The stupidity of politics

No sane person would run a household or business with the lack of thinking that the government devotes to its affairs.

Westminster politics is simply stupid. That’s one inference we should draw from the latest Mandelson scandal.

If your final shortlist for a job comprises Mandelson, George Osborne (and maybe Bear Grylls) but not anyone with direct relevant experience such as career diplomats then you’ve probably not even bothered to do a detailed job description; you’ve not asked “what’s the shape of the hole we want to fill and who is that shape?”. One of the most prestigious jobs in government seems to have been filled with less care than an investment bank would take over the hiring of a junior analyst.

This, however, is by no means the only way in which political decisions fall far short of basic professionalism. Here are some others:

- The government ignores opportunity cost. For example, in funding Sizewell C or Transport for City Regions, in supporting the expansion of Heathrow, or in wanting to increase the share of GDP spent on the military, it doesn’t say what is being cut, or not being done, to pay for these projects. We can’t therefore know whether these are good ideas or not. That’s a failure of basic project appraisal. And opportunity cost is not the only basic economic idea of which the government seems unaware: there’s also regulatory capture, transactions cost economics and the tragedy of the commons for example.

- Shabana Mahmood claims that 350,000 “low-skilled” workers and their dependents qualifying for settlement in the UK over the next five years represent a £10 billion cost to the taxpayer. This is not only almost certainly false in its own terms, but misunderstands economics: “low skill” is the product of ideology and a low level of economic development, not just individual characteristics.

- Sir Keir Starmer seems not to understand the basics of what the job of Prime Minister should be. It should be to set out a basic strategy (”vision” if you like) for government and to resolve conflicts between departments. But observers agree that he is terrible at both of these.

- Starmer thought there were “policy levers” which he could pull and easily achieve results, only to discover that there weren’t. This is a double failure: to not appreciate history (many ministers before him made the same mistake (pdf)); and to fail to understand that policy-making isn’t a simple engineering issue but is more like gardening, an exercise in guided emergence.

- Labour’s promise not to raise tax or national insurance rates makes intelligent tax reform more difficult - for example by lumbering us with the £100,000 pa “tax trap” which deters people from working more, changing job or getting promotions.

- The government’s fiscal rule that the current budget should be in surplus by 2029-30 means that fiscal policy depends upon a forecast that is inherently volatile, with the result that policy itself is unstable. If that’s not daft enough, targeting net financial debt means that the government considers only one side of its balance sheet and ruling out the acquisition of potentially lucrative assets: a household with such a rule, for example, would never take out a mortgage.

- There’s great concern with opinion polls, without anybody asking: how is public opinion formed and changed? and is it really a reliable guide to what people really want or to good policy-making?

None of these examples are merely of individuals mis-speaking in a throwaway remark. They are instead fundamental to how the government operates, and are examples of a basic failure to understand social science and government. No sane person would run a household or business with the lack of care or intellect that the government devotes to its affairs.

And this is with the “grown-ups” in charge. If we could bear to look beyond Labour, we’d see the LibDems and Greens wanting to over-ride the price signal of high oil prices; people of all parties drivelling about the benefits system without having endured applying for PIP; and whatever nonsense comes from Reform.

Politics, then, is fundamentally stupid.

Why have things sunk so low?

It could be that what’s happening is incentivized stupidity. Just as bankers had no incentive to spot risk in the run-up to the financial crisis, so politicians have no incentive to act intelligently. Voters are woefully ignorant about basic social facts, and the media ensures that they remain so. Politicians have an incentive to pander to this ignorance. And many on Labour’s right, it seems, would rather “bash the Trots” and get a well-paid job after leaving parliament than actually win the next election.

This, however, is only part of the story. It doesn’t explain why Starmer was willing to risk losing so much political capital appointing Mandelson as US Ambassador. And anyone wanting a job outside parliament surely has an incentive to give the impression of not being an idiot. What’s more, the media was more powerful in the 90s and early 00s than it is now (at least if power is proportionate to circulation) and yet Blair and (especially) Brown managed to govern intelligently.

Something else, then, is going on.

Partly, it’s a part of a general dumbing down: just compare the BBC’s output now to (say) Civilization or the Ascent of Man. In particular, what Simon Wren-Lewis calls the “knowledge transmission mechanism” (pdf) has broken. Academics, perhaps because of pressure to publish, have retreated from the public realm to be replaced by junktanks and newspaper columnists. Whereas Thatcher would regularly refer in her speeches to Friedman, Hayek or Popper, her epigones cite nobody of comparable standing.

There’s something else. We’ve lost the conception of politics as a discrete profession in which trade-offs and conflicts of interest are managed by our representatives. Instead, politics is seen as just another retail experience where we leave bad reviews if we don’t get what we want. The public sphere has suffered from a tragedy of the commons, leaving a wasteland with no place for politicians wanting to do anything other than fulfill the orders of billionaires and shadowy donors.

Whatever the reason, the fact is the same. Westminster politics is something which no intelligent person can look upon with anything other than revulsion. We are in the position described by Alasdair MacIntyre at the end of After Virtue: how to build communities to sustain intellectual life during our new dark age.