All it takes is to fool enough of the people enough of
the time and your place in history, society or the head of the paying-in queue
at the bank is assured. The first objection you have to overcome is
your own; there is none so zealous as the flag bearer for the cause and once you've brainwashed yourself the rest is relatively easy. Of course, KNOWINGLY
misleading people is called fraud, but once you've convinced yourself of your
mission it is simply called delusion. Fraud is a crime, but delusion is legal.
Luckily, in the real world our wackier delusions are
often brought down to earth by a heavy dose of common sense. If I tried to borrow
money from a bank for a business idea I hadn’t properly analysed I’d get short shrift.
If I tried to convince listeners that I’d received the word of god at three o’clock
on a Saturday morning following a night of excess I’d rightly be met with scepticism.
And if I concocted a miracle cure in my shed and tried to flog it in recycled jam
jars at the car boot sale I somehow doubt I’d be retiring any time soon.
But package any of those ideas up in the right way and
you have the latest stock market darling, a whole new faith and GlaxoSmithKline.
Research (by experts) shows that if you say it often enough, commission studies
to arrive at a pre-ordained conclusion and get the price right, people will buy
any old shit. Which brings us to politics.
Politics has nothing whatsoever to do with producing
useful outcomes for ordinary people. It isn’t about the best way to run the
country and it certainly has nothing to do with whatever the electorate says it
wants. The alchemy of snakes like Mandelson is to gently tell you that what you
believe isn’t the right thing to believe and that he’ll be gentle with you as
he makes you nicer. The prestidigitation of a Cameron is to talk tough medicine
for all, while privately bending over for big business and special friends.
No wonder people are disengaged with politics. If you buy
a can of fly spray that doesn't kill flies you get your money back. If you buy
a vacuum cleaner that sucks – or doesn't as it were – you exchange it for
another one. And if you order a blue car you don’t expect to get a red one
delivered. Yet in politics, if it doesn't work or it’s feeble or you don’t get
what you voted for, the Sale of Goods Act just doesn't apply.
Here in real life if you don’t like cheese you don’t buy
cheese, if you can’t afford to heat your house you don’t pay to heat your neighbour’s
house and you don’t continue to pay for membership of a club you never go to,
that your dad signed you up for forty years ago. It’s that simple, yet the power
of the political shaman lies in making it complicated.
Here’s a classic example. Everybody is banging on about
tax. The tax code in the UK is so complicated nobody – literally NOBODY – can fully
understand or explain it. So, the common sense answer is to simplify it. Do the
sums, work out how much we need to collect, decide who is going to pay how much
of it and there you go, done. In a household we call it a budget. The
politicians’ response? Make it more complicated still… Oh and bung some more
Europe into the package.
Walking - as designed by politicians
The reason people are drawn to Nigel Farage is because he doesn't seem to offer false hopes and he doesn’t appear to offer all the answers.
Whether the reality ever lives up to the hope is up to the future to reveal but
maybe political naivety is exactly what we need right now. He doesn’t play the political game because unlike the others maybe he’s seen through the smoke and
mirrors and realised something many of us suspect. We’re told there are no easy
answers? Of course there are! Politics – it’s only hard because they make it
hard.
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