New Politics

So, having said in an earlier post that I don't find parliamentary politics or the goings-on at Westminster compelling per se, I have found the horse-trading and king-making of the last few weeks pretty interesting, particularly this notion of the 'new politics' that Cameron and Clegg are bandying around. It has to be acknowleged, I think, that the past few weeks has generated an exceptional level of interest amongst people who don't normally care that much about politics. As an example of this - a few weeks ago, I went for a Friday night drink in a Sheffield pub, and was drawn by a total stranger - a middle-aged father of two - into a conversation about the election, which eventually extended to include everybody on our side of the bar - 15 or 20 people, almost all of them total strangers to each other. Even the nine year old had an opinion about it. I've never experienced anything quite like that before. And when Clegg says, of the coalition government, that it is:

"new politics, where the national interest is more important than the party interest, where co-operation wins out over confrontation, where compromise, give and take, reasonable, civilised, grown-up behaviour is not a sign of weakness but a sign of strength".

I think that is the mood that he is invoking - a tangible if temporary shift in the way people engage in the decisions they make about their own lives. That said, this change is patently not a product of the electioneering of the main political parties: it is the simple but largely unspoken fact that for once we were faced with an election in which the outcome was uncertain. When was the last time that happened? '92, probably - when I was seven years old. In every election that I can recall with anything approaching an adult consciousness, the outcome has always been assured - usually whole electoral terms before. How can it be that in a so-called democracy, the belief that the future is not yet determined is something that we experience for a few weeks once in a generation? In Cameron's inaugeral speech (can I call it that?) he claimed:

People last Thursday in the ballot box told us politicians that they didn't think any party deserved an outright majority. so the only way you can create stability is by creating a government, a coalition government, which lasts.

Quite apart from the fact that I don't recall their being an option for 'no outright majority' on the ballot paper (there certainly wasn't on the one I defaced), Cameron has jumped the gun here - fetishised without any justification this notion of stability - and all the stagnation that this entails. 'Uncertainty' is a peculiarly British bete noir - mandarin-speak for job-losses, deprivation, social unrest - a code word for a plan that has gone wrong. That seems to me to be a terrible dereliction of the political function. Politics and politicians should never be certain. Cameron has attempted to capitalise on both by hybridising a hope for some indeterminate but profound change with an ideological and political commitment to the status quo (which is, after all, what 'Conservative' actually means'.) As a starry eyed idealist who's had the benefit of a congenial conversation in the pub, I reject this commitment to stability with every screed of energy available to me. We should acknowlege not just the danger and the possibilities of uncertainty, not only that mutability is an undeniable fact of the universe, but that as human beings - animals able to make conscious decisions - uncertainty and instability are essential parts of our make-up. It is this fact that make us properly people.