Westminster's elite can't be trusted, so make room for Bez the anti-politician
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Version 0 of 1. How short the journey from striver to scrounger turns out to be. How great the gap between benefit cheat and misunderstanding over MPs' expenses remains. The Department of Work and Pensions website is clear: "Deliberately withholding information that affects your claim is stealing." I am not going to rehearse the strange accounting of Maria Miller (including claiming her parents' council tax) again, suffice to say that Michael Gove was right: the public are very angry about expenses. They see rules bent at the top, and brutally enforced at the bottom. Tears are not enough. Never mind a 30-second apology. It was obvious she was already gone when Andrew Lansley, a man with the charisma of a toenail clipping, was sent out to defend her. This charade feeds into the anti-politics mood that is everywhere. Miller, it is said, had to go because of rows over Leveson. Nonsense. Most people do not give a damn about Leveson. This just reflects how the political and media classes are conjoined twins who act as if one has to die to save the other. It's a stupid act, no longer fooling most of the people most of the time. Hence lies, untruths and half–baked apologies. Miller clearly didn't think she had much to apologise for – though the interior decor of her barn was worth a proper explanation, if you ask me. "Trust" – not yet bottled by Richard Branson – is a precious commodity. Once it's gone, it's gone. My colleague Zoe Williams's heartfelt plea to forgive Tony Blair, so the left can reunite and just get rid of this dreadful government, is also to do with trust and accountability. We can't "move on" without a proper apology and Labour won't do it. It may be near Easter, but the resurrection of Tony Blair is not going to happen. Labour did some good stuff, sure. They also did some bad things. It still amazes me to see seasoned pros saying Miller's resignation would have been better handled by Alastair Campbell and Peter Mandelson. Are we to respect these high priests of manipulation after all the damage they did? The left looking to Blair is like the right looking back to Thatcher: desperate stuff, for desperate times. During the high days of New Labour I often got invited to local Labour party meetings and decent folk would ask how to get their message across to Blair and his pals on the sofa. It was like being with a friend who asks if their partner is being unfaithful. You both know they are but it's a hard thing to actually say: "They are cheating on you." Last weekend, I was at a festival in Laugharne to see David Icke interviewed by Keith Allen. (I do these things, dear reader, so you don't have to.) Icke didn't turn up (that's reptiles for you), but Bez, "crazy dancer" of Happy Mondays, went on stage as he wants to become MP for Salford. Bez is very much a striver I would say, and some of what he said made sense. He is into permaculture and anti-fracking. He doesn't appear to know what a manifesto is, but he wants "to stand up and be counted". Later, when I was speaking, someone asked me: "So if it's not Labour, do we just have ex-drug addicts then?" They meant, does the anti-politics alternative mean the likes of Russell Brand and Bez? Politics "done differently" was how the Lib Dems got in; it is how Ukip functions; it is how the far right gains. So I well understand that an abused electorate feels as if the Labour party is the only refuge available. The message is that "this is as good as it gets", that the system is flawed and party politics means compromise. Get real. Stop dreaming. Collectivity is over. The actual problems of care, of climate change, of inequality, of the limits of the state and the collapse of global markets are actually problems of collectivity. This should be fertile territory for the left, but is hardly reflected in our decrepit party system. It is not a question, then, of Labour just apologising for its war-mongering but also for its spinning, its failure to stem widening inequality. If all political careers end in failure, renewal starts with accountability. For Blair and his cronies destroyed trust in a much more fundamental way than do fembots such as Miller. As a result, we inhabit a centralised omnishambles, anger recast as apathy, with a media that pretend politicians are more powerful than they actually are. The anti-politicians' ideas appear childlike, faux-radical and unworkable because they are too big. Or have our politics got so small? For this is Blair's legacy too, a reluctance to act, a generation which saw that voting didn't change anything. Nor did the biggest demonstration this country had ever seen. It is idealistic to think anything could have been different. That is why we had a Tory coup and why Labour is better than nothing for many. That's hardly a mandate. Still, it's better than nothing. This is the context in which a man who shakes maracas makes as much or as little sense as anything that comes out of the tin ear that is Westminster. Sorry people. |