The Slog skims across the sad history of delusion and illusion that lies behind our contemporary travails

Where are We?

The UK government is “operating 24/7” in the midst of the eurozone crisis – despite David Cameron and George Osborne being on holiday – said  William Vague yesterday. This is of course another way of saying that their being on holiday had made no difference.

Labour – which is showing one or two smarter moves of late – decided that they could pretend people had noticed the difference; the spinners chose to pervert the whole point of Twitter trends by launching a day of tweeting #where’sthegovernment. It shot to Number Three, and then rapidly disappeared again. Oddly enough, it’s decline happened soon after I tweeted, ‘Dunno mate, #where’stheopposition?’ to John Prescott. Labour’s fundamental problem at the moment is that, while they are the most effective Labour opposition for many decades, nothing they say has any credibility, and none of the  content contains any alternatives to what Camerlot and the Draper are doing. Thus Miliband drones on about Hackgate, nervous at very turn that Tom Baldwin’s illustrious past will be revealed in more detail; and whether they like it or not – or no matter how many times Lord Manglesum lies about it – the ONS figures on 2003-09 spending are there for anyone to see: Labour blew too much money, and in 1999 sold far too much gold.

Of course the Tories have done no economic restructuring – they never do. Of course the Tories have a flatlining economy – because Britain left the cuts five years too late. And of course the Tories are scared of the banks – the same bankers to whom Brownose sucked up for a decade or more. If one looks at the polls, there is no political persuasion going on in the UK right now: some Tory support has drifted away – largely to a state of cynical torpor and UKIP – and a disappointed LibDem Left has migrated back to its natural homeland, the Labour Party. All three Parties are thus left preaching to the converted….while ignoring the 55+% who don’t like any of them.

The point remains this, however: the US has lost its AAA rating (about which very few of my market contacts care either way) and Europe is imploding into a long-expected strangulation by debt. Britain has no say in, or effect on, any of it. While Hague licks every American and Arab arse he can find, nobody in Camerlot has had any EU policy since May 2010, beyond referring to it as ‘an imponderable’. There is a generic lottery slogan, ‘You have to be in it to win it’, but the opposite is also true: ‘You have to be in it to get rid of it’. Hitler learned this lesson after 1924: the Conservative leadership never will, because any sign of EU engagement is treated by the Right as treachery.

As I posted last month, there is no imagination being applied to British foreign policy. But an equally paltry amount of creativity was applied to our post-Imperial economic decline as a whole. In the EU, neither reality nor imagination are present. The same is true of the US. In Australia, the naivety of the Labour Government (and property scramblers) has to be seen to be believed. In the G20, no will, reality or imagination was applied to controls on the banks in general, and forced deleveraging  in particular, after 2008. So here we are again – and it’s worse than ever. Quel surprise.

How did we get here?

Why does the democratic selection of legislators keep on producing nonentities of lower and lower quality with fewer and fewer ethics? I think there are a number of factors, but they are all related. As always, it comes down to culture; and once the key elements are in place, a circular progression gradually throttles every last aspiration to do the right thing boldly.

At its base level, there is this ubiquitous desire to please. And among those who wish to be pleased, there sits a smug, almost impertinent expectation of instant gratification along with minimal pain. But none of these desires or expectations could’ve been created in the first place without three very important developments – of in turn a political, media and marketing nature.

With the very best of intentions, the first majority Labour Government of 1945-51 set about creating a welfare State in which those just back from a crippling war could feel that, if nothing else, the burden of weekly anxiety about money among the lower middle and working classes could be banished. Today, the contemporary Young Right driving the way the Metropolitan Bubble thinks (with the exception of Ed West) make the grave mistake of judging the actions of that Administration having had the benefit of 70 years to watch what happened next. The truth is that it was the last British Government to set out a stall, sell its contents honestly to the People, and then enact over 90% of it once elected. We may decry its direction in 2011, but I’d give a couple of limbs to have a Government willing and able to be that effective today.

By the early 1950s, the consensus that the social side of Labour was spot-on had become so widespread, influential Conservatives were able to admit, “We’re all Socialists now”. That Party returned to power and, by freeing up the economy and allowing the first of many credit booms, ushered in a 13-year period of dysfunctional growth alongside poor exporting performance. Thus the willingness to live nationally and personally on unaffordable credit began – and coincidentally, two other elements were added: television ownership, and the political class’s discovery of advertising agencies.

Harold Macmillan (‘SuperMac’ to the cartoonists) may have given TV performances we regard today as hilariously inept. But at the time, they showed that he had grasped far more quickly than Labour just how influential the medium could be. He was also the first to discover the soundbite – “You’ve never had it so good” – and the first PM to use such a vacuous form of words to wipe the floor with the Opposition. SuperMac romped home in the 1959 Election, but he did so with talented help from an ad agency by the name of Colman, Prentice & Varley…or Cockup, Packup & Vanish as they were known in the business.

The key account man at CPV was John Pearce, a legendary former editor of Picture Post who went on to form probably the greatest UK creative agency of all time, Collett Dickenson Pearce. John gave the Tories a slogan for 1959 – ‘Life’s better under the Conservatives, don’t let Labour ruin it’ – that chimed precisely with the spreading mood of the times: ‘better’ meant better off, home and car owning, aspirant post-war families determined to shake the dust of working class squalor from their lives. These people were buying bungalows, lapping up everything at the Ideal Home Exhibition, driving Ford Consuls, and discovering the magical new programmes of ‘the ITV’ on Channel Nine. For the first time ever, a staggering 42% of workers voted Tory.

The following year, Jack Kennedy won the US Election with even more blatant selling of the vague and the mendacious – the New Frontier and the ‘missile gap’ versus the USSR respectively. Death in Dallas brought JFK immortality, and the luck never to disappoint; but the 1959-60 period was a turning point for Western politics: ever afterwards, the public has been sold mythical problems, crass solutions, and empty promises on an industrial scale. Without television and the skills of admen, this could never have happened.

The first politico to spot the potential of it all was Harold Wilson. The glamour of Kennedy and the method of his victory left him in awe of the power of media-orchestrated fibbing. Wilson would casually refer to the President as ‘Jack’, suggesting they socialised regularly (they only met once), and constantly tell his younger colleagues how this was The Future, and it worked. One such was the (at the time) entirely sane Anthony Wedgewood-Benn, who first coined the phrase ‘white heat of technology’ during a Shadow Cabinet session in 1962. Wilson instantly saw its potential, and from it developed the theme that would help him narrowly snatch power in 1964.

The general drift of Labour’s appeal in that seminal year was that they were The Moderns and the Tories were The Grouse-Moor Nobs. Only Labour could ‘forge’ the technology required to drag Britain out of the Victorian age nurtured by Thirteen Years of Tory Misrule. And the whole thing was summed up by more vacuity, ‘Let’s Go with Labour!’ It was all the most dreadful tosh, but does hold within it the chilling chimes of today, where the Left calls itself Progressive, and the Guardian dubs everything else Reactionary.

The point here is that, without the rise of political cynicism as the secret ingredient added to the newly formulated political elixir, we would not have the dishonest, sleazy and amoral Westminster and Whitehall regime under which we suffer today. Wilson (a former Liberal supporter) had been ambitious for the keys to Number 10 since the age of nine, and represented political cynicism incarnate. A product of class mobility via very high intelligence and natural cunning, Harold loved to display his liking for working class things like brown sauce and a pipe. In fact, he smoked cigars in private and rarely used HP sauce or indeed ate breakfast. His insouciant genius was to decide on an image, and then stick to it. Truth didn’t come into it: in 1966, he devalued the Pound shortly after regaining power, and infamously told the public – via television – that this would “not affect the value of the Pound in your pocket”. This in turn became the first political mega-lie.

Image was a seminal word in the middle years of the Twentieth Century. In and of itself, it is a Freudian slip of a word, because an image is unreal: it is a manufactured reflection with no substance or physicality. But after 1964, truthful politics became an oxymoron. In 1970, Heath promised prices cut ‘at a stroke’ prior to a period of rampant inflation under Chancellor Barber. In 1979 we had ‘Labour isn’t working’ (immediately before a doubling of unemployment) and in 1992 ‘family values’ (which returned to power the most maritally unfaithful Cabinet in history).

In the same year, Bill Clinton in the US announced his discovery of the Third Way between the Democrats and the Republicans. It was in fact a Zen-like place this Third Way, in which Clinton and his accolytes looked at the polls and focus groups, and did as they bade: ‘what time would you like it to be?’ politics. His own private soundbite – ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ – was the natural output of this mindset: fix the feelgood factor, and you’ll win. Like Wilson forty years earlier, Slick Willy cared little for the truth: there could be no power with Truth, and power was what he wanted. And like the very same Wilson, another Labour politician Tony Blair (also a one-time Liberal Party supporter) swept to power in 1997 with the emptiest promise yet: Things Can Only Get Better.

Blair and his spin doctor, the odious Alistair Campbell, served up a veritable running buffet of soundbites about education, crime, prudence, Constitutional reform and even Royal deaths. All of them proved to be a massive disappointment; policy was mostly illusory, in that often nothing was done at all. In a few cases, the very opposite was followed as a policy – policing being a classic example. Under New Labour – the ultimate advertising tool, a brand relaunch – things of little substance became things that simply didn’t exist: the New Dawn of aged care, Cool Britannia, and falling crime figures being the worst examples.

And so we arrive at today’s Big Society, an idea of such density and irrelevance, most media opinion leaders are still debating what on Earth it means. But this Coalition which suggested a eurosceptic, cost-cutting, radical Government ready to change Britain from top to bottom has done the opposite, or nothing, respectively.

A key point I’m trying to make here is that without the desire for power for its own sake within the political class, the media and its advertising partners could never have achieved the influence they have today. A subsidiary point – but one I make quite knowingly and without apology – is that the Left has been an even worse abuser of media power than the Right. If you want evidence of the fact that advertising can be honest if regulated, then look at its output beyond politics. It stretches the truth and makes a biased case – but it dare not falsify facts: should it do so, the full force of the law will order it to remove the campaign involved. The media’s editorial writers have no such regulation (although their misbehaviour may change that soon) and the politicians of course have none at all. You know why? Because even when they make official political broadcasts on TV and the web, they are exempt from advertising regulations. Just fancy that.

So, much as the Left loves to demonise advertising and ‘the media’, they have been its greatest beneficiaries. And media manipulation could not have been allowed to get out of hand in the political sphere without corrupt pols just gagging to use it for their own selfish pursuit of power in the first place.

Two questions now present themselves: how did this political cynicism get worse? And second, how on earth did voters become so lacking in discernment, they seem prepared today to believe any old bollocks – even to treble the support of LibDem leader Nick Clegg on the basis of one 90-minute appearance on a televised debate?

I think the process started with the decline in religious belief – a decline, by the way, of which I largely approve – and the erosion of what I would call ‘civic’ education.

Organised religion, when mated with sovereign power, is the most dangerously visceral animal on the planet. It has caused more deaths comparatively speaking than any other single factor – and led to more ignorance and overpopulation than any other variable, period. But once stripped of its political influence, it can be a force for enormous good and social progress. Most important of all, for nearly three milliennia it has been the main repository of that philosophical coda arguing for good rather than bad social behaviour…via the promise of a blissful afterlife, in return for good works and a pacifist attitude of tolerance to one’s neighbours in this one.

Once the motive for good behaviour was removed by rationalism, and the influence of even a politically neutered Church rapidly declined, it should really have been blindingly obvious to everyone that standards of behaviour would fall. Further, once the values of loyalty and marital fidelity became subjects for cynical derision, it was equally inevitable that the familial glue of our society would be unable to withstand the forces of appetite without restraint. The idiotic 1960’s mantra ‘if it feels good, do it’ was probably the worst summation of this Mr Hyde view of life. Soon after it came to prominence, the Manson ‘family’ slaughtered a houseful of people, quoting exactly that Weltanschauung as the raison d’etre.

For several centuries in Britain, the best of religious social values were in turn reinforced through the primary school system. But then after 1964, the ‘progressive’ tendency got hold of it, doing their best to eradicate all religious influence from teaching. At the same time, they chucked out the principle of educational excellence in favour of blind ‘equality’ in school-teaching. University recruits in love with this anti-religious and anti-standards philosophy gradually became first the mainstream, and then the overwhelming majority, of those practising the teaching profession.

The result has been the catastrophic loss of probably the two most vital civic lessons taught at school in a healthy culture: always think OF others, and always think FOR yourself. The two consequential symptoms we see most in society today are selfish, undisciplined, anti-social behaviour; and an inability to see past ideas and promises that are almost complete drivel.

Yet what we see emerging now is not only a generation of politicians coming through who are themselves the products of this disastrously ill-conceived policy of ‘social engineering’ – but also media people suffering from the same absence of a moral compass. The cynical personal enrichment of Tony Blair, the sociopathy of Gordon Brown after 2006, the MP taxis for hire, the expenses-hammering MPs, (and the Cameronian attempt to subvert new rules brought in as a result) are the first signs of this Hobbesian Generation coming through. The Newscorp, MGN, tabloid, reality television, talent show cheating depravity is another part of it. And as Tom Watson so rightly observes, we should be prepared for much worse: anyone expecting this now to cure itself is suffering from naivety at best and delusional escapism at worst. I do not doubt that there will be a reaction against the reptilian Simon Cowell: but I honestly do not know what one can do about the likes of Andy Coulson, Rebekah Brooks, Piers Morgan and Andy Hayman.

In an essay like this, one must by definition oversimplify some aspects of cultural decline. But most of the specifics I haven’t touched upon are also the result of this truly bizarre combination of gullibility and selfish greed in the contemporary mind. Declining creativity in the performing arts, for example, is the direct result of Friedmanite ‘everything washes its face’ economic dogma: but without the silly acceptance of such a potty thought in the first place, it wouldn’t be evident in a thousand remakes and cross-productions in every capital city’s theatreland and Hollywood blockbuster.

Trickle-down wealth in turn is an idea so daft, it defies every experience of human nature. The belief system that says 3% of the population need to be obscenely wealthy to create a healthy society is refuted by every shred of data going back to the early 1950s – most of which, ironically, can be found at the CIA’s online library facility. The pursuit of vast material wealth for its own sake denies the obvious reality of mortality. The suggestion that Islamism is a religious stance open to rational argument is utterly without logical foundation. The repeated assertion by City financiers that the current model of investment banking adds to the sum of human betterment is beneath contempt – especially when described by the foul Lloyd Blankfein as ‘doing God’s work’. This must be one of the few cases on record where a Godless anti-social exploiter quoted in his defence the one thing in which he patently doesn’t believe.

What can we do about it?

I could sit here all night and keep on adding similar examples of people desperate to believe the unbelievable, and sell the unachievable, in a desperate – almost pathetic – attempt to find some elusive form of tranquility in their lives. But mindful again of the confines of this essay, it behoves me now to comment briefly on a starting point for reversing our leaders’ increasingly cruel use of conjuring tricks to hoodwink Western electorates.

If people are addicted to belief in the unbelievable and the unachievable, then a new stress on empirical reality is a vital priority. And as the process of diluting socio-political courage and honesty has been going on for over half a century, we should stop pretending that a bit of tinkering here and there is going to solve anything.

This is why I summarise my philosophy, such as it is, as Radical Realism. Put simply, we should always accept what IS in the cognitive sense, but not accept that such is inevitable. We need to get real about the need to be radical; and we can never find a radical cure if we prefer dated polemics to empirical reality.

Further, the socio-economic obsession with easy returns and safely-made fortunes is antithetical to bold, creative leadership….because it encourages caution. And the decline in willingness to admit personal responsibility leads to sickeningly dishonest attempts to evade blame. But the adoption of – and promotion of – boldness has in the past led far too easily to banking irresponsibility and authoritarian political models.

This is why, beneath the umbrella of Radical Realism, I argue that the guiding light of all judgement of social, political and business effectiveness should be an assessment of the evidence of Accountable Leadership in those actions.

From these conclusions, a few initial summaries of the action required logically follow:

1. The role and practice of education in the establishment of civic, social and personal values is absolutely central to action. Tory Education Minister Michael Gove is making a reasonable fist of this under onerous circumstances, but beyond him there are few if any genuine believers in the importance of his task in either Party. Gove also, I believe, lacks either the funds or the outlook to be as radical as we really need to be.

2. The overbearing desire to protect their privileged position among all three Party Establishments demands an end to their dominance of our politics. My own favoured approach to achieving this objective, in the light of recent events, would be first, the creation of a National Government from the best of the Parliamentary ranks; and in short order, the adoption of a radically altered voting/legislative model to break Party power forever – and encourage the creation of truly relevant and representative Parties in their stead.

Despite frequent readership demands to do so, I’m not going to indulge in the detail of the radical reform programme that would have to follow. The main reason for this is that the details already exist here, and can be located by using the search engine supplied. I will (when economic meltdown and the mining of depravity are temporarily ended) pull most of this stuff into a Home Pager header – behind which everyone will be able to view the hopeless contradictions in many of my ideas for themselves.

But such is the price of membership in the Homo sapiens club: we are not as yet, thank God, Vulcans. All one can ever ask for from any socio-econo-political philosophy is an absence of Utopianism, and a refusal to accept Dystopianism. That, and good (but grown-up) intentions from the person behind it.