The failed magic of politics

Many years ago, when I was a teenager, I went canvassing for the Labour Party. This was for the General Election of 1966, and was in a part of my local constituency that had some Labour voters, and which consisted mainly of semi-detached houses and council estates. I called at one house and gave my usual little speech to the owner, an old woman. “I’m not voting Labour”, she said. “That Mr Wilson (the Labour Prime Minister at the time) has been in power for 18 months and he’s not done anything about the drive at the side of my house”. The drive was indeed pot-holed and unkempt. Had I been more politically astute, I would have replied by saying “Mr Wilson has a very busy job, but I can get in touch about the drive with the local council, and they may be able to help”. At the time, I put her comments down to a lack of knowledge about the functions of different levels of government. But looking back, I see it as part of something more fundamental - a belief that political leaders have magical powers, that they can change everything all at once. The lack of change, even to minor matters such as an unkempt drive in Solihull, must therefore be evidence that they have chosen to malevolently withdraw that power. 

Ignorance of how governments operate is widespread, then as now. This became evident to me when I became a social worker a few years later. Many of the people who most depended on public services, for housing, income and basic public safety, had little idea of how these services operated and how they could best influence them. This was compounded by poor literacy, so that official letters (this was well before the Internet) were left unread. I remember visiting people about to be evicted from their council house for non-payment of rent to find the warning letters from the council stacked unopened on the mantelpiece. For such powerless people, the route to survival was gaining the ear of someone they saw as powerful. They would approach social workers like myself because we were seen as  possible intermediaries with the elusive people of power. We would do our best to explain official communications and would contact agencies on their behalf. Our role was analogous to that of the priest or saint who could act as an intermediary to God.

There is, however, no need of a god when we have television. Television is a magic window on a shining world of plenty, inhabited by the beautiful and the powerful. People on television (or now the Internet), whatever their shortcomings in real life, are worshipped by millions of acolytes. Indeed, their shortcomings seem to make them more worthy of worship, almost as if they take the sins of the world on their shoulders. Politicians who can transfer this celebrity magic to politics (like Donald Trump) become popular with the powerless irrespective of the policies they espouse. Other, less fortunate, politicians can only mimic this celebrity identity. Tony Blair, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage were successful at gathering some such magic, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer much less so. 

Politicians blessed with celebrity magic are assumed by their worshippers to be all-powerful and capable of correcting all ills. But the gods always fail. Society can not be wished into perfection, resources can not be generated out of nowhere, complex problems can not be solved overnight. Politicians themselves in their autobiographies complain of the immense difficulties of achieving their aims, while those who do make significant changes, like Thatcher and Johnson, often make catastrophic errors. The response to failure among the supporters of celebrity political leaders is severe rejection. This has become the fate of Blair and Johnson, but not of the less charismatic prime ministers like Major, Brown or May whose worth is often appreciated more after they leave office. 

The science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke proposed that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Our ever-more complex world, with multiple sources of powers, innumerable interacting agencies bound by complex rules is already too advanced to be comprehensible to its citizens and even to its supposed rulers. We plunge headlong into darkness.