It is, of course, reshuffle week. To be honest, I don’t care much about who is up and who is down. Not only is this government heading in the wrong direction on almost every count, it’s even stopped being interesting. Compassionate conservatism, as a strain of one nation conservatism, could at best have been something to engage with, at worse something vaguely watchable. But that moment has gone. What is interesting is the spectacle of the reshuffle and what it says about the culture of modern politics.
The point of a reshuffle is to publicly demonstrate the quickening pace of government, to promote the new and the fast and punish to the old and the slow. Yes, the government now dresses slightly further to the right, but the reshuffle says more about the aura of delivery than it does about ideology. In fairness, David Cameron has held out longer than his predecessors – fending off demands to change the pack right through to mid-term. The impatient ultra-modernisers of New Labour could never manage to sit still for so long. For them, it was the fast and furious politics of an endless, restless, twitching fidget.
The average tenure of a New Labour minister was 1.3 years. It’s one of those remarkable facts that reminds me of the 1980s Paul Hardcastle hit “19”, which highlighted the average age at which US troops died in Vietnam. How can anyone possibly achieve anything in the complex world of politics in 1.3 years? Remember, that’s an average. Many posts were held for less and having Gordon Brown in the Chancellor’s job for 10 years must have skewed the figures. There have been eight transport secretaries in 10 years, a turnover now mirrored in the civil service as three departments have had three different permanent secretaries in the last two years. Surely only football managers are scalped faster?
Of course, everything in politics is speeding up as everything in life speeds up. Short-termism defines the economy. In 1966, institutions held shares in FTSE 100 firms for an average of eight years, today the average is less than one. Our culture is dominated by fast food, always on communications, omnipresent media and the ever-quickening pace of the consumer treadmill as obsoleteness becomes not just technically built in but psychologically embedded. Besides, China never sleeps and never slows down. We either run faster or we lose.
Politics has found it impossible to avoid the same fast fate. As politicians give up managing the economy in the interests of society, or saving the planet – they have to justify their existence by meddling in ever more areas of our life, at a faster and faster pace. A dangerous bout of displacement activity sees political leaders justify their existence any way they can – other than dealing with the causes of the problems we face. So within the tight time cycles of our first-past-the-post electoral system they go for the quick fix; the big IT project, another piece of legislation or another round of re-organization to fill the 24/7 media channels, look busy and impress the people. Speed begets speed, as the knowledge of your almost certain shift in one to two years means acting fast now or facing the chop. And worry not, as you’ll be in another post long before anyone notices how many novice mistakes you made.
Today, the abiding philosophy is that change can only be imposed quickly from above. It’s a mish mash of Soviet-style centralisation and target imposition alongside the heroic CEO of the free market as the drivers of change. What neither model can do is trust the people to change things for themselves by themselves. It is raw elitism over pluralism, the politics of the blueprint over politics as a shared journey, it refuses to allow people to learn best by learning from their mistakes as power is used over rather than with the people. It’s the short-term over the long.
What we need instead of the cult of speed is a slow politics, which seeks fundamental and deeply embedded change. Such a slow politics is based on the recognition that meaningful, sustainable and popular change takes time to get right, that a consensus needs to be negotiated to build popular agreement on the way forward and that decisions need to be shared if people are to feel ownership of change, work for it and pay for it. It is the politics of the tortoise, not the hare.
Raymond Williams, the brilliant Welsh cultural theorist and socialist, understood all this better than most. His book The Long Revolution was written because Williams saw the sheer complexity of any kind of socialistic change towards self-government, rather than the easy paternalistic forms of nationalisation. Which all reinforces one of the golden rules of the left, namely that democracy may take more time than the target or the market – but it comes up with better solutions. And more than anything else it is the planet that needs us and our politicians to slow down.
The lesson of history, whether Bolshevik or Blairite, is that you cannot short cut history. If you try, then disaster looms. It’s not just reforms that take time but truly hegemonic transformational change is a slow process too. It took ten years for the welfare state to emerge from the 1930s crash. The new right gestated for three decades before it took power. My favourite example is the Swedish social democrats, who took power in the 1930s and steadily, surely, and slowly built a rather good society that didn’t reach its peak until over half a century later.
We need a different theory of change, one that matches principle with patience, the purpose of which is to head in the right direction and find as many fellow travellers as possible to share the journey with. A switch to proportional representation would help, then a long-term progressive consensus could be secured. Ironically, the perpetual failure of one-party-fast-politics is delivering just such hung parliaments. Meanwhile, this week’s reshuffle will change almost nothing.
More film references to end with. Politics is not akin to Keanu Reeves on a bus that will explode if it slows down, it is more akin to Walkabout and a process of self-discovery through tough terrain with others. And then there is the brilliant line in the otherwise rather average film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: “It will all be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay it’s not the end”. With that I leave you for this week – sorry, I’ve got to rush.
Neal Lawson’s column appears every Thursday on The Staggers.
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