Rejoice at the complexity!
Ever since the election result I've been thinking of reasons to be cheerful, despite things not quite having gone the way I may have wanted. And I'm still feeling that way. Every time I start worrying that it's going to be awful, something pops up into my head like "Hang on, no more ID cards!" and I keep on enjoying these crumbs of comfort. You may say I'm deluded, but I'm not feeling as shattered as I thought I would be. And certainly not as shattered as I would be at the prospect of a Conservative Government with a landslide majority - and I think that's the key.
So we don't have a strong Government, and apparently that's A Bad Thing because the markets like strong Government. But do I want a strong Government, of whatever colour? At a time of financial crisis, you could argue it's a good thing to have a Government that can't do anything it wants to, and is open to scrutiny from its own backbenchers and political rivals alike. Our own lives aren't simple affairs in which we do whatever we like through 'strength' - our own working and family lives involve all kinds of compromises and deals, all the time, and we don't see it as 'shabby', rather just existing in a community, family, workplace and society. So why are talks between political parties about a solution seen as being A Bad Thing? Maybe this is the election where our democracy in this country finally grows up. But will the press see it that way? Are they able to communicate the complexity, or explain why democracy doesn't always deliver simple results that mean one party governs powerfully every time?
Yet another positive thing to come out of this election for me is that it has made me realise exactly what it is that annoys me so much about the tabloids, and newspapers in general: they don't like complexity.
The odd thing is, newspapers have the scope and the scale, and the resources, to do complexity. They've got acres of pages to look at the subtleties, the nuances, the contradictions, the ups and downs, the big picture rather than X is X, because I say so. But quite a lot of the time - though not all the time, of course, and you'll note that I'm happy to try and couch things this way - I think they just choose not to, and it's baffling. I don't have a theory as to why this might be, but if I were to guess I'd say it might have something to do with the a perceived need to try and explain to even the most bewilderingly stupid; a mission to be concise rather than exhaustive; and the idea that stories get batted around in editorial conferences - and that if you can't sum up what 'the line' is within two sentences then it might be dismissed as being too complicated for the readers, or too hard to understand, or that the complexity somehow diminishes the interest or value of the tale.
To me, though, that just won't do. I don't like the way that time after time, we're forced to settle for stories that don't make sense if you compare them with what people have said or done, or which don't tell the whole truth, just because the story they tell is a more simple, less cluttered and more familiar one than what actually happened - or as close a representation of what actually happened as all kinds of bias, selective interpretation and so on will allow eyewitnesses, official sources and reporters alike to get close to. Instead of having a bash at the complicated truth, too many times I see newspapers going for a type of story, a bit of identikit news. Here's the kind of thing we do every time, so here it is again. That's such a waste.
I reckon readers are more than capable of understanding that sometimes things aren't as trouble-free as we might like: sometimes the good guys do bad things; and sometimes the way to achieve something involves some unpleasant compromises. Because our lives are not simple things. We don't just do exactly what we want, because we want to. There are all kinds of obstacles in our way, and some of them are fair, and some of them are unfair. And that's how it is. I think it's ludicrous to try and present news stories to people as if this isn't the case. But I might at this point add an alternative suggestion as to why they do this: perhaps it's an idealised version of the truth, a version that's satisfying precisely because it's a fantasy compared to our complicated, difficult, struggling lives. When you see Susan Boyle go from nothing to genius, that's pleasing, because it offers hope that these things can really happen, in contrast to our own experience of trying to succeed - you don't want to see the machinery in the background that made it happen, because that ruins the illusion. Maybe that's something to do with it.
I think if there's a thread running through this whole blog, and a reason why I get so frustrated with the way that newspapers choose to cover the news, it's to be found in the words of Ben Goldacre: "I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that". Because I think it is, regardless of what 'it' is. Almost all the time, things are far more complicated than we might like to think. And that's actually something to be delighted with, rather than disappointed by. Rejoice at the complexity! Luxuriate in the conflicting arguments! Enjoy the on the other hands and the neverthelesses. They're what makes life exciting and unpredictable; they're what makes the world hard to grasp, impossible to understand - but wonderfully satisfying to try and get a handle on.
And so, when you get a hung parliament, I reckon it's disliked by the papers for two reasons - well many more than two, if I'm going to try and stick to the principles I've outlined in this post, but we'll start with two and fan out from there. Firstly, their chosen candidates didn't win. That's something irritating, because it makes them look a little bit less than powerful. Sure, David Cameron received 36% of the popular vote, and got 47% of the seats - but it wasn't a convincing victory. Newspapers told their readers to vote for him. They didn't all do that. Now you could say that most of their readers did vote for him, but we have no evidence that's the case. They might have roundly ignored the advice of their inky friends, and put Xs down for all kinds of other candidates. So whatever way you look at it, the papers look like mugs for saying that Cameron was the only hope to save Britain, and their readers said "meh". To them, that's annoying. To me, it's great. But there you are.
The second thing, though, is that the hung parliament is an unsatisfyingly complicated result. It means that newspapers will have to try and delve into the complexity to try and work out what's going to happen. It means that the scale of the result will have to try and be explained with something other than a simple swingometer, because there wasn't a uniform swing, and there were so many regional variations - and the local election results provided even more variety and contrast with the general election scores. It's not as simple as saying that Gordon Brown has been rejected, or that David Cameron has been approved, because neither is quite the case. You can add that locally, the Labour Party seems to be more popular, and managed to get out a good deal of its voters when they were required. Is that disaffection with Gordon Brown nationally, or an increased turnout due to fear of the Tories? Again, the answers aren't easily at hand.
You could speculate that the Lib Dems appear to have trodden water, having increased the popular vote slightly but decreased their number of seats, but this could be because they got no new supporters, or it could be because some supporters abandoned them for the Tories and were replaced by disaffected Labour voters, adding up to a similar total; or it could be more complicated than that, particularly at a local level, when you have tactical voting and boundary changes involved. In my constituency, for example, I previously had a Labour MP who had a large majority, who was replaced with a Tory whose main rival turned out, quite surprisingly, to be a Lib Dem - the tactical voting advice from the Mirror, Guardian and elsewhere to vote Labour wasn't quite right, or didn't work, while the Lib Dem bar charts in election leaflets were (and I'll confess this is a surprise) accurate as they were based on local elections which had shown the trend heading towards the Lib Dems. I didn't believe them at all, but it turned out they were right. Again, the complexity of the situation defeated the simple 'tactical' vote calls. (I voted for who I wanted to vote for, and not tactically, in the end. But I would have been annoyed if I'd voted for someone I didn't want to vote for, and it had turned out to be the wrong decision.)
But I rejoice at all of this. At the complexity of the local results and the national results - and the big result, a hung parliament, could turn out to be A Very Good Thing. I know, I know - call me naive or desperate or deluded if you must, but I can't help seeing the positives in this. Despite resistance from the Conservative Party, we could get some kind of fairer voting system out of this - which would result in many, many more 'hung' parliaments and many more complex results in the future. Which I think is good, for a healthy mature democracy, if it means votes mean more - and if the price to pay for that is Ukip and BNP members of parliament, well, so be it - their record once elected is universally awful, and I think the way to deal with these people is not to exclude them but to outvote them.
I can see the papers describing the coming days as a 'mess' and a good reason as to why the voting system shouldn't be changed. There's a danger that protracted negotiations, even though it's the right thing to do, will be portrayed as 'dithering' and 'damaging'. But let's see past that. There's a real chance for things to change now. When David Cameron said 'Vote for Change' I'm pretty sure he didn't mean this, but this is what he's got. We have to make the best of it, and be unafraid of the continued scaremongering. Now the parties have to some degree to work together, and no-one is in a position to do exactly what they want. Is that so bad? I don't think so. I think there are still many reasons to be cheerful.
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Hello. I'm a Bristol-based writer and soon-to-be-redundant journalist. You can read more about me and the Enemies site here, or follow me on Twitter. Email me if you like - antonvowl at live dot co dot uk
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May 9th, 2010 - 10:35
What is there to be cheeful about when the left are more than happy to cosy up to the Tories to help them run this madhouse? Shouldn’t Labour have had the first chance at trying to garner Libdem support? That’s what i had heard on the news. But I have no idea who has what rights and it seems that, even though I despise Labour just the same, Clegg has abandoned them in favour of the rightmost party in politics (ie the right most party that isn’t the BNP or UKIP or whatever other small time bunch of nutters is currently on the loose).
Seems likely to me that a deal will be done. Cameron wants power, Clegg seems to want to work with him more than he does Brown. Game over. Here come the bad old days again.
May 9th, 2010 - 13:05
Please don’t insult the left by associating the Liberal Democrats with them. Please read the following:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/04/misrepresenting-the-left-we-are-not-liberals/
Liberals are generally more centre right, but certainly not anywhere near the left, especially not the current Liberal Democrats who are all in favour of massive public spending cuts and unrestrained free markets.
May 9th, 2010 - 15:52
Are you talking to me or Nick Clegg?
May 10th, 2010 - 11:02
I think you’ll find we most definitely are the left. For one thing the link you posted refers to the Democrat party in the states so it’s completely irrelevant to the subject in hand. For another, the vast majority of the party are social liberals (i.e. lefties). The majority of the party associate themselves with Labour more than the Conservatives. Of course, it’s always hard to place a party on the left or right given the complexities of modern politics and I will grant you that the current party leadership represents the Orange Booklet Liberals who are indeed further right than most of the party. However, the majority of the party is social liberal and that is why we are described as a social liberal party (sayeth the wikipedia).
However, I will agree that we are not a traditional left party. Nor are we a traditional right party. We are Liberals. Modern Liberals to be precise since we have moved on from classical liberalism. We are less authoritarian than Labour and more concerned with social welfare and proper economic controls than the Tories. But if you have to describe us on one side or the other of the political spectrum we are to the left. Would a party of the right really proposed the NHS?
May 12th, 2010 - 11:07
Just read the Orange Book. It openly adovocates the gradual privatisation and marketisation of the NHS. You make an artificial divorce between party, leaders, manifesto and members.
As well as that, Social Liberalism itself is a right wing ideology even if the majority of Lib Dems held onto it (which I highly doubt considering the major support for the Orange Book and free markets espoused by the past umpteen Lib Dem leaders). The creation of the NHS by Labour and the progressive reforms by the Liberal government of 1906-1914 were merely concessions to allow for the continuation of capitalism. Sure, they made massive impacts on society, but they were done without much being done to restrict the power of big business or change the mode of production from capitalist to socialist. The evidence for the changes being done to ensure capitalism’s survival are especially obvious for the government of 1906-1914, as they had to make concessions due to a rising threat of revolution in Britain at the time. Anyway, the concessions, like Labour concessions in the past, were made at the same time as the Liberal party (dominated by Social Liberals at that point) was engaged in helping brutally oppress the Irish and harm the cause of women’s rights and in the sabre rattling that eventually lead to the butchery of the First World War. And the current LibDems aren’t any better, considering that most of the party supported the imperialist invasion of Afghanistan and have in the past supported other imperialist adventures, such as the illegal invasion of Yugoslavia, sending troops to Somalia and other such heinous crimes. No left wing party can support such imperialist adventures, yet the majority of the LibDems did. Combine this with their current love of free markets and you hardly have a party of the left. At best you have a centre right party.
Not all progressives are left wing. Some are just less right wing than the Tories and are only doing progressive things to ensure the survival of regressive things.
May 12th, 2010 - 11:07
Also, although the article is mainly about the Democrat Party, it still does discuss social liberalism, and thus isn’t entirely irrevelent.
May 9th, 2010 - 14:03
Well as Clegg correctly pointed out, with more of the popular vote and more seats, the Cons have a larger mandate to govern. As in, more of the country want the Cons in government than Lab.
Plus if Lab and LD were to join up, they still wouldn’t have a majority in the house, so in a sense there’s not much point talking to them anyway (although there are also other options e.g. with the nationalists, but they have been dismissed by Lab).
Politics is the art of the practical (couched in the language of the impossible).
May 9th, 2010 - 11:26
With a philosophy of life firmly rooted in situational ethics, for me life is a complex spectrum of greys – no blacks or whites in sight! So I am right with you in your frustration and anger at the artificially simplistic nature of most of our media.
There could be on other possibility, however… You say the press has ‘the scope and the scale, and the resources, to do complexity’; true, but only up to a point. As a former journalist and editor, albeit in a small way, I know that the average word length that the public will read is around the 250 to 300 mark. It varies hugely, of course – a broadsheet reader might manage anything up to 1,000 words on a topic of immediate interest to them, while the typical tabloid reader is unlikely to manage more than 200 words; sometimes little more than the headline and the first par.
I think these journos know that trying to explain complexity to the majority of the British public is simply a waste of time and effort. And if some of the tweets I’ve had to endure over the past few days are anything to go by, I agree with them 100%!
May 9th, 2010 - 11:48
I wonder if it’s not a vicious circle though. People only read little of stories because they know they’ve read all that’s going to be said in the first three sentences – so why bother carrying on?
May 9th, 2010 - 14:36
“I think these journos know that trying to explain complexity to the majority of the British public is simply a waste of time and effort.” This attitude, though, is profoundly depressing and cynical. And it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – if you treat the public like idiots and only give them a simplified version of the truth, then that’s all they’re going to have the chance to understand. If you give them the complex reality, then sure, many people might not bother to read it, but some people will, and maybe more people will gradually become more informed.
If, as a journalist, you start with the notion that the majority of the public are monkeys who it’s not worth trying to inform, then I think you’re in the wrong profession. (That’s not a personal attack on you by the way – just a general opinion that journos ought to respect their readership enough to actually report the news thoroughly and responsibly.)
May 9th, 2010 - 13:08
With the media and it’s over-simplification of things, I don’t think it’s due to to a dislike of complexity. I personally believe that it is more due to the nature of media being propaganda for the ruling elite. By keeping things simple and trying to restrict people’s knowledge of an issue to only what they print, you restrict debate and are less likely to be questioned about it and can ultimately help dominate the issue in question, such as how with immigration you can’t discuss it publicly without being forced into the racist bullshit of “send ‘em back” for fear of being ostracised or being treated like a retard. It’s brainwashing pure and simple.
May 9th, 2010 - 13:44
I too voted for the party I wanted to – in a Lab/PC marginal – and the subsequent PC victory ousted what could now have now been an important extra Lab seat. I also advocated voting tactically before the election, mainly to emphasise the importance of voting reform, and chose to ignore my own article. I was right to ignore myself – tactical voting is a horrible creation that only exists because of the complexities of the FPTP voting system.
Complexity is my biggest worry about any new voting system. “A public” who only make it to the end of the first paragraph of a story or vote depending on the name of the candidate or who took the advice of Simon Cowell and not Rupert Murdoch (there is a difference) will, and I did research confirming this*, struggle to understand how the new systems work.
Here is a brief example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
*I once had to explain the Additional Member System (the one used in Welsh Assembly Elections) to a room full of politics students, and although sometimes you have to blame the presenter – everybody else in the room also struggled with the other systems so… (not quite research but hey – try it for yourselves – try explaining the new systems to someone else.)
But, it is fair, and that is the simple point. Votes should be equally in proportion to seats. That is a pretty simple philosophy to aim for; how we distribute the seats afterwards is more a question of process than principle.
I needed to read this article though. I was in a state of dread at the prospect of a Tory majority. I’m chuffed to bits they have not got one yet, and “we” may be in the process of securing they never ever have one again. Optimism rules.
May 9th, 2010 - 14:07
“if the price to pay for that is Ukip and BNP members of parliament, well, so be it”
I was always against PR for this very reason – I don’t think giving the BNP any more legitimacy than necessary is a good idea, but their actual turn out was pretty crap, just look at the result in Barking. Maybe we CAN be trusted with democracy after all!
May 10th, 2010 - 09:26
I think this is one of the things that frustrates me about the press; They’ve got all this power, all these trained journalists filling all these pages with stuff that people will happily sit and read. They could use a few of these pages to explain the current situation (or indeed any situation) which can’t be boiled down into a snappy BREAKING NEWS ticker on Sky, a BBC News Alert text or maybe even a package on the TV news where they often seem to prefer to fling dozens of condensed stories at us over and over (or, on rolling news channels, follow a car with a helicopter while pundits try to guess what’ll happen next). Newspapers are in a special position. People will sit there at lunch, or on the train, and pore over them. There’s no producer barking at them to move on to the next story, no 140-character space limit. They could go into stories in amazing detail and do wonders for our understanding of the world.
But instead they seem to think “Fuck it, someone didn’t get their bin collected yesterday because they left the lid open. Phone the Taxpayers’ Alliance, that’ll fill a page”
May 10th, 2010 - 11:22
People are engaging with it as well, over the weekend and in work this morning it was all we could talk about – and not everyone I spoke to was a politics junkie.
Isn’t this the way it’s supposed to be?!
May 11th, 2010 - 17:20
Another reason to be cheerful…a new generation is taking over. I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more discussion about the major transition between generations we are witnessing in the leadership of our country. After years of Baby Boomer Prime Ministers, and a Boomer-dominated Parliament, we now have a new generation in charge: Generation Jones…the previously lost generation between the Boomers and Generation X. We’ll probably have a GenJones PM in Cameron, or ultimately in David Miliband or Jon Crudas and Parliament now as more Jonesers than Boomers. Similar transitions have happened in other Western countries and it provoked a lot of media interest. In fact, it got so much media buzz after Joneser Barack Obama came to power that the associated Press labelled Generation Jones as the #1 trend of 2009.
This commentary about GenJones in The Independent last week has a very interesting take on the meaning of Clegg and Cameron’s identities as GenJonesers: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/jonathan-pontell-cleggs-rise-is-the-sound-of-generation-jones-clearing-its-throat-1961191.html
I also found this site worth looking at to get a quick sense of GenJones in the UK:
http://www.generationjones.org.uk/
May 12th, 2010 - 05:45
You are right of course. The post-election foot-stamping by UK newspapers and air-headed TV ‘journalists’ betrays an inability to engage in meaningful debate. I guess this is why I and many others haved turned to blogs.