Portrait of Scandal

  Modern democracy clearly owes more to its eighteenth century predecessor than the infantile theory of freedom which animates it, for it also surely also owes that century the entire centrality of scandal. Now here of course one needs to remember that the entire party system in Britain was founded upon a seventeenth century scandal. Namely that of James Duke of York’s (later James the Second’s) Catholicism, and whether that meant he should be excluded from the throne or not. The system then began in rumour and threat, in gossip and irrational fear, and has pretty much carried on in the same vein. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the remit of scandal was of course expanded. It became the mainstay of an entire (well heeled) slice of society. The court and those who would surround the court were endlessly emerged within scandal, and tales of who was sleeping with whom and when. Scandal, and its schools, like illicit sex, were everywhere – oiling the system, stabilising little hierarchies and sideshows, allowing individuals to orientate themselves within a wider social fabric. Every scandal imposed a two-way divide upon society. There was the set of people in the know (a small enough elite). Within that set there were then the sides which each party took, and what actions followed on from those sides. Knowing about certain scandals conveyed then both status but also confirmed whom one was supporting, and who not. The system was as much a society of scandal, as it was a set of schools for it.

  And building upon this theme it seems that our political system has become a veritable university for scandals. It is an engine designed to create and occlude them in variety of different manners and orbits. And we then, the voters, are endlessly invited to join the scandal-riven sides, and voice our opinion in an endless tittle tattle. We live then in a society of scandal. And yet it is a key feature of this society that perhaps the real scandals are hidden, within the endless babble of events. For example certain investigators knew that Bernie Madoff (of Ponzi scheme) was a crook and could prove it, and yet so great was that scandal, and so threatening to the overall financial system was it, that that fact was endlessly suppressed. Our university for scandals is then highly selective in its manufacture. It does not want just any scandal. It certainly does not want ones that are genuinely threatening to the overall system or to accepted verities. It wants then only those that can easily and readily be absorbed, by parties which conform to the existing parties within society; in short only those that are useful. You try then running genuinely inconvenient scandals, and they bomb. For example one simply does not get any political capital out of showing that the PFI initiative really has been an inefficient and very costly way to borrow money (money we had to lend ultimately back to the banks which we borrowed it from, and eventually ruin ourselves in the process). But in spite of this clear failure, no political party (and apparently also not the media) wants to get involved with the story. It is just too difficult, for it would necessitate the parties involved finding a new and a better model, one that did not increase the influence of business and individuals. A move that runs against the easy jargon-led consensus of the times, and is therefore dismissed as too difficult. We want then to be highly selective with our scandals.

  There are the real scandals out there, which no one will touch. - All the more so, as the very imposition of government policy is likely to create problems of its own and have endless possibilities for scandal. This is almost inevitable, as such policies combine, as often as not, a relative aspiration, within a highly complex and technical piece of legislation, and a very big pot of money. Moreover it is often rather difficult to monitor the progress of the aspiration, coupled with the fact that often it is not clear what that progress would mean anyway. One has then projects such as the NHS database, started decades ago in good faith: placing all our records on a single database is such a great idea, and still spending strong. It has of course become one of those unstoppable leviathans (like Trident), which are so hard to close down or stop or do anything other than fund and hope for the best about (in spite of the fact that Facebook could do it now and far cheaper). Only when individual scandals reach meltdown, and spread out, sucking other elements of government (for example the banking crisis) do they become game-changers. At which point of course we all admit that we all (in differing ways) expected as much, and yet of course no one could or would act upon the knowledge. Unreported scandals are therefore everywhere. We all know about them and assume their truth. But this very fact blights our understanding both of parliament and policy, making us always quest after that scandal, (isn’t it odd that government’s doings are always reported as if there was a scandal in the offing?) and forcing us to divide according to the allegiance which any one revealed (or suspected scandal) produces. An effect that reaches into the three main ‘circles’ of current political discourse; the media, the politicians and the public. Each circle not only has its own way of making a scandal, but also exists as a scandal for the others (or as parts of scandals) a series of processes that will be analysed in the rest of this essay.

  The media seem to have three basic motivations to create and articulate scandal. First and foremost they know that scandal sells newspapers. They therefore want it. They seek it out, and in a system that appears to create it as a policy, that quest is never very difficult. Everything becomes then reported as if it were a scandal, and is so irrespective of the reasonableness of that reporting or no. To listen to reports of corrupt holiday deals, or minister’s behaviour is always to ask oneself whether or not the scandal being portrayed is genuine or mere hype. More than that, when faced with a real scandal, the media have a choice about what scandal to run (and what to suppress). Take for example the case of Damien Green’s arrest seventeen months ago or so. Police invaded parliament and arrested an MP. A real scandal. It was either a gross act of defiance by the police of legal niceties, or else a real crime had been committed and by a Tory shadow minister too! Either scandal might have taken hold. But the politics of the time necessitated that the second scandal was quietly dropped. We were then fed endless reports about the way that the police had not respected parliament or the Tory Party, and about how incompetent they were (and were so in spite of the complexity of the operation). This story stuck, and the fact that a document was stolen from the Home Secretary’s safe, and given or sold to a member of the opposition (a clear crime) was ignored. The existence then of a scandal is essentially a provocation to the media. They know something will need to be reported, and will choose which scandal it is; a choice that others may then condemn.

  Secondly there are the scandals which the media feel themselves to be a party in, and that they are being forced into complicity with. The current example is clearly the debt crisis that haunts this general election. Neither party wants to talk about it, for they all know that any party that has done has crashed in the opinion polls. The media then feel as if they are being set up as stooges and resent this fact. That is, they resent the fact that they are being forced to report what the politicians are talking about, and not the salient fact of what they are not talking about. They look then for occasions to run with the stories they want to (and make politicians look shifty in the process). In this of course they are practising their own little bit of sanctimonious hypocrisy. For part of the trouble is that the politicians can rely upon the media to not be very measured in their reporting. The fact then that we apparently cannot talk about the most important fact in the next parliament, reducing spending, is surely caught up with media reporting as much as it to do with politicians prevaricating. The entire system for discussing problems and involving people within that discussion (while making some people money, and getting others elected) is clearly dysfunctional. Be that as it may; the media from their own side are clearly malcontent, and unhappy with what the politicians are doing (and with good reason, for it makes a mockery of democracy). They are then looking for those scandals.

  Finally it is clear that the media are bursting to tell us something about our politicians. For they see politician’s apparent double nature. Namely they see how both politicians are when they perform their stuff in the streets in town halls up and down the country; but also how they are in private, and off stage. The media then experience both these worlds, and have lost sight of the fact that of course politicians behave differently front of house and backstage and we must expect them to. Perhaps one might go even further than that and say that one wants them to, for if they believed what they say and do, with its false bon homie and endless posturing, they would either be bonkers or stupid. And if one thinks about it for a second this shooting one’s mouth off about constituents is actually rather necessary. For these same constituents have, as often as not, just imposed a heavy burden of a bent ear and demanded to be treated with respect (and as if they were a personal friend) as a condition for their support. Such a demand that in normal life would be seen as unreasonable and even despicable, and yet endlessly in a voter is their right. Sounding off is then a part of the process. The logic of modern politics is clearly the logic of the stage, where off stage is different from on stage. But of course it does not feel like that to the media, locked as they are in the battle buses of political parties, and with their endless lobbying and food, until they quite naturally get rebellious. They start to want to report this hidden world with its cattiness and tantrums. They ache to let us in to this other world. So a chance remark, recorded by all networks at the same time (and so guilt free) is an opportunity to do so. No matter then that the remark was actually quite measured (I have heard much worse when canvassing), for that does not matter as long as one ensures that the party involved is properly upset by it. The upset is enough to create the story, and they ache to tell us: Politicians behave differently in private (and to the media). - To which I for one only wish to yell back – so what? deal with it or get out of the battle bus!

  On the politician’s side there are two motivating factors. Firstly there is clearly an endless fear of scandal. And yet this fear is always short term in the extreme. The motivating factor behind the recent expenses scandal was not greed or corruption but fear. MPs knew they could not simply raise their salaries. This would create a short term scandal which none felt they could face down or deal with. They therefore came together and created a system for payment in kind, and generous perks, of course they did. What else, given that they could not up their pay in line with everyone else, could they do? The trouble was of course that this eventually created another and far worse scandal of its own.

  Secondly there is a sense that politicians are starting to give up on policy and rather pedal open-ended scandals instead. Take Cameron’s use of that singularly vapid (and meaningless) term the ‘broken society’. Now societies are not cars or watches or even hearts, they do not break. They are not that kind of thing. That is they simply cannot be located in the very nursery rhyme  ‘broken so mend it’ bracket. What actually is the case is that ‘shit happens’, (and always has); and lives are complex and hard to generalize about; while solutions are difficult (or often happen unlooked for and in spite of everything). None of this agony and complexity is caught in the phrase ‘broken Britain’. On the contrary this blandest of terms operates by inviting individuals to project their own fears onto it, and Cameron can then claim to be the one the mend them. It is a bit of political nonsense that appears to have gained credence within the media, and if it really reflects Cameron’s understanding of society (big or small) then it does not bode at all well for the future.

  Finally there are the people themselves, with their apparent endless appetite for scandal, and desire not to understand difficult issues (or to dismiss them). More than that there is their tendency to have a one-stop solution which once it is received knowledge, is never questioned or worried at. Take for example the notion of increasing the number of police on the beat. This has been done, and we have now more police than ever before and more out there on the beat (per head of the population). Does it make us feel safer? No: it does not work. Police on the beat do not stop modern crime, they merely hark back to that mythic past a ‘time before crime’. History though is not an effective law maker, and cod history doubly so. The romanticism then of the past has created a democratic imperative to spend more money on police and put them somewhere where they are not very useful. The public is then pockmarked with endless issues and political mob raisers, which make government so tricky.

  Perhaps it does not have to be like this. There are many other voices, other things the public could say (and do say) and yet it appears that democracy, as it is currently constellated in Britain at least, cannot get at those voices and allow them their own freedom. Perhaps it is the desire to say other things that is really animating the current disgust with politics and politicians. And yet if that is true we have to be worried about this fact, because this system of democracy is the only one we have, and if it cannot say what we want it to, then who knows where we might all end up? That is, one can only long with Marx that the dead (the scandalmongers) bury their own dead, and that we work out a new song to sing political change. The trouble is that both then and now, such a song is difficult to find, for all the easy ones lead to very dark places very quickly. And so it is we are left with that university for scandal that is our legacy from the eighteenth century, and for which we appear to be able to find no realistic alternative.