Duckhouse envy

Jonathan Pearce has a new post at Samizdata, admiring Camilla Cavendish's article in The Times, Our powerless MPs overwhelmed with trivia. I think Cavendish's article is good, but I think its hook is weak. But JP accepts that hook as a substantive point. He writes:

... the contempt many of us feel for MPs is not just driven by their corruption.

But 'us' ≠ 'the general public'. It doesn't include me either, because I don't feel contempt for MPs in general (though I couldn't say the same for most current ministers). I am more of the Cavendish position: MPs are many of them talented, but working hard on the wrong things. However, both he and Cavendish (though the latter in passing only) suppose far too much political/constitutional awareness and interest on behalf of the general public, I fear.

I wish the article were correct in that respect. I really do. But I don't think it is. The analysis of the real problem with Westminster politics is first class. But to attribute current public anger to any widespread appreciation that MPs have little power and are therefore 'getting money for nothing' is mistaken. Nor is it really anger at hypocrisy. I think Anthony Steen's diagnosis, however hopelessly self-regarding in expression and misjudged as a public comment, of envy, is actually more accurate.

The received wisdom of the man in the street has always been that politicians are 'all the same and only in it for what they can get' - which is doublethought with an authoritarian presupposition that if there is any social problem, substantial or confected, 'the government' (a term encompassing both Westminster and Whitehall) or 'they' should do something about it. What's changed is the availability of detail.

We live in a world where daytime TV and lottery scratchcards can present £100,000 as an unimaginable, life-changing, prize. For a majority it might well be. Most people cannot comprehend how well off their GP is - doing pretty close to as well as an ordinary MP. But they never see it.

It is because the meaningless cliché of political corruption is now embodied in terms the most ordinary person can understand, with pictures of the sort of objects purchased with 'our money', that there is such fury. That the part-time chairman of the South East England Development Agency spent more of our money on taxis in 2006-7 than all MPs put together made a headline or two, but I never heard calls for quangocrats to be hung from lampposts - it is all too abstract and aggregate. An £8,000 TV, a floating duck house, 'moat dredging' have metonymic force: they form a dramatic impression of what may be a new idea to many: that all MPs live with an opulence that will forever be denied to the average punter, at the average punter's expense. The picture readily attaches itself to MPs because the corrupt politics cliché has prepared the ground.

The truth is that weird though their system may be, MPs have their hands less deep in the public pocket than others. Much of the senior public sector (not to mention its consultants), lives at the public expense at a similar level to managers and partners in corporations or professional firms. For the average punter this too is unreachable - but also invisible and unimagined - opulence. An executive director in an executive agency can expect about £130-£140,000 in salary plus a pension and other benefits. Guido, who is not disposed to underestimate, calculates thus:

Examine the situation: an MP’s current compensation package (without dishonesty or blatant looting) is worth some £120,000 to £130,000 if added to the basic salary are their “within the rules” allowances and pensions valued at pre-tax equivalent market rates. Guido gives a range because of arguments as to the value of their pension package. So let us settle on a figure of £125,000 as the current all-in value of their package.

I wonder if a top broadsheet columnist can get by on that? If the Telegraph's series on 'the coping classes' a couple of years back is anything to go by, probably not. But the public in general finds it to be incomprehensible riches, and does not bother to grasp what MPs are doing at all. The general public is angry simply because of the money, not because of what MPs do or don't do for it. Those of us who wouldn't mind what they cost if only they could and would control the growth of the modern bureaucratic state, are in a small minority.

Encouraging ignorance of politics

Sometimes one has to think people deserve what they get when they vote, just as they do when they buy a product for some irrelevant reason without reading the label or figuring out how they will use it.

Hackney blogger Blood and Property, proudly proclaims 'I've lived in Hackney for 10 years, not voting, not knowing who my MP or councillors are and not paying attention to Hackney current affairs. Am I missing anything?' Their latest post allows us to answer the question definitively: yes.

It is also a classic example of how TheyWorkForYou.com doesn't work for us, failing in a way its creators almost certainly didn't predict. The elegant interface assists human stupidity. Most people just don't have sufficient grasp of politics to be let near the site. It has produced a widespread blight on political commentary. Forums and comment columns everywhere are full of the sort of numbskulled quotation of division extracts that Blood and Property provides here:

Info from theyworkforyou.com shows that in August of the same year [2005] Meg Hillier "voted very strongly for introducing ID cards. votes, speeches" it also says she " Voted very strongly against investigation into the Iraq war. votes, speeches"

Well, dur. Those were heavily whipped votes. No Labour MP except for the Socialist Campaign Group would show any different. Blood and Property has focussed on this empty, highly selected pseudo-information, and neither noticed that Hillier is a junior minister (so that under no circumstances could she vote against the government), nor that, a much stronger case for the contradiction s/he set out to point out, that Hillier is actually the minister responsible for the ID scheme.

Even if you look at the votes of the Socialist Campaign Group on any issue other than right-on lefty totems, then they are solidly conformist too. Do we see principled abstentions on government amendments to incomprehensibly obscure tax or companies legislation or sentencing rules accessible only to specialists? No. They vote as the whips tell 'em. An MP's voting record tells you almost nothing about their personal beliefs. Only votes against the whip and free votes are significant, and there are almost none of them. Sites such as TheyWorkForYou.com, far from demystifying politics, make this sort of misunderstanding because they create highly selective pictures of MP's activity. Their top users and creators are essentially drawn from a liberalish tradition of interest in politics, so the questions that are highlighted are the very same right-on lefty totems.

TheyWorkForYou and its relations are useful tools, if you already understand something more than superficially about politics. But they aren't helping the general public get more insight. Contrariwise.

Fil(l)ing space

My zero readers will have noticed (I think propositional calculus allows a null predicate to have any properties I choose to attribute to it) that I am putting up my old letters to the editor. I hope to lure a few readers via their searches that way, as well as to establish where I stand - generally on the anti-populist side of any question, hence the title of this blog. It also gets me into the habit of posting something, which is a good habit.