The Triumph Of The Political Class by Peter Oborne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars


N.B. If this review is rather long, that is because Peter Oborne's book raises a large number of issues that are very difficult to deal with briefly.

I find this book to be highly perceptive about some recent social trends affecting politics in the UK; also on the plus side, it is a real page-turner, written with caustic wit, and with a clear (and startling) message. However, although I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and see much truth in what Oborne is saying, I am not at all persuaded by the central argument - that there is little difference between the three mainstream parties, and that the next big development in UK politics is therefore likely to come from outside the mainstream (Oborne is ambiguous about whether such a development is to be welcomed).

The first claim is fleshed out by Oborne as a story of the decline of the party system since the 1950s, when the Labour and Conservative parties could both boast 2 million members each (or more). The mass memberships from different sections of society sent MPs to Westminster as, effectively, delegates to represent their respective interests. The result was an authentic choice between opposing political outlooks based on the differing life experiences of people far from Westminster, underpinning a healthy democracy. The rot sets in when party membership starts to decline (somewhat oddly, Oborne doesn't venture any suggestions as to why this happened). This eventually results in local constituency associations becoming hollowed-out shells, powerless to resist the takeover of the parties by their national leaderships. Once all three of the major parties have been through this process, their respective leaderships naturally form a cartel, which is none other than the Political Class of the title. As the cartel sticks together on all major issues, General Elections become meaningless, and real politics is driven to the margins, leading to an increasing sense of alienation amongst ordinary people. Meanwhile, as the elite's confidence grows with the realization that it is effectively invulnerable, its rule begins to take on more totalitarian characteristics (e.g. curtailment of civil liberties, attacks on the independence of the judiciary and the civil service). The post-democratic era is characterized by low standards of conduct in public life, and equally low levels of competence in government - national decline only intermittently obscured by the techniques of "manipulative populism".

As I say, there were moments when he almost had me persuaded! But I think there are less alarmist explanations for the trends he identifies. The decline in mass membership of political parties can be put down to the fact that they have lost their function as social clubs; that is, most of the people who left were not activists, but people who went along to socialize, and have now found more exciting ways to do this; many activists have stayed and are still engaged in doorstep politics and local campaigning, just as they always were - at least if where I live is anything to go by.

The national leaderships of the parties certainly have much more leeway than in the 1970s to make policy independently of, say, party conferences; but this does not necessarily support the thesis that leaderships have declared independence from their memberships. On the contrary, in all parties the leadership is itself chosen in a more democratic way than was the case in the 1950s. Besides this, there are other powerful incentives for leaders not to neglect their core constituencies, e.g. the need to keep the activist base enthusiastic, the need to get the core vote out at elections (even in marginal seats, in which it is not the case that the electorate is composed mainly of uncommitted "floating voters", merely that the number of committed supporters of two or more parties is fairly evenly matched), and the need to treat sources of funding that remain reliable in hard times with due respect. The benign explanation for the increased freedom of leaderships to form policy is that making policy via party conference proved to be a hopelessly unwieldy way of doing it, which parties have had to abandon in order to avoid losing competitive advantage to those of their rivals that have already given it up (or never used it in the first place).

The inevitable (and healthy) struggle for competitive advantage amongst the parties also explains why their platforms can sometimes appear to get closer together over time. A potted history of Britain since 1945 will illustrate what I mean. First, a new ideological paradigm appears on the scene (1945; 1979) and is embodied by a radical government that sweeps a horrified, protesting opposition before it. Next, over time, some features of the paradigm become generally accepted (the NHS in 1948; private ownership of industry in the 80's), whilst others prove to become increasingly irksome (national wage and price controls in the 60's and 70's; underfunding of public services in the 80's and 90's). To win votes each party must move away from its initial, ideologically entrenched, starting point in order to keep up with the evolving consensus. Until a new paradigm appears on the scene the differences between the parties will tend to become more subtly drawn, at least in terms of the original paradigm. This is not necessarily unhealthy - it is merely symptomatic of the fact that there is no point in continually re-visiting issues that were settled years ago. A party that does try to live in the past in this way tends to lose elections, as Labour discovered in the 80's and the Conservatives discovered in the noughties). Furthermore, this setting aside of old issues creates space for previously-neglected issues to come to the fore, e.g. climate-change, immigration, gender-equality, press regulation, banking reform. Whether the parties are actually getting closer together or not rather depends on the perspective from which the party battlefield is viewed; from a vantage-point fixed in the past the parties will appear to converge as they move on from old issues; but from a vantage-point that keeps up to date it seems instead that the the battlefield has changed shape rather than shrunk. That Oborne's vantage point is out-of-time is suggested by his choice of political heroes - George Galloway and Jonathon Aitken - figures whose dearest wish is to relive, respectively, the battles of the 1940's and the 1980's.

I still have to deal with:
- the growing sense of alienation with politics amongst ordinary people
- the alleged totalitarian tendencies of the ruling elite
- the thesis of British national decline
- the forecast that a new movement may arise from outside the mainstream


Alienation From Politics

Oborne's description of this problem is very good, and I think he is right about some of the reasons for it, namely: the professionalization of politics, and increasing levels of corruption. His other reason - the lack of difference between the mainstream parties - I have already dealt with above. But what can we do about the first two causes?

On professionalization, I would pose the question: is this not something we would be better off just getting used to? After all, we've got used to professional athletics and even professional rugby union, so why not professional politics? As with the other two cases, the professionals in politics have tended to win over "amateur" opposition because they are just better than them at winning according to the rules of the game (getting the most votes after 5 years of pitiless 24/7 media scrutiny, in the case of politics). Because no-one in politics wants to lose, I don't see any easy way to reverse this professionalizing trend. I can also see a benign consequence, namely that voters - faced with a seemingly blander choice between similarly professional alternatives - will be encouraged to concentrate on the policy issues rather than merely deciding with which candidate they can most easily form a tribal identification.

If accepting the professionalization of politics sticks in the throat, then something that might sweeten the pill is that politicians are not the whole of politics. The media (including social media) are a powerful independent force, and are increasingly open to apolitical citizens who organize campaigns on the issues that concern them. The media are just as much "clients" of these campaigning citizens as they are of politicians, and of course the media also have to think all the time of their own clients - that is, us, their readers. The politicians only get to survive for as long as they can ride the media's bucking bronco, which involves combining a receptiveness to public opinion with the ability to mould it in a constructive way. I think Oborne recognizes this in a way, but whereas he calls it "manipulative populism", I would label it more optimistically: "leadership".

OK, so what about corruption? The first point to make is that Oborne is right to be concerned about corruption in British public life. The second point is that he is also right (on the whole) to point the finger at Tony Blair's premiership for undermining the traditions of due process that keep corruption under control. Where I differ from Oborne is that I don't share the part of his diagnosis that portrays Blair as the culmination of a trend that has its roots in the 1960's. Instead, I diagnose corruption as a perennial hazard in public life. After all, Asquith and Lloyd George were notorious, and that should be impossible given Oborne's picture of Victorian moral rectitude persisting till the 1950s. I am not saying Blair was a one-off; just that, from time to time, leaders will come along who take short cuts because they have an inadequate understanding of the role that the rules play in upholding fair play and decency. I think this problem has always been with us, rather than being, as Oborne has it, a recent phenomenon (interestingly, his epilogue on the Brown administration in the paperback edition acknowledges that Brown tried to restore cabinet government; and since then the Cameron administration has apparently stuck to the model of cabinet government).

I think it is also important to note that even the Blair Administration's record on standards in public life is not all bad. It was the Freedom of Information Act (2000) that allowed the scandal of MP's expenses (something else that had been going on for a long time) to be exposed, forcing MP's to tighten the rules. Also, if the point of comparison is supposed to be with the 1950's, then we should remember that that was the decade of the Suez War, the Mau-Mau concentration camps, and concealed scandals about unsafe nuclear power plants. My point here is that we might be seeing more corruption because we have got better at spotting it, rather than that there is actually more of it around. Another thought that reinforce this one is that the sex scandals that have recently surfaced concerning figures who were powerful in the 1970's would be unlikely to occur today, as it has simply ceased to be acceptable to use social position to extract sexual favours in the way that it was then. Whilst these optimistic thoughts should not let the Blair's off the hook, they do tend to undermine Oborne's thesis that corruption is on the increase in general.

Totalitarianism of the Ruling Elite?

I think Oborne is barking up the wrong tree on this one. Totalitarianism is normally characterized as a state of affairs in which every aspect of life is deliberately politicized (and polarized) by an all-powerful ruling elite. It is hard to see how New Labour can be saddled with this, whatever its other faults. On the contrary, one of Tony Blair's strongest points is that he is good at understanding the perspective of people who are basically apolitical (remember "Mondeo Man"? Plenty of other evidence of this trait can be found in Blair's memoirs). Britain today is not a highly politicized society (like Venezuela or Cuba, where leaders with totalitarian tendencies have left a divisive legacy), but a complex, multi-faceted society in which politics sometimes struggles to get the hearing it needs. Blair's talent was that he could (sometimes) get it that hearing. Oborne diagnoses that talent as something diabloical ("manipulative populism"), on the grounds that the Blair government invoked public opinion to challenge the functioning of established institutions such as the judiciary and the civil service. But, hang on a minute, isn't it the very idea of democracy to make just such a challenge possible? It is too easy (lazy) to diagnose totalitarianism any time some leader does something popular that you disagree with.


British National Decline

Approximately 1% of the world's population lives in Great Britain. But, in the last two-and-a-half centuries or so Britain has exercised an influence on world affairs out of all proportion to that. Why? Because the industrial revolution happened here and not somewhere else, giving us a huge advantage. Eventually, other countries were bound to catch up, as much of Europe and America did in the late 19th century, and much of the rest of the world is doing now. So in one sense, national decline is indisputably real. But I don't think this gives us license to wallow in self-indulgent negativity, as it is still very much open to us to improve our standard of living and way of life, even as we become just another "ordinary joe" on the world stage.

The recent very important work by Stephen Pinker ("The Better Angels of our Nature") demonstrates convincingly that the world is rapidly becoming a less violent place. This means that losing the military dominance that we had until WW2 need be no very bad thing for us. Instead it is open to us to redefine our identity in the way suggested by E.M. Forster in Howard's End:

Does [Britain] belong to those who have moulded her and made her feared by other lands, or to those who have added nothing to her power, but have somehow seen her, seen the whole island at once, lying as a jewel in a silver sea, sailing as a ship of souls, with all the world's brave fleet accompanying her towards eternity?

A new Movement from Outside the Mainstream

Well, we don't have to speculate about this prediction, as it has already come true - in the form of UKIP, the BNP, the Green Party and the Respect Party. But then these alternatives have (in some form) been there for a long time - it is just the fact that they have not generally been popular at the ballot box that accounts for the fact that we don't generally pay them too much attention. Indeed, as one of them (UKIP) has recently started to make inroads at the ballot box, so mainstream parties have started responding to its policy agenda, as should happen in a healthy democracy (whatever you think of UKIP's ideas). In theory Oborne should welcome this as an injection of "principle" into the mainstream, but somehow I doubt if he does.

In general, I find Oborne's apocalyptic tone puzzlingly contradictory. He complains whenever politicians trim their sails to the wind, but he also seems to regard the likely consequences of their not doing this (takeover by parties currently regarded as non-mainstream) as also being potentially sinister. Democratic politics has always been, and continues to be, a mutually educative interaction between governing elites and the wider public, and I think it is unhelpful to paint this interaction in relentlessly negative terms. If some of the main parties stand for something different than what they used to stand for, that is because they have chosen to move with the times and stay mainstream, rather than being left behind and become minor. I think this is a mundane, rather than a scandalous, fact of our political history.
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