The motives of politicians

****

It is common for us to question the motivation of those who hold a different view. We are too seldom prepared to accept honest or honourable reasons - whether ideological or practical - for that person to wish to do something we would not do.

And the more passionate our commitment to the cause, the more we are unable to accept that someone simply doesn't agree with us or that this disagreement is principled not cynical or driven by some sort of base motive.

So it is with public service reform. I have read some of the thousands of comments, tweets, facebook posts and carefully crafted infographics that impugn the decisions of government. Rather than, for example, accepting that private sector options in delivering health are used because people believe it will lead to better health outcomes, we get the accusation that ministers do it because of personal gain.

And rather than see that reforming welfare helps make work pay and can improve peoples lives, we're told that those proposing change are uncaring or, worse, are motivated by 'hatred of the poor'. Instead of seeing the point (you're not obliged to agree with it) that the prospect of a life on welfare is something to be discouraged, we're fed stories of how changes are proposed to "punish" the poor or the sick.

There may be the occasional person whose motives are questionable but I don't believe the motives of current ministers are anything but decent and honourable. At least not in policy decisions. Nor for that matter do I think that the motives of ministers in Gordon Brown's government - a tragic train crash of ignominious failure - were anything but decent and honourable. I just think they were wrong.

Too much of our discourse is conducted on the basis of trying to destroy the reputation of decent men and women trying to do what they think is the right thing to do. We poke around at where they went to school, at who they are married to, at their friends and at things they might have done twenty or thirty years ago at university. We make sweeping statements - "Tories don't care", "Labour hates business" - as the basis for our arguments without realising how petty, how shallow and, frankly, how nasty it makes us seem.

You're welcome to point out when I have done this - I'm sure I have - and to suggest on this basis that I am a hypocrite. But in the end, if we are to have a politics that people think worthy of respect, we need to try and deal with policy choices on the assumption that the reasons for doing them are decent and not motivated by venality, greed or base political advantage.

....