With 'Greatness' and Respect must come Reponsibility

Note: I originally wrote this almost a week ago. Since then, I have despaired at the lessons that have apparently not been learned after all. However, I have also had the priveledge to attend an international conference in Dublin at which incredible people from all over the world have come together to discuss how, by working with local and global communities, research really can instigate positive social change. In this beautiful and culture-rich setting, I have seen my country represented in a global discussion by a british citizen to whom, from the strong hispanic accent, english was not their first (or only first) language but with which they incredibly eloquently and passionately described a project they were working on that was making a hugely positive impact to thousands of fellow britons' lives. If that doesn't make us 'great' I don't know what does. 

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.