Portrait of Perspectives

  It is a cliché that an election is all about perspectives. My election is never simply your election, and the information which we process to feel the campaign, is different, as are the points that resonate within us, and the places that we feel the points go to. The depth of this relativism is of course extreme. For not only is it that you and I have a different take on society, politicians and the campaign, but also very many of the arguments, and even the ‘well known truths’ underlying those arguments, come down to a point of view. Or to put it another way, unlike material reality, there really are very few (that are not mundane and of very certain types eg; waiting in queues, filling in forms etc.) definitive shared experience that can be labelled ‘the economy’, or ‘society’. It is rather a unity which weaves together from a variety of differing figures, facts and feelings; this reality is of course highly collective. You and I might well share the same take on the campaign, or share very large parts of it, and that sharing might create truths of its own. But the fact remains that what we are sharing, what we are knowing for reality is very much our own take upon the truth. - A truth that reflects our feelings, our concerns, and our desires. Political truths therefore are a social construct.

  So far this is self-evident. Indeed one might well say that a social construct by itself is such a bland phrase that unless one further develops the point, it is a meaningless one. The point of realities (the backdrop that informs our voting) is that they are created as a part of a great commentary upon a world that is itself a mere comment. At every point we are then reacting to other’s perceived reality through processing. As we vote, we comment; and yet as we make the decision (or not) whom to vote for, we endlessly comment: As we learn about the campaign we are invited to be a commentator. - But even more than this, as politicians campaign they endlessly comment both upon their own progress, but also upon individual groups within society, and their own intentions in relation to these groups (or issues). At its very baseline, being part of a campaign is to be invited into a commentary – a commentary which has a variety of different levels and statuses. At their heart all these commentaries have the same basic move. A mere account is not enough; one needs in these commentaries either to be using or appealing to a wider world. To commentate is therefore to inhabit a world of allegory, where little tales or small facts are forced to resonate into other worlds. The great commentators are then great poets of the allegory, and transfigure the commonplace or small facts, into stories pregnant with power and the need to act.

  At base level there are the politicians themselves, who are increasingly merely commentators upon global affairs and the status of certain individuals in society. Their task then in the campaign is first and foremost, to make a certain act of one individual in one part of the world really matter to us or for us. They need then to create a commentary that is redolent with problems and powers. To do this within modernity there are three classic stratagems.

  The first of these is to appeal by type. One creates a group, such as the nurses or one parent families or immigrants and claim that one is going to do well by them (or that one is already doing well by them) or that one will from this day on persecute them (or ignore them). Types are then recreated, a story about those types built-up, and we are invited to take that story into our own homes. It is meant to resonate across our experience. We hear the word ‘nurse’ or ‘unemployment’ or ‘criminal’, and plug it into our own stories, our own accounts of the world. It becomes then a part in our own thought processes, and so by its very generality grows into being within us. No matter that the poor or the criminals or nurses are a fairly diverse lot with a variety of different concerns and needs. All that matters (politically at least) is that we believe we already know them, and have an opinion about that knowledge. Secondly there are those infamous election events. A campaign will then be pulled this way or that by a particular story or issue or set of figures (the so-called war of Jennifer’s Ear is of course the classic). The campaign will then set up a single story as if it had wider significance. We will all be invited to read meaning into it, and to learn from it, and its materiality. Here, we are told is a real case, a real example of that feeling we all have, a case to base an election choice upon. Finally there are moments of light and shade. Take the current spat over National Insurance. The figures in a sense do not matter. Nor is it very surprising that business leaders do not like paying tax (no matter that actually their tax burden is in reality light as a whole). What matters is though, that the stories can brand the Labour Party as somehow anti-business and anti-jobs. They then face the Labour Party with a complex dilemma. They can dismiss the ‘business leaders’ and their possible links to the Tory Party, but only at the cost of damning much of their own polices for the last fifteen years or so. They are then caught up in either dismissing the wisdom of business (and so New Labour as a whole) or enduring the criticism as somehow peculiarly just. No wonder they squirm, and no wonder they cry foul. For as so often with Osborne (current Shadow Chancellor) the policy of reduction of National Insurance contributions was not made due to economic concerns, but merely as a political gambit. A fact that of course the Labour Party are trying now to make capital out of – a move it has to be said, itself beset by danger: For if Osborne does become Chancellor, he will only be the second most political Chancellor of recent times, after Gordon Brown.

  Looking on at this campaigning are the political pundits. Pundits’ rules of engagement (which demand some balance and certainly a keeping oneself at arms length from the campaign) mean that they invariably conform in their commentaries to two great prerequisites. On the one hand the role of the pundit is not really to criticise the campaign or to engage with it as if it were meaningful. Many pundits report it then, as if they were separate to it, as if they were merely commentating upon a horse race. - Seeing then who is getting the ‘better of the argument’, and who the worse, who making is the running and how. On the other hand, the rules of being a journalist demand that one distance oneself as far as possible from the politicians whom one is reporting upon. They become then a separate breed, whose actions and motives are endlessly examined as if they were something other than simply human.

  But these moves are both more perplexing and more virtual when one remember that most journalistic commentators both know their quarry and perform the role of their prime audience. Who is it after all, who is accompanying the politicians through their mad countrywide dashes but the journalists? Who is that they are speaking to and sharing their travails with? The journalists are then being rather disingenuous within this campaign. All the more so, as there is often a smug self-satisfaction in their commentaries. They know that as a caste, if they report that a politician has the best of the argument, then it is so. They are then often producing the truth that they report, which makes their lives so much easier.

  And yet there is another aspect to this production of stories now. The listener is invited to react to and scream at the radio or on the internet. A power of commentary whose true effect is being felt for the first time. - The commentary upon the commentary by people who only react to the news. This reaction then becomes itself a story, for there is news in ‘real voters’ commentating, real people. Thence the differing commentaries of those who react to the media commentary becomes itself the news (much to the delight of the media who see their power echoed in a thousand differing voices). These voices then of course become the story. The media then arranges a campaign where they sing the solo part, and the general public sing the chorus lines, and all together commentate through their melodies upon the doings of politicians.

  And yet there has in recent times, amongst some journalists faced with this post-modern pot pourri, been a desire for ’real’ statistics. No campaign would then now be complete without statisticians on the sidelines giving a measured view upon the numbers and what they show us about the debate. The role then of these individuals is to provide a ‘balancing voice’, or a nod to objectivity that is otherwise ignored (and that people are free to run with or not). The statisticians then comment in their own way. They investigate whether the numbers used by the politicians actually matter, or whether one can decide if they do matter or not. Their role is then to show that most of the debates, and most of the appeals to objectivity in government and in the media are rather false, as in the end in any campaign or at any one time only certain figures are thought to matter, and the rest can go hang. Thirty years ago we worried about the balance of payments where now we worry about the deficit and tax burdens. Such commentaries form the perspective on numbers as objective science - which is of course utterly necessary. It is always useful to know how and why politicians are claiming success and whether they can be entitled to that claim or not, or whether (as is often the case) it is a mere accident of what figures are or are not collected. The other somewhat self-appointed task of this set of commentators is to create differences between the parties: so that they ensure that their figures show when different parties have different spending and taxation concerns, and how these differences match up to the rhetoric. They see their role then as actually creating or articulating choice, at its semi-objective root in figures. And yet there is a real oddity in this endeavour to inhabit a world of real numbers. On the one hand, bringing numbers home to people (for example the amount of debt in the country) is itself not necessarily apolitical. The national debt itself is as large as it is because it is an abstract figure. Its abstraction is a part of its essence. To bring it home to people is then to change the problem for good or ill (becoming obsessed by it might not be ever effective). Likewise in a welter of numbers, individuals are likely to orientate themselves according to the numbers that stick in their heads. All the more so as for most individuals the numbers are not a plaything; they will not care for the maths and will not delight in the figures. They will rather run away and develop one or two telling nuggets of truth. Hence the figures will be caught up once again in the endless allegory of individual identification (they will become then merely one more fact known by that know-all in the pub).

  Beyond the orbit of the journalist’s rooms there is another set of individuals whose perspective is endlessly created. This is the perspective of the bloke in the street or the pub or wherever; that real honest voter or listener that everyone seems to be concerned to find or create. Such an individual is invited into the debate (for this is still a democracy) and to locate their own point of reference within it. As such they are in sense required to pour their own individual life experiences with all their doubts, oddities and pains, into the mould given to them by the political commentary. If then they are asked to have a viewpoint on the national debt or the state of the streets, that viewpoint will reflect their day to day worries and often grumbles. It is not the stuff necessarily of high politics (it is usually called common sense). And yet it will need to be treated as such (politicians need to address everyday concerns, and the media needs to appear to reflect them). Everyday life, the life in which politicians appear third parties upon whom viewpoints are had, and judgements made, become then a part of the politician’s own perspective. They endlessly attempt to reach beyond what they are and prove that they are really also merely a member of the public. The campaign then plays the silliest of buggers with perspective. The performers claim that they are part of the audience, but also claim that their audience are already a part of the performance, and that their concerns however petty or quirky are really animating the show.

  At times of general uncertainty about jobs and individual fears about finance, one gets a campaign that right or wrong reflects that fear. And yet here there is a further complexity to the situation, for the public do not necessarily want their own individual concerns reflected in politics. What is right for an individual might not be right for a politician, and likewise the mean little grumbles and selfish concerns that animate a life do not make beautiful politics. The parties of such concerns are then often marginalized; to make a pitch based on genuine common sense (or grievance) is not therefore to have a universal appeal beyond a very small number of very blinkered individuals. An election is in short, one of those times when individuals actually do step beyond their own identity and become something different or look to differences. The man the street is usually nice enough to tell their own passions and perspectives apart from more general concerns (or at least is so sometimes).

  A campaign is then a curious thing. On the face of it, it is impossible to campaign in the real world. But rather one enters a morass where reality is always a matter of commentary and commentary upon that commentary. Reality becomes then a curious creation both of passion and of sharing of that passion, of individual and collective experience, of engagement and breaking off from that engaging. We are all invited within the scope of this tempest of shifting perspectives – we all have our perspective upon it. Once again I suppose we can only hope that this sliding scale of viewpoints and perspectives makes for good government, to make up for the fact that it does not make for healthy or sensible debate.