Is Politics dead?

By Mark Greene Christianity p 56-58, December 2005

For far too long programmes like Question time and Any Questions have been treated by politicians as opportunities to take pot shots at the opposition: ”When you were in power”, “When we were in power”, “Not our fault, it was you.” All this sounds like a pair of ten year olds squabbling round the dinner table over who was to blame for spilling the milk. I’m all for snap crackle and pop in debate, but what we have is nit, pick and squabble. And “squabbletics” is simply wearisome.

Similarly, the political interview, a genre whose tone is increasingly infected by Paxman’s reductive gladiatorial style has, as I have written before in Christianity, been reduced to a verbal fight

In which the politician’s chief aim seems to be to avoid getting bludgeoned by the interviewer. Paxo is all onion and no sage and has poisoned all political conversation with the sulphur of suspicion.

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How on earth, for example, can a Labour party apparently concerned for the poor countenance the further development of a gambling culture which has already been shown, like the lottery, to aggravate the plight of the poor in every country that has a lottery?

How can the party that cries “Education, education, education” possibly pursue its policy of closing grammar schools in Northern Ireland when their results at GCSE and A level continue to outperform the rest of the country and when the comprehensive system has signally failed to produce the social mobility that it was designed to deliver?