How to lose friends and alienate people
Politicians can't stop convincing themselves that working for commercial interests is actually working for the public good. The contradiction between what they think and what we think is undermining democracy.
One of the most dispiriting things in an era where much seems dispiriting is that those with custody of our democracy are the ones who seem least interested in protecting it. I don't mean from attack, I mean from erosion.
That is all I can conclude from Starmer and Reeves, but equally so from the Scottish Government. To show you what the erosion looks like, I want to focus on renewable energy. It is a really good case study on why the politicians are unable to govern and yet at the same time feel like it doesn't matter.
For a while now I've been in correspondence with some of the activists who are fighting back against the uncontrolled expansion of wind farms and pylons. The most important thing to know is that many of these activists support renewable energy. And that is the conundrum that best demonstrates the phenomenon I'm talking about.
How do you make someone angry about something they support? Why on earth would you do it if you want them to support it? What happens if you do this a lot, add it up and it amounts to a disaster? Why wouldn't you want to stop doing it?
The how is easy. The way you alienate people from policies they support is to implement those policies in ways that harm their quality of life after having deliberately ignored them. The two halves of this are equally important, and to understand why it is worth returning to the core analysis of how humans respond to their society.
There are two aspects of our existence that exert overwhelming influence on our sense of wellbeing – how we experience our physical conditions of life and how we assess our social significance. Humans are incredibly social creatures and we're hard-wired to feel deep anxiety about anything that might lead to our social isolation. It weighs more heavily on us than just our physical comfort.
So if you want to really piss a person off, take the priceless, peerless view out their window and plant a series of humungous pylons in it. It reduces the quality of their lives and it reduces the value of their property. There is no upside – you don't get community benefit funds from a pylon.
But if you want to really, really piss them off, do it to them contemptuously. Consult them and then ignore them. If they say that they hate the idea of pylons at 50m high (much bigger than normal pylons), come back and say 'OK, we listened – now they're going to be 60m high'. It would have been contemptuous to ignore them, but to ask them and still ignore them is worse.
You could keep going. You could start using the power of the state against them. You know it's not a fair fight so cheat. I mean small things like getting your redaction pen out and hiding information (remember, 'commercial confidentiality' and 'fuck you' mean the same thing). You force them into guerilla war. They have to get their information from somewhere else.
So they start to research the issue and then they discover that, from the beginning, you've been less than wholly honest with them. So now you're an arrogant bully that lies. You're well on your way to being as unpopular as a politician – but you're not there yet.
For that you'll want also to start patronising them, probably trying to humiliate them and demonise them too. I don't know, call them climate change deniers or explain to them what Carbon Dioxide is. If you get all that right you should by now be a nasty, patronising, arrogant bully who lies.
But don't stop there. There is one more step to really seal the deal. Ideally you want to be biased too. I mean, everyone knows you're biased because you've been ignoring, patronising and lying to them – but really put it in picture form. After all, this is David and Goliath, so you should go on a stag do with Goliath and post Instagram shots of the two of you having a right-old belly laugh.
Failing that, send your top politicians up to do photoshoots promoting Goliath Ltd and the amazing wind turbines it is going to build as soon as you give them planning permission. That is 'fuck you' with a hard hat. But to really get the bias across you should then refuse to meet with David because there is an ongoing planning application which blah blah pseudo-legal blah blah.
'But you did this whole photoshoot with Goliath!'. [Raises two fingers and smirks.] Congratulations, you are now a biased, patronising, nasty, arrogant bully who lies. You've completed level one. It's time to reform the social care sector...
“As long as democracy falls apart equally for your opponents, it doesn’t matter”
By assiduously judging human nature and by carefully planning a range of actions best suited to burrow under and into that nature to give the human concerned the unmistakable impression that you couldn't care less about their quality of life and you don't value their existence in the slightest because you have more prestigious friends, you have turned them against a policy you support.
Oh, by the way, if you had listened to them, not only could you have had a smoother ride and kept people feeling positive, you'd have ended up with a better energy system too.
This is how we arrive at the point where politicians are at the bottom of the like-and-trust ratings of the public. It is also why we have this new permacrisis in our democracy where no-one believes any more so things just get worse. And yet the politicians give an overwhelming sense that they don't care. Why?
Because two different things have crashed into each other and our politicians aren't up to the task of resolving them. Thing one is the mistaken belief among the public that democracy is there to serve them. That is a mistake, on the basis that thing two is the actual political doctrine of predicating democracy on the success of private commercial actors.
Why does no-one like Starmer and Reeves? Because they are truly, truly terrible at disguising the fact that they govern for the rich as their fundamental philosophy and genuinely, surprisingly bad at making it sound like somehow that is in your interests.
That is the deal. The deal has become that democracy is there to serve you, but to serve you we must first serve the people more important than you. Why? Because then they'll let us serve you. Literally, they'll agree to pay their taxes/invest in infrastructure on condition that we do as they say and since they threaten to not pay their taxes/invest in infrastructure if we don't do what they say, we'll have to do what they say.
You cannot rationalise the contradiction between 'I serve you' and 'but I do that by serving them instead' because it is a fundamental contradiction. Oh, and you also can't do it because you've been saying it for 50 years and it has never come true. Serving them first has never served us best. Ever.
The real reason for everything I have written above is that the Scottish Government doesn't want to own Scotland's energy, because that is against its philosophy. It actually believes that public provision 'crowds out' private provision. In care they pay for expensive residential care services from the private sector because that's the only way the private sector will invest.
Except in the case of care that literally just means 'buy a building', a building the government could buy much more cheaply than the rent they are paying for it through the private landlord. So why don't they? Ideology. They genuinely believe that them paying more for the building than if they bought it has 'levered in' investment. They're that gullible – but then, you've seen them brag about inwards investment, right? That's what they mean.
At the start I called this democratic erosion. I called it that because it happens slowly and not quickly, and it happens evenly. It's not that government politicians are distrusted – so is the opposition. And that is why politicians don't care.
They don't care if they're hated, they just want to be the hated people you give your vote to and not the hated people you don't give your vote to. They're counting the votes among the communities fighting against uncontrolled energy exploitation and they just don't matter enough. Like Flamingo Land, where locals didn't matter enough. The pro-independence people will have nowhere else to go, right?
And so on we trundle landing ourselves in the worst of all worlds. The private sector takes away every single penny of benefit, the politicians get a statistic for their climate change announcements, and the community isn't big enough to influence the election. Win, win, win. For the politician.
Yes, there are much, much better ways to do this. Yes, destroying public faith in big matters you need them to believe in (climate change action) is beyond reckless. Yes, this is just one more nail in the coffin of democracy. But as long as democracy falls apart equally for your opponents, it doesn't matter.
Repeat this right across government and you have our societal collapse in outline form. Politicians could start serving us and not commercial interests any day they wanted. They would be rewarded. But they have no incentive to do it because they're being rewarded anyway – and you won't give them a place on your Board when they retire.
It's a mess alright and we don't have a political class up to the task of understanding it, never mind sorting it. So welcome to mega-pylons and there's always the book festival next year when you can say erudite-sounding things about how you're worried about the deterioration of support in democracy.