When
I was growing up, my infant and junior schools were situated on a main through
road. There was a crossing in the middle complete with a friendly lollipop
person but the road was long and a bit windy and people would cross at various
points all the way along it, despite the cars zipping along at great speed on
their way to wherever they were so desperate to get to.
When
the school and parents asked the local council to implement some traffic
calming measures, their response was that they would do so only if there was
proof that this was necessary - and that proof would be not one but three
infant deaths. Deaths. Talk about 'cure' is better than prevention...
This,
of course, was most likely an exaggeration. I was probably only 8 years old at
the time and by the time the council response had got to my youthful ears it
had probably transformed beyond recognition. But this morning a news story
transported me back to that same feeling of incredulity at society that here,
on our mild, damp little island, where the culture of polite tutting and a
natural aversion to extremism has come to reign, we had to wait for a death to
make us consider our actions.
I
genuinely and unashamedly sobbed when I heard about Labour MP Jo Cox's death.
In my political ignorance - and very much to my detriment - I had not heard of
her before, so although a quick browse of the internet, including some of her
own articles, showed that her life is clearly a great loss to us all, this was
not what caused the emotional reaction.
I
am growing so very, very tired of the vitriolic, sensationalist, extreme,
cheap, cop-out, greed-fuelled, insecurity-abusing, hatred-proliferating
marketing campaigns that are constantly being sold to us as 'politics'. The EU
referendum debate is just the latest version of this. The rise of parties who's
entire manifestos are based on statistics designed to incite fear and
irrational thinking pulled directly from tabloid newspaper headlines (and that
laughably think these sources can be used as references for their figures -
hah, try that in a peer-reviewed journal, Nigel!) is another indication. The
dummed down, repetative, emotive language of every political campaign leaflet
that has come through the door in the ten years I've been eligible to vote is
yet another. And don't even get me started on the benighted misuse of figures
that every school student could pick up on: "If we do A it will
cost us £x per year but if we do B it will only cost £y
per month," - if you're going to make a comparison then x and y
need to be in the same #@$%?!-ing units, fools!
My
love for numbers aside, there is clearly an even greater problem here. We have
fought so hard for a grown-up, sensible, measured political system, one which
even approaches the ideals of democracy, and we are watching it decline and
descend into nothing more than a pointless popularity contest. Who can get the
most votes? Who can say the right things to make the most people buy their
political ideal products?
What
makes me really sad is that it's only now, after murder has been committed,
that politicians are starting to realise that they might have gone too far with
their emotionally evocative campaigning where getting a quick reaction has been
infinitely more important than providing any actual information. But why did it
take a life being so needlessly taken away to realise this? Why was this style
of politics allowed to happen in the first place?
We,
the general populous, need to realise that we are at least partially to blame.
We demand that politicians are infallible. If an MP were to answer a question
about a policy change or strategy that did not work well truthfully, saying
that they had tried something that they thought would work, it turned out not
to work well after all and they were in the process of analysing why this was
so as to not make the same mistakes in the future, we would lose confidence in
them. So instead they are left with the belligerent stances of either
stubbornly sticking to the policy even though it was clearly a bad idea or
blaming another party. The sad thing is, the truthful, critically thought-out
reaction is the one that would earn the most respect in every other field apart
from politics. As Jennifer Allerton points out in her article 'The science of
politics' (page 14 of this issue
of Wessex Scene), politicians are not allowed to turn to the basic
principle which every "scientist knows to be true: that a negative result
can still tell us something.".
What's
more, we leave no room for the dull yet important, long-term nature of policy
and political strategy. A nation, comprising of a large number of people and
all the systems and mechanisms necessary to a) keep them all alive, b) help
them to cohabitate in the same limited space and c) maintain their standard of
living as highly as possible, is a very complicated system. One thing we have
learnt throughout human history is that it helps to have some sort of central
authority - e.g. a government - whose full-time job is to manage it. Remember
that - people management is a full-time job. The system is not only complex but
dynamic, constantly changing and the job of managing it is in constant need of
evaluating, self-analysing, introspection and updating. It is ridiculously
naïve of us to think that this can all be done with a few tagline policy statements,
'less immigration', 'more benefit policing', 'more/less tax'.
The
media also clearly has a large portion of responsibility here too - some might
even say the largest. After all, for the majority of us this is where most of
our information about politics and political decision-making comes from and the
headlines we see and hear have an undoubtedly huge influence on our opinions.
And the politicians, realising this, play completely into the media's hands as
they desperately scrabble for good representation and popularity votes.
Newspapers, TV shows, films, radio, online journalism - all of these
information conduits are incredibly powerful, and with that power should come
the responsibility to not incite people - politicians and the general
public alike - into a state of such hysteria that murder can be committed in
the name of 'making Britain great'.
Is
there a point to this rant? Apart from a personal journey coming to terms with
the news of Cox's murder through which channelling tears into structured thoughts
is the best way to attempt to prevent such a tragedy happening again, there is
definitely a message: we are all, public, politicians and the media,
responsible for creating the culture in which such a murder could occur and
it's about time we collectively stepped up and did something about it. We've
spent so long bickering at the simplified cartoon representations of ourselves
that we're missing the bigger picture - for the best description of which I, a
member of the public, turn to the
words of a politician published by the media:
“Unless
we strive for a culture of respect to replace a culture that does too little to
challenge prejudice, we will be learning nothing from what happened to Jo.”
A
secondary school teacher once pointed out to us that as teenagers we desperately wanted
respect, to be treated like the adults that we were fast becoming, and that such
respect would be more forthcoming than we anticipated - but that it could not
come without us also showing some responsibility.
Politicians,
press and public alike, we are all collectively responsible for creating a
culture in which it takes a death to teach us that we've taken things too far.
Referendums, campaigns and party allegiances aside, we all need to step up our
game and start putting into place the mechanisms that will lead us to a future
where events such as Jo Cox's murder are as unthinkable as they should already
have been. Britain can be 'great', just as any nation or group of people can be
- and individuals such as Cox frequently are - we just need to pull together
and earn it.
