Now is not the time to scoff, we need ideas to fix politics
Liz Truss has refused to rule out having another go at leading the Conservative Party, which has sent most of Westminster into a fit of pique or giggles.
But while people may balk at the idea of a political comeback by the UK’s shortest serving prime minister, the reaction to her ideas on how to fix some of the problems facing the country exposes a deeper problem which Westminster would be smart to solve.
Wise or wild, Truss is throwing grit into the machine – a machine that isn’t as well-oiled as it ought to be. There are problems piling up across Whitehall which will take fresh ideas to fix.
Whether her calls to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, scrap the Supreme Court and the Human Rights Act and think again about how much control the Civil Service has over policymaking are workable or not, they are worth consideration – if only to stress-test the way things now run.
But the response has been almost universally to scoff and shrug off the suggestions, proving Truss’s claim that Westminster has lost the ability to consider things that don’t strike it as obvious, to its own detriment.
It is clear that Truss is not the perfect messenger at the moment. Her time in office is too recent, her political ambitions too naked and her own sense of injustice at being booted out of No 10 after just 49 days still too raw.
But she is not the only one to call out Westminster and Whitehall for the failure to properly consider things which don’t fit the narrative.
In the House of Commons this week, Health Secretary Victoria Atkins passionately defended the Cass Review, a report into the UK’s youth gender identity development services.
The review has been welcomed by both the Government and Labour shadow ministers, yet MPs, medical professionals and campaigners who made similar arguments in the past have been vilified. They have been abused and had their views ignored in favour of a policy which, the report finds, could have done serious damage to young people.
There is nuance, as with every complex policy, but, put simply, they were not considered mainstream enough until Westminster collectively hit a turning point, then suddenly their ideas became acceptable.
When did we become so bad at listening to one another, especially when the idea is so completely different to our own? When did we stop following people we disagree with on Twitter to better inform our own thinking, or stop reading certain newspapers because we feel they don’t represent us?
This is dangerous; it narrows our horizons and fixes some things as untouchable so we develop blind spots and risk travelling so far down a tunnel, that it’s impossible to get out.
In the case of politicians, this desire to shut down, cancel or drown out people whose ideas seem odd or different is also strangling new talent from entering a world which is crying out for it. I can’t count the number of MPs who have told me they’ve considered standing down because they’re so fed up of being shouted at online or put in a box by colleagues.
Yet without opposition and new ideas we can’t grow or change – we need the grit to shake things up a bit. Without it, Westminster will get bogged down in the middle ground, with those on the fringes branded as extreme and it will come at a great cost, because it doesn’t represent the real world – and voters know it.