Partisanship in politics will tear us apart
The Tories are heading home from their hols, thinking about what to say when they get back to work. My tip: speak softly, with maturity. The public is sick of fury in politics. Debate is fine, democracy is beautiful. But partisanship can tear us apart.
I’m thinking of Laura Pidcock, a recently elected Labour MP who said she’d never be friends with a Tory because they are so irredeemably awful. It’s a childish sentiment but a widespread one: I recall a Facebook post by a friend the day after the EU referendum announcing that anyone who voted for Brexit had betrayed her children. Which is super, because it means I no longer have to fork out for Christmas presents for them.
Pidcock’s views blend the personal and the political, and they’re nothing new. British politics has always seethed with class anger. In John Osborne’s 1957 play The Entertainer, the eponymous comedian recalls a working-class acrobat he once knew who used “Tory” as a swear word. “If you gave him a plate of badly cooked chips, he’d hold them up and say: ‘Who done these no-good, blank, blank, stinking, Tory chips?’”
Osborne was labelled an “angry young man” by the critics, and the anger articulated by his heroes was a howl of fury at a Fifties Britain that was deeply unjust and too smug to do anything about it. I sympathise. If Tories appear more socially relaxed than socialists, it’s often because they’ve got less to be angry about – although never mistake their politeness for niceness, because it can be condescension in disguise. Pidcock is right: class is a reality. It affects your wealth, your health and the scope of your dreams.
In the Sixties, the class war shattered in several directions. A new politics, the politics of identity, said that who you were was far more complicated than your economic status – and that the struggle between the rich and the poor contained many other battles. If you were black, gay, female or all of the above, that identity shapes your experience of life and, by logical extension, your politics. It’s an argument that’s very hard to disagree with and has to be approached with care. Thanks to identity politics, we are no longer just debating ideas. We are debating what makes us who we are.
Osborne turned traitor in the class war. His later plays were dismissed as the work of a disillusioned radical. His 1975 play Watch It Come Down ends, absurdly, with a wife-beater gunned to death by angry farm hands. The roof of his house then falls on his head. In fact, Osborne foresaw that the stakes in politics were on the way up and that what was on the way out were love and friendship. He was angry at the anger, and the reviews were unkind.
Osborne said that he felt about critics the same way a dog feels about politics, and time has proved the dog had a point. In the last few years, identity politics has performed a vicious 360-degree revolution: whereas your identity once defined your politics, now your politics defines your identity. Some folks believe that they are who they vote for. Elections divide families and ruin friendships. Alternative ideas are driven off campus. Words like racist and elitist are thrown around like mud. Social media is a toilet wall scrawled with insults.
It’s important to stress that the Right has become as bad as the Left. I noticed when covering US politics back in 2012 that conservatives were already identifying themselves as a persecuted minority, forced, in their explanation, to vote for candidates like Donald Trump so that they could be heard above the Leftist din. In fact, in 2017 no one is voiceless any more. Trump is in the White House; Laura Pidcock is in Parliament. And the talk of “no surrender” undermines coalitions and stops things getting done.
Moreover, the rigid, militant politics of representation excludes those who don’t fit with the programme. There are gay people who don’t go to Pride; women who stay at home to raise the kids; ethnic minorities who voted for Brexit. The Left speaks of “communities” of identities as though they were segregated, whole, unbreachable. Nonsense: life isn’t like that. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks: “As an obese Latvian, how will I be oppressed today?” On the contrary, many voters don’t have a side in the culture war, don’t fall asleep in front of Newsnight, and believe the whole point of elections is to send MPS off to get on with the job. This new silent majority doesn’t look exactly like the old one, but it shares its desire for peace and quiet.
An anti-politics politics is possible. The democratic consensus has always been about trying to cut a careful path between reform and tradition, with the Left emphasising the former and the Right the latter. The most attractive promise of Conservatism is to protect us from excessive reform, which is essentially a promise to leave us alone. Liberation and enlightenment are never found in government programmes, but in the private sphere, jealously guarded by well-administered laws. The good life is good friends, regardless of politics, sharing a beer. I’d vote for that.