What are politicians for...?

I appreciate that this sort of question raises an endless torrent of sarcasm, cynicism and vulgar repartee but it’s an important question. And one we don’t often ask, preferring instead to wander along in a safe assumption that somehow we need politicians. Which I think rather lets us off the hook and allows us to ramble on about “leadership” even, horror of horrors, “community leadership”.

Frankly I think leadership is a vastly over-rated element of politics. I’m not elected to “lead” but to represent, yet the debate is always about political “leadership” rather than political “representation”. This isn’t to say that politicians shouldn’t lead but it is to observe that leadership is not the purpose of politics or politicians. Yet it remains the obsession of observers – who seem to want a kind of magical spirit of leadership to emanate from politicians:

Yet I couldn’t help think that there was something missing in all the talk of leadership. There were numerous real life and theoretical examples of people ‘doing’ leadership or asking others to show leadership, but I couldn’t help but feel that I was no nearer understanding what Cameron’s definition of leadership is, how it manifests/shows itself and why he thinks the examples that he used demonstrate leadership (as well as what politicians can learn). One of the problems with our body politic at present is that all of those references to leadership could have been sprinkled into the speeches of Ed Miliband or Nick Clegg and none of us would have noticed any different.

What we have here isn’t leadership (and Puffles is right to make that observation), it is representation – people want leadership so our representatives present themselves as leaders. And what we mostly want is one of two things – and often both:

1. The leaders to take away the problems of our life – be it work, health or relationships. We want it to be “someone else’s problem”; we want the magic government fairy to sort it out. This applies whether you’re a billionaire banker or a poor pensioner
2. The leaders to fix things for our benefit, to make rules that favour what we do or that stop those things of which we disapprove. Sometimes this is about economic protection, sometimes it is the projection of a moral position but it is always about fixing things so we benefit.

When politicians don’t do this – or do it for someone else and not us – we accuse them of being weak leaders. Yet the irony of such accusations is that the very opposite is true – it takes a real strength (and a willingness to risk electoral defeat) to tell people they can’t have what they are demanding.

None of this is to argue that politicians shouldn’t lead but it is to say that we don’t have politics and politicians for the purpose of leadership – we have politics and (under our system of representative democracy) politicians to resolve dispute. To make the choice between competing policy options, to decide what course of action to take. And the representation bit is important – my member of parliament has the job of representing me (and the sixty-odd thousand other Shipley electors) in that process of choice.

This is representation and, if we opt instead to devolve responsibility for our economic, social and personal well-being to these people, we are making a colossal mistake – we stop being free men and women and become mere supplicants. Wide-eyed beggar brats gazing into the shiny political salon hoping they’ll notice and “do something”. Because of this, politicians have become a peculiar species of social worker – mollycoddling their electors rather than doing the primary job of representing those electors in the making of choices, in the job of politics.

Puffles suggests that the system for choosing politicians (the selection process rather than the election process) is at fault:

One of the paradoxes I find is that some of our political institutions and the practices of political parties end up suppressing leadership rather than encouraging and nurturing it.

I remain unconvinced - so long as we shuffle about like well-fed sheep waiting for the man with the crook or the dog to herd us in their chosen direction, so long as we see the problem as one of leadership, so long as politicians are expected to wet nurse the voter we will have this crisis of leadership.

I look to a world where, to borrow a Marxist turn of phrase, the need for politicians withers away. Some call this a process of apathy, the rebirth of idiots, but I welcome private strength, individual choices and people who want to be free from the “leadership” that politicians are urged to provide.

As I wrote a couple of years ago:

...the core consideration is the extent to which we are able to live as Greek idiots. Quietly, privately, without bothering our neighbours with our problems – and when such people want change they will get up from their armchairs, walk away from the telly and vote. The idea that not being bothered with voting most of the time makes them bad people is a misplaced idea – they are the good folk.

Above all we should listen quietly to what this “apathy” calls for – it is less bothersome, less interfering, less hectoring and more effective government. Such people want government to be conducted at their level not to be the province of pompous politicians with overblown and lying rhetoric. And they want the language of common sense, freedom, liberty and choice to push away the elitist exclusivity of modern bureaucratic government.

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How the search for 'fairness' must end - for the sake of the children!

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If we believe it to be "unfair" that the privately educated dominate the best universities, secure the best jobs and influence the wider social and cultural agenda then we need to do something about it. However, the very way to address the problem is itself castigated by the same critics as ‘unfair’. Obviously this is something of a dilemma for these caring, sharing folk – but only because they pursue the crock of gold at the end of the fairness rainbow.

Britain’s state schools are not – in the round – very good. For sure there are some good schools, indeed some exceptional schools and incredible teachers. But the truth is painful – nearly half our young people leave school after eleven years or more of education (that’s around 10,000 hours of teaching) without the sort of literacy and numeracy skills needed to get anywhere in today’s world or work.

And this failure covers up how we fail brighter children – the ones who could get top grades and places at leading universities but don’t because the system lets them down. Or the middling sort – the children who are ‘OK’, will get 5 or 6 GCSEs and satisfy the school’s need to a tick in the achievement box but could do so much better.

So why aren’t we crying out more loudly for change? Why has it become such a political ‘no-no’ to say that, just maybe, some academic selection might be a good thing? Why can’t we point to success elsewhere – from African elementary education, through the intense systems of Korea and Taiwan to the Charter Schools springing up in poor parts of the USA? And why do teachers, unions, local authorities and educationalists not hang their head in shame at the way they have failed – and continue to fail – so many young people?

The answer lies in those dreadful words – “it’s not fair”. We can’t have selection because it’s not ‘fair’ on the children who don’t get selected. We have to maintain the bureaucratic distribution of money and the centralised allocation of places in order that the system is “fair”. And we have to make it incredibly hard to deal with bad school management and poor teaching because otherwise it wouldn’t be ‘fair’ on those wonderful public servants in our “education system”.

So it’s ‘not fair” to have schools freed from the local council’s oversight – those free schools would take pupils from other schools (presumably ones less popular with parents) and that’s not fair now is it! And this reallocation won’t be fair because mythic “pushy middle class parents” will get all the advantages. Opposition to changing the system is wholly couched in the language of fairness, in the identification of putative ‘losers’ rather than in recognising that a changed system might just provide more winners.

No system is fair – however clever its designers are and regardless of the extent of their commitment to achieving “equality” and “fairness”. And because any system will produce unfairness and inequality, it makes no sense at all to choose the approach that has the greatest “fairness” if that comes with the huge “unfairness” of dumping most poor kids into the work of work without the basic skills they need to succeed.

It does make sense to choose the most effective system – the one that produces the most winners and the highest standards. And such a system will be selective, it will be self-managed (by which I mean not bureaucratically directed) and it will contain a very wide choice of schools, curricula and management styles. Not every child will succeed, not every school will be a good one and there will be constant cries that it’s all unfair. But we’ll see most young people better equipped for work, more children from modest backgrounds getting into top universities and the social mobility once again a reality rather than something in the past.

Much is said and done ‘for the children’ – it is the cry of nannying fussbuckets everywhere. Well just maybe these folks can direct their campaigning effort to our schools. For there is no doubt that breaking up local education authorities, promoting school independence and free schools, and removing the malign influence of teacher unions is the right thing to do “for the children”.

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