Client Politics – the Punter is King
Client Politics seems to me to be an excellent description of a new brand of politics, which has grown out of triangulation and the Blairite tendency. Clearly closely related to the commercial version, “The Customer is King”, it can be taken at its extreme as an abnegation of leadership. “Giving the punter what s/he wants”, regardless of how it fits with “our policies”, may seem an extreme version, but it is getting close to a reality.
The most absurd examples of this philosophy occur in the education world, where student choice has led to many courses becoming a hotchpotch of popular subjects without any regard for the totality of the subject – hence endless Henry VIII and Hitler but no Magna Carta and the Black Death, or more and more IT studies and the end of chemistry. The rigour of an intellectual discipline is being lost in favour of a kind of X factor subject selection.
Is it fanciful to say, at least on the left, this comes from a loss of faith in leadership, whether expressed in the Leninist top-down model or in the milder British version of “the man from the ministry knows best”? And clearly leadership is extremely out of vogue. A recent meeting I attended in Battersea was all about “identity politics” and totally opposed to “political politics”. One older member of the left arguing that one could hardly become friends and discuss tactics until one knew each other’s politics whilst the younger community activists argued precisely the opposite, that you could not possibly discuss politics until you had become friends.
No one could argue with the proposition that both Lenin and the “man from the Ministry” got it wrong rather too frequently but now we have an education policy world under Gove, where any group of parents can argue for the establishment of a free school of any kind absolutely in disregard for what might have been “the man from the Ministry’s advice”. The absurd result is that in the Labour Party, which once believed almost entirely in non-sectarian education – see our experience in Northern Ireland – and which in the 70’s argued about the possibility of getting rid of Catholic and C of E schools, now has members arguing that we should not do anything other than welcome with open arms the prospect of having Jewish and Muslim primary schools as neighbours in our inner city.
The appeal is in the immediacy of the punters’ support. Whether the support is still there a few years, or even a few weeks, later is deemed irrelevant. Whether the long-term implications for the community are good or bad, we can justify our decision, because it was what the punters wanted. In the circumstances it is odd that we do not take too much trouble in trying to assess whether the punters are merely a vocal minority or perhaps even a misguided majority.
This is very apparent in the Wandsworth example of the Springfield Hospital development site. This large, undeveloped, NHS site has stood under-used for decades. The NHS, which of course needs the money, has put forward two perfectly acceptable development proposals, but they got their politics wrong. Their last application was submitted at a time when it got caught up in the 2010 General Election. Both major parties, for largely electoral reasons, took part in a vigorous anti-campaign and the Council, assisted by the fact that its Deputy Leader lived opposite the site, decided to reject the application.
The community, or rather the immediate neighbours, knew what it wanted and won the argument – the Council gave the punters their desires. But just what are the odds on a semi-privatised NHS, even more strapped for cash, and/or its developers coming back with a larger, much less neighbour friendly application – fair to middling I guess – and in the meantime we have had an extra few years of decay, fewer desperately needed homes and less money for the health service. So we have total victory for the punters in the short-term but arguably a loss for the wider community (the homeless and patients) and a probable long-term loss.
It is, of course, hard work standing up for one’s core beliefs when one really doesn’t have any. Hence as a working councillor, I hear arguments such as “free/faith/foundation schools are popular with the parents” and therefore we should not oppose them – regardless of our long-held belief that sectarianism should be kept out of schools. It’s an attractive proposition; especially when, over the course of time and government legislation, it seems particularly ostrich like to maintain one’s so-called principled position. A persuasive advocate of client politics would say, after Keynes, “Ah so as the facts change so does your position – and quite right too”.
But surely there has to be a limit to such an argument. Some core beliefs have surely to be really at the core. Client politics is too easy an escape from taking responsibility. Leadership must be receptive to public opinion, but it cannot escape the ultimate responsibility to lead.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 