Championship record

[fpb]

In the race between the three main parties at who can be the slimiest and most unprincipled, the LibDems have taken what seems so far an unassailable lead. It has been revealed that, two months before they went to the polls on a written pledge from every candidate to oppose university tuition fees, the LibDem leadership already regarded such pledges as worthless in the event of a coalition government. As a coalition government was the only likely way for the LibDems to enter government, this means that the LibDems offered written pledges to their electorate that they knew to be worthless. This is championship standard stuff, well ahead of Cameron's "cast-iron promise" with the built-in rust and miles beyond Gordon Brown's attempt to blame anyone but himself for his own choices.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Or, as Charles Pasqua used to say, "les promesses électorales n'engagent que ceux qui y croient..."

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Yes, but a politician with a sight beyond the next two weeks (granted of course that such a beast exists) ought to wonder why people should vote for anyone if they are warned in advance that the promises they vote for are worthless.

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I don't expect politicians of any kind to keep to the letter of all their pre-election pledges. I'd be quite suprised if anyone did. I understand them to function - taken en masse, across the manifesto - to give the voter a general sense of the likely direction of the party if they were in power, not specific details. I also tend to assume that what they leave out is often more revealing than what is mentioned - if they say, we will not cut A and B, I take that to mean: we probably won't cut A and B significantly, but we will certainly be chopping C and D.

All parts of the current government seem to me to be playing the political game in a perfectly ordinary - and in some respects actually quite principled - way.

But then I enjoy politics per se and though I have quite often been angered or repulsed by politicians in person (most recently David Willetts, who spoke very poorly I thought in Cambridge in the spring), I don't think I have ever felt seriously angry about a political development as a whole. I wouldn't want to be a politician and nor would most people I like and respect so I accept that the whole system is a trade-off between the sort of integrity and high intellect I would *like* to see in charge, and the fact that it has to be done by people who actually want to do it (i.e. not, on average, the very cleverest and most principled in society).

[fpb.livejournal.com]

When I give a pledge in writing, I expect to redeem it.

As for politicians playing politics, I would remind you that you are speaking to a historian. I know all about it. I still don't have to like it, especially when it undermines the basis of society.

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

You really think this kind of routine slipperiness undermines the basis of society? That's interesting, if so. Of an ideal society, certainly, but it does just seem so ordinary to me - an ordinary part *of* ordinary, imperfect, not-always-likable society.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I make a promise in so many words. I break my promise. My relationship with the person to whom I had made the promise is shot all to Hell. Mr.Clegg makes a promise - in writing - to every one of his voters. He has already broken it when he makes it. The basis of his relationship with voters is broken. The results you have seen yesterday. It astonishes me that you should consider this kind of violation of every protocol of human behaviour commonplace and uninteresting. A politician may rightly say less than he means; but when he is deliberately saying, in the most solemn manner, the opposite of what he means, then he has ceased to be a politician and become a crook. Even large and rich corporations can be prosecuted for lying; do you imagine it does less damage when a corporation lies about the amount of saturated fats in a pork pie, than when a politician lies about what he offers to do his fellow-citizens? Remember that part of the reason why Nazism triumphed in Germany was that the country had been unified by a lying crook (Bismarck) and by crooked and criminal procedures. The Germans became convinced that dishonesty in politics is justified and valuable; and there was no end to the dis-evolution of the German mind, until they came to believe that villainy was a value. This is what constant lying does to a country.

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

It's hardly a violation of *every* protocol of human behaviour, though - rather of one particular one: that certain kinds of speech or written statement are assumed by both parties to be factually true and that either party can be held to that understanding. I agree of course that in some situations this mutual understanding is important to society - when someone makes a statement in court or to the police; when I promise my small child to collect them from school; when I write a CV; perhaps even when I list the ingredients of my brand of pork pie on its wrapping. Even in these sorts of situations, we all appreciate that in practice what is said or written is not always strictly true, though we might well consider failures of that sort to be culpable in one way or another.

I suppose that honestly I simply don't think of what politicians say - and especially in the context of an election campaign - to be in that category. As I said, I would feel disappointed and aggrieved if a party's actions in power bore *no* relation to what they had laid out in a manifesto, but I just don't think of any particular point in a manifesto or specific pre-election pledge as being a statement of the witness statement/promising-my-toddler-sort. I don't think that makes the vagaries of political speech and our interpretations and expectations of it uninteresting - far from it; it does (for me) make the Lib Dem U-turn on tuition fees pretty unremarkable.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

If you "don't think much of what politicians say", then, considering that Clegg, Milliband and Cameron are pretty much clones, I cannot see your reason to choose one over the other. At any rate, the point is that, given that the elector has no ground to choose between candidates save what they say, deliberate lying on a grand scale (and a measure that impoverishes and indebts the whole middle class for the benefit of universities and financial corporations is a major measure by any standards) makes elections simply worthless. No reason is left to vote for one villain over another except tribal loyalty. And that is another way in which society may rot.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

No reason is left to vote for one villain over another except tribal loyalty. And that is another way in which society may rot.

That's been my position for years. Nobody over here seems to agree with me, though. I just keep getting told I'm being unrealistic or the like.

Principle means less to the electorate because it means to little to both the political ruling class and much of the press. I am reminded of the statement: "We get the government we deserve." That makes we wonder why I live here.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Er, because yoiu are not apt to find anything much better anywhere else? (When I think of Italy's parties, I shudder with disgust. I haven't voted in any Italian election for decades.)

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

Alas.

Two mon. ths later...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I am perfectly aware that "I told you so" is among the nastiest and rudest of all sounds. I have, however, to point out that the results of Lib Dem skulduggery are now in, and, contrary to your argument, they are worse than even I dared think. The Lib Dems have wasted two decades of hard graft and slow electoral growth, and are now back to the days of Cyril Smith and useless internal warfare between the heirs of Lloyd George and of Balfour. I say this because it is not without importance to determine which of us was nearer the truth; and I have to say that your cool, even somewhat innocent assumption of universal depravity has not proved a correct or successful interpretation of events. I am not pleased to say this - it brings me no pleasure to have to say to someone I like and respect, "you were wrong". But it is not a matter of my ego or yours, but of which interpretation of reality is confirmed or denied by the facts, and in this case I feel quite strongly that they confifmed mine.

Re: Two mon. ths later...

[helixaspersa.livejournal.com]

I don't know Fabio, I don't want to upset you as you obviously feel very strongly about this and I really don't, but I just don't recognise the picture that you paint. The Lib Dems have seen through some of the things they said they would pursue, and abandoned others. They have certainly done some damage to their reputation, I agree, but then I expect to some extent that's inevitable when a party that's been so long out of power finds themselves finally in it (though as the lesser party to a coalition). And in any case they did much less well in the election than expected so I imagine tactically they were right to take their chance.

I didn't vote for them so I don't feel personally let down by them. But I find the political and psychological mechanics of the coalition fascinating in practice.

Re: Two mon. ths later...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Really? And what would it take to convince you that the Lib Dems have not just shot themselves in the foot, but thrown hand-grenades at it - if you are not convinced by the sight of large and angry parades where Cameron was ignored while Clegg was treated as a hate object? Or by the Lib Dem collapse in Saddleworth? I've got this picture of HA saying she's not convinced, while in the background Nick Clegg is tied to a stake and people are running around gathering faggots... 8-)

Re: Two mon. ths later...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

P.S.: it's not so much being upset, as being convinced that certain basic features of communication between human beings are violated only at the danger of the whole community. Where would we be if, when Churchill had spoken his inauguration address ("...I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat...") and his Dunkirk address, people in general had taken them as you seem to, as meaningless sound? How would the nation even have accepted that there was a grim struggle ahead? And the rest of the world? How would treaties be concluded, laws passed and obeyed, taxes paid, if the words of politicians were taken as meaningless? But I also think that you are mistaken in point of fact, in your interpretation of what has been happening in this country since Mr.Clegg revealed the depths of his bad faith. But I should also have remembered something else: that you, with all your charm and talent, are very English indeed. And that the most English feature I know of is the underlying, pig-iron obstinacy, to which facts are simply irrelevant. If an English person ever decides that the sun is blue, that is the way it is, and too bad for facts, let alone reason. I have known this much too long to be surprised or angry at it.