do is create barriers and bureaucracy.  In other words, it's a waste of time.

The problem is one around party funding: the one thing that I find quite spooky is that some of our leaders in business - the ones who create the wealth and the jobs we all rely on - feel the need to pay to talk to the Prime Minister.  I would have thought it's in everyone's interest for that access to be free.  And, as such, it could be non-ideological and not supporting one party or another.  And we would all benefit from this, because it's not in anyone's interest for the people who create wealth to feel that they have no direct means of talking to government.

What would be sensible is, of course, greater transparency.  I would want to be assured that any government was not partisan in terms of who it met and who it refused to meet.  But the idea that companies should feel the need to pay to influence policy?  That just seems wrong.

The problem of Britishness

A couple of vignettes:  John Major said that Britain would always be a land of warm beer and cricket on the village green, and Chris Evans more recently provoked a substantial postbag on the hot topic of what constituted an English breakfast.

I remember John Major's comment, intended to reassure voters that Britain would always be Britain despite Maastricht (or whichever EU treaty it was), and thinking that it didn't resemble the Britain of my experience.  And the noticeable feature of the "what makes an English breakfast?" postbag was the extent of the variation between regions about what should, or should not, go into it.

What has always struck me, as an English/British person, is how markedly regional England (and its culture) is. Everything from the building materials - despite the prevalence of brick, it's still a good guide to where you are - to food, to dialect and accent, screams of a profoundly regional place.  Even when British English are abroad as sports fans, this seeps through - how many St George flags or Union Jacks have the names of a place or club emblazoned across the middle?

Maybe this is why the "proud to be British" or "proud to be English" statements seem to fall a bit flat for me - what, ultimately, does it mean?  I'm already demonstrating my confusion - I don't know in this context whether to refer to British or English.  Both seem a bit alien to me, but largely because I'm seeing them through the lenses of other people's experiences, and since they are not mine, they feel a bit wrong.

The reason they feel wrong, it seems to me, is that when people talk about characteristics of being British or English, they tend to pick on things that really can't be national (tolerance, fair play), or are in fact regional (see above).  In other words, we tend to go to either extreme.  In a recent blog for the BBC, Mark Easton pointed out that it was unfair on the rest of the world to pick issues like tolerance and decency, even democracy, as national characteristics.  And regional issues can be incredibly nuanced - as a child, I would notice that even if I was using the same words as kids only twenty miles away, it would be pronounced differently: 'larking' and 'laking' meant the same thing, but I could tell you which one was said in the West Riding and which in the Vale of York.  We even ordered our fish and chips in a way that wouldn't be understood 30-40 miles further south (anyone else ask for 'one of each', meaning fish and chips?).

The odd thing about Britain/England is that this deep regional association is in complete contrast to the wider political and constitutional arrangements.  The UK has an incredibly centralized tax-collection system, for example, which is what provokes so much debate around the Barnett formula etc - in effect how much money anyone has is decided centrally, even if all the money (and sometimes more and sometimes less) ends up flowing back again to the same place.  The constitution is similar - despite the fact that regional government has always existed (even without regional assemblies, there were always 'government offices' for the regions, they just weren't democratic) - it's all dominated by Westminster and Whitehall, apart from the more recent devolutions in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Part of the 'British' identity is, I think, wrapped up in this centralized state.  This is the Britain of the armed forces, of the Empire and Commonwealth, of the monarchy.  But beneath this, sometimes even overlapping with it, is a regional culture of peculiar strength: our armed forces are recruited still to regional regiments (although increasingly less so), a number of our ships are named after cities.  And probably only the monarchy remains as a unifying influence (despite the republican element within Britain).

What is striking, then, is how far much apart from a shared monarchy is 'up for grabs', a sort of vast pick and mix from which people can take their identity.  Mark Easton examined this through institutions - no other country has anything like the BBC, or the NHS, for example.  But these are peculiar institutions to pick, not least because they are very recent, but also because they are a bit nebulous.  When we talk about the BBC, are we really saying we like high quality TV with no adverts?  Is that strong enough to be an identity?  Or are we talking about Reithian values, in which case how far does even the BBC represent this?  It's a similar issue with the NHS - do we mean the original intention of a service free at the point of use, and (presumably) not managed via an immense queuing system?  In which case we don't mean quite what we have now, with charges for dental and optical treatment and prescriptions - even for car parking - and sometimes long waits to see consultants and for operations?  I think the BBC and NHS both represent an idea that we like, but may not in practice experience very much.  In that sense we might include the Church of England as well - as Yes Prime Minister put it, no-one goes to it, but we all feel better knowing it's there.

Scottish nationalism in this sense is an extension of these themes.  It's noticeable that the SNP isn't proposing to break with the monarchy (and why should it? It belongs to Scotland too).  In other words, the one uncontestable unifying factor isn't going to change.  But how politics and government is organized in the countries that share that monarchy is most definitely up for grabs.  Perhaps it's relevant in this context that when Scottish devolution took place in the late 1990s, even the role of the BBC was an issue, including the idea of a separate Scottish edition of the 6 o'clock news.  Recently the SNP has argued that the Union itself imperils the NHS, and whatever the merits of that argument, it would seem to be true that the version of the NHS that most closely resembles the original idea is in the devolved areas of the UK.

One could regard constitutional arrangements simply as a matter of what the majority want, i.e. 50% + 1 vote.  But in practice in other countries, most constitutional changes require bigger mandates - 2/3rds at least.  This suggests that constitutional issues are much more about consensus than majority views.  In other words, it's not enough for 50% + 1 to vote in favour - it's much more a question of starting at what everyone agrees with and then achieving as much co-ordination and consistency as possible while retaining  as much support as possible.  And maybe the issue here is that once we move beyond the monarchy, there isn't much that everyone agrees is a good idea.  Beyond this is a mass of regional identities, some of which might be shared by 'super-regions' (broadly what the north/south debate seems to me to be about).  What's striking about the debate on Scottish independence is that the Scots are ahead of the rest of us in terms of defining themselves (as well they might be), and thus what they want the constitutional settlement to be, within the monarchy.

Thoughts on the Iron Lady

There were two things I read about The Iron Lady, one before and one after I saw the film the other week.  The first was a comment from one of the producers that part of the interest was in the contrast between a powerful leader and a frail woman with dementia; and the other was Meryl Streep's comment at the Bafta awards that it was a chance to get an insight into the person behind the one we all thought we knew.

Both comments surprised me a bit, for different reasons.  The most obvious is that I wasn't sure the film really did tell us anything about Lady Thatcher that we didn't already know.  She comes across as determined and committed to politics, at some points to the detriment of her family life (although whether that is actually true I don't know), but otherwise there wasn't much new.  Indeed, the flash-back approach tended to obscure some of the bigger issues that might have illuminated her character more: Europe is hardly mentioned (not easy to film, I guess), council house sales, a policy with tremendous consequences, doesn't figure at all.  The gradual failure of cabinet government as Thatcher replaced stronger personalities with weaker ones is only fleetingly evident.  All of these decisions tell us something about Thatcher, but as they don't feature in the film, we don't get to learn much about Thatcher's character through them.

The second point is a wider one about dementia.  The difficulty with dementia is that it is something that is overwhelmingly associated with old age (hence the separate status given to 'pre-senile dementia'), so much so that in aspects it is almost synonymous with it.  Loss of loved ones, such that one imagines conversations with them, intrusion of past memories, short-term memory loss, are more or less part of being old.  And it doesn't really require a life of power to experience such things.  So there isn't really a necessary contrast between an elderly person with dementia and a powerful politician in younger years - it's equally possible for someone to have led a powerless life and experience dementia in later years - although granted it might make the contrast greater.

Despite this, what is surprising is the extent to which the film functions as a study of old age.  It opens with Lady Thatcher (perfectly capably) buying a paper and milk from a newsagent, and only later do we realise how far this has ruffled feathers back at her home: seemingly she is not to be let out on her own.  And later in the film, she suffers the indignity of her daughter telling her that "she is not prime minister any more", a point of which she is surely already aware.  The same theme recurs when her medical appointment is brought forward a week or so, and she has a conversation with the doctor that confirms the problem: people seem to be worried about her, but she can understand and articulate the doctor's discomfort.  Towards the end of the film, she is shown washing up a cup, only for a flunky to say "I can do that for you, Lady Thatcher".  In other words, this is as much about deliberate disempowerment as it is about loss of capability.  And in that sense, the film is an extraordinary success; but it didn't need to be about a former prime minister, or specifically Lady Thatcher, to illustrate the point, since it doesn't require a life of power to realise how demeaning her treatment in old age is.

Whilst Meryl Streep has received many accolades for her performance, Jim Broadbent's performance as Denis Thatcher is equally haunting - he is almost a ghost of Shakespearian dimensions, at points funny, protecting, then terrifying.  The film is reminiscent at this point of Truly Madly Deeply, which also explores the emotional dimensions of the return of a dead loved-one.  Jamie is never completely acceptable or accepted, and indeed it is is some senses his ability to be annoying that prompts Nina to wish him gone, and he in turn builds on this capacity to drive Nina back into the world of the living.  The only difference is the scene in which Jim Broadbent's ghost seems genuinely to frighten Lady Thatcher, but again it is a device to prompt her to pack up his things and put the past away.  Lady Thatcher's subsequent regret as he departs is genuinely upsetting, as is Denis's departing shot that she was always better on her own (one of the few false moments in the film, since it comes over as a touch vindictive - the one time Dennis speaks for those for whom Thatcher remains a bogey-figure?).

The pressure on Lady Thatcher to remove her late husband's possessions brings one back to this point about treatment of the elderly.  In some senses, it clearly does not matter if Lady Thatcher is imagining conversations with her deceased husband, any more than it matters if she retains his possessions.  At her age, it is unlikely that 'moving on' is likely to bring any more happiness than if she nurtured his memory.  It is almost more cruel to force Lady Thatcher to host a dinner party that clearly leaves her bewildered, even though conversations with smaller groups or individuals is something she can manage very well.  The scene in which someone offers to clean a cup for her is also relevant here: isn't it better that she cleans her own cup, and replace anything that gets broken (if it does), than to take even that minor role from someone?  It rather gives the impression that someone's sense of capability is less important than whether a cup gets broken.

In conclusion, this isn't a film I would describe as enjoyable or even comfortable at times.  But it was compelling, dramatic, and frequently very interesting.  A neighbour of mine in Brighton thought that the remains of the old West Pier - burnt to a shell in a fire around a decade ago - should be kept as a permanent  reminder of how society treats the elderly.  The Iron Lady brought that story back to me, along with many others about the struggles that society has with the problem of people growing old.