13 Comments

• RC 6th Apr '13 - 11:58am

  The problem is that tough economic times are naturally divisive and lead to angry, contentious politics because there are fewer resources to go around. What had seemed like a win-win situation pre-2008, where the rich could get rich and the majority could also share in the good times has turned into a zero or less than zero sum game, where someone’s gain is always someone else’s loss. When the cake has shrunk, someone’s belly is going to go empty or at least will be less full than before.

  How a party in the middle of that political punch up, with unfairly few MPs and no media friends, can defend itself is a difficult question to answer. At the moment, it seems we are reduced to onlookers, murmuring from the sidelines. As such we are being ignored or criticised for apparent inaction.

  Voters react to narrative and at the moment we seem to lack one. If we don’t hurry up and come up with something, someone else (i.e. our opponents) will do it for us.

• Liberal Al 6th Apr '13 - 12:08pm

  Well, this is not really anything new; we, Lib Dems, have always been accused of two things:

  1=Being too rational.

  2=Being too obsessed with the details.

  An example which always springs to my mind is during a council election in the Midlands. The Lib Dem team I was helping at the time were a great group with some wonderful ideas, but they still got wiped out by Labour. Why? I believe it was mostly a case of national issues overtaking local ones, but that leads to the question, ‘how did we allow the national issues to overtake the local ones?’

  I feel the answer is that Labour’s campaign was a constant attack of leaflets once a month, containing basically the same, 10 unsubstantial, overly emotive, but easily to presume is right, bullet points. On the other hand, our campaign kept talking about local issues using what in focus terms may as well have been thesis, with statistical evidence to boot. While great stuff to those who care, most do not care and as such will never bother to read this information.

  Rightly, or wrongly, 10 bullets which can be read at a scan will always be more effective than lots of factual information.

  However, that being said, I am not advocating that we go down Labours pandering path, or join in the their ad hominem style of politics. In fact, I am currently in a long running debate with a Labour activist over how campaigning and politics should be presented to the public. Call me an idealist, but I am shocked and saddened by how shamelessly she supports partisan politics, the spreading of myths, straw-man arguments and personal attacks. To her mind, it does not matter how one wins, so long as they win. It is, in her opinion, quite acceptable to scapegoat a minority group, so long as you can win.

  I do not know, but to me, surely there is more to politics than just an obsession with winning.

  I guess I bring this up because, although I realise its flaws and our own, I would still rather we stick to our principles of rational and reasonable debates/policy making,than sink to the single-minded level of the Tories and Labour. A level which has, in my opinion, only fueled the discontent and divide between the political class and those they should be representing.

• paul barker 6th Apr '13 - 1:14pm

  We know (Comres 26/3) that only half of Labour “voters” trust them with the Economy. Thats a situation where stoking fears about what Labour would do can be both emotional & rational.

• Paul R 6th Apr '13 - 11:58pm

  “Votes for prisoners? There’s a simple rule: never appear to side with prisoners.”

  No, actually. Instead it is a case of being real emotional that Human Rights should be respected for everyone – yes, even for prisoners. Human Rights don’t just apply when it is your rights under threat, they apply always and for everyone.

• Geoffrey Payne 7th Apr '13 - 9:26am

  I remember this issue coming up at the last general election. In Hackney we organised a public meeting on the Arab – Israeli conflict. We had as speakers Jonthan Fryer, Fiyaz Mughal and Yossi Mekelberg from the Israeli Peace Now movement. It was a brilliant debate and about 30 people turned up. But when George Galloway spoke at a different event at the same venue, the place was packed out. To my ears he had nothing worth saying on the issue, but what he did have was anger and that was what a lot of people wanted to hear.

• Simon Banks 7th Apr '13 - 11:50am

  Labour don’t hate us any more than they did thirty years ago. It’s not to do with the coalition. It’s to do with challenging them and confusing them. They’re comfortable with Tory enemies because they confirm all their stereotypes. They hate us most not when we cuddle up to the Tories, but when we invade Labour territory, either geographically or in policy and class terms.

  Liberal Al: the lesson here is to concentrate and repeat the message, which can be a local one. “What I tell you three times is true”.

• Tony Dawson 7th Apr '13 - 12:06pm

  ANY cynic can ‘tap into the emotions’.

  A decent political party would be led by human beings with genuine emotional commitment to the arguments as well as rational analysis of the steps which will be effective in choosing the way forward which will achieve the desired ends. Such people do not have to ‘tap into the emotions’. They are there, available to them, from the moment they wake till their head hits the pillow.

• Julian Critchley 7th Apr '13 - 6:01pm

  “…Pupil Premium: extra money for the most disadvantaged children in our schools. How can it be that in a modern, open society like ours a child’s destiny is still determined by their background? How can it be that, despite all the promise on a four or five year old’s first day at school, despite the passion and dedication of their teachers, too often you can plot that child’s path just by asking how much their parents earn?”

  I recognise that you’re writing about how it doesn’t pay for politicians to be too fixated on facts and evidence, compared to emotion or prejudice, and – sadly – I find Westen’s argument persuasive : perhaps a clear majority of people have neither the time nor the inclination (nor the ability) to process evidence in such a way as to reach objective conclusions about policies. Maybe if you could sit down an elector for a day, and explain to them simply and effectively the evidence, they’d challenge their own prejudices. But that’s impossible. However, I think politicians have known that for a long time – I’m sure I could find a useful quote from Seneca or Machiavelli to illustrate the point.

  Nevertheless, the approach in the UK during the bulk of the twentieth century was to “campaign in poetry and govern in prose”. This meant that the prejudice and the emotion was brought out to win the election, as a signifier of “values” and “people like you”. But when in Government, parties would attempt to base their decisions more on evidence wherever possible. This is the heart of representative democracy : we elect people we emotionally identify with in order that they might have the time, expertise and support to deliver evidence-based decisions which move policy in a way which we would wish, if we had the remotest chance of understanding the issues in the same depth.

  The alternative is horrible, however : politicians take emotional, evidence-free policies into government. You highlight education policy, and I think this is one key area where this traditional approach has foundered, and the emotional engagement and “stands to reason, dunnit?” approach of the campaign has been translated directly into policy, with the result that we have an education policy now largely divorced from any actual evidence, but based firmly on 19th Hole saloon bar prejudice. This is now having some fairly serious consequences, with much of education policy resembling the emperor’s new clothes : a series of nonsenses which everyone involved knows are nonsenses. But when experts and professionals point out the nonsense and argue for a return to evidence, politicians of all hues counter with yet more emotive language and prejudice of the sort you outline above. In fact, some politicians even use the objections of experts and practitioners as evidence that they must be right – some sort of bizarre throwback to the days of granny telling you that the nastier medicine tastes, the better it is for you. It’s good campaigning (in the tabloids, anyway), but it makes for terrible policy, and real harm to our children.

  So I think for campaigning, it’s hard to ignore Westen’s analysis. All rational people know that the popularly-believed picture of welfare recipients in this country is not remotely related to the actual truth. But any attempt to counter that founders. Facts are mere pinpricks in the hide of the elephant of prejudice. To counter Tory misrepresentation, the left will have to play the Tories at their game – and make no mistake, the Tories know exactly what they’re doing, and are cynically manipulating the public’s ignorance and prejudice to carry out their slash and burn policies on the public sector.

  But those same politicians, we have to hope, will remember that, when in office, their job is to represent the rational side of us, not to abandon reason and pursue policies which stem from our ignorance and prejudice.

• Joe Otten 7th Apr '13 - 7:08pm

  I find the easiest way to tell the difference between evidence-based policy and policy-based evidence to be whether I agree with it or not.

  But seriously, there is an important lesson from Westen that is easily missed. It is not just the common folk that are motivated by emotion, it is all of us. The smarter and more rational you are, the better the reasons you will feel compelled to invent to support a policy that emotionally seems right. I think this causes problems for any plan to “campaign in poetry and govern in prose”.

• Julian Critchley 7th Apr '13 - 7:40pm

  “The smarter and more rational you are, the better the reasons you will feel compelled to invent to support a policy that emotionally seems right. I think this causes problems for any plan to “campaign in poetry and govern in prose”.

  This is where I don’t travel with Westen, and nor should politicians, who have a duty to pursue evidence and reason ahead of emotion, for the good of the rest of us. Not all opinions have the same value. Some opinions ARE more rational than others. To pretend otherwise is to argue like a 14 year-old faced with an unanswerable argument : “well it’s all just opinion, innit ?”

  There is a difference between an ignorant person literally inventing facts to suit their prejudices (there isn’t anyone who’s ever been involved in door-knocking for a political party who hasn’t witnessed such fiction presented as fact about various topics), and someone who seeks to find evidence-based policies which they can use to achieve their goals.

  Government Ministers have a duty to fulfil the latter role. And if the evidence isn’t there to back up the prejudices they have, then they should be mature enough to challenge their own prejudices. This does happen : Heseltine after the riots of the early 80s found his views on state intervention reshaped; Morris abandoned the Labour flagship EAZ policy when faced with evidence of its failure. It happened even in the dog days of the Major administration, when I saw at first-hand Tory Education Ministers who, despite their ideology, were actually quite concerned to ensure that many of their policies (or the implementation of those policies) were based on evidence. Being pragmatic and sensible is what we need in Ministers. If you want Ministers who take their prejudices and “feelings” into government, then you can have George Osborne and Michael Gove. If that isn’t a conclusive argument for governing based on facts and evidence, then I don’t know what is.

• jedibeeftrix 7th Apr '13 - 8:18pm

  anyone believing themselves to be a disinterested god labouring tirelessly in the pursuit of rational argument ought to read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt.

• Joe Otten 7th Apr '13 - 9:55pm

  Jedi, yes in fact on reflection my previous point may have been from Haidt rather than Westen.

  Julian, yes I agree there is a great danger of lapsing into relativism. I largely agree with what you say, although I am not so confident to leap to judgement as to which politicians are ruled by prejudice.

• Julian Critchley 7th Apr '13 - 11:18pm

  I don’t mean to imply that anyone who disagrees with me, or my preferred party of the moment, or whatever, is therefore irrational (although I know many think that way). I’m merely looking at those cases in which the policy is clearly and objectively based on lies and untruths. The current welfare “debate”, for example, in which Tory politicians and press are deliberately feeding lies about welfare recipients (and indeed the whole welfare system), in order to deliver their noxious policies, is obscene. The facts are objective in terms of number of large families, number of families over the cap, percentage of welfare payments which go to unemployed people as opposed to pensioners etc. Yet the Government’s policies are sold to a largely ignorant and misinformed public on the basis of a series of lies and insignificant irrelevancies.

  To a certain extent, I expect this from the Tories. I tend towards Bevan’s view of them. But what’s concerning is when politicians from LibDems and Labour alike start to frame their own policies to address this imaginary state of affairs, instead of the reality. That sort of pandering to prejudice and ignorance takes you towards Tea Party territory, where “mainstream” politicians endorse notions about Obama being a muslim, or women being unable to get pregnant from “real” rapes.

  There is a difference between having a difference of opinion, with possible validity on both sides, and knowingly acting against objectively available evidence. Campaigning is an art-form, and subjectivity is central, but there’s quite a lot of data which allows governing to be more of a science. I don’t expect objectivity from Tories. I think they mostly live in a different reality to the rest of us. But if the LibDems and Labour abandon reality in favour of pandering to clearly demonstrable ignorance and error, then we’re surely lost.