Politics Rumbling
Posted on March 25, 2007
Filed Under For Argument's Sake |
I won’t bore you with the details but I just finished reading a book review by the up and coming UK politician - possibly the next PM, David Miliband. M reviews a new book by ex-Director of the London School of Economics (LSE) Anthony Giddens. Giddens for those who don’t know is an English academic who tried to be French, conceptual and philosophical. Used lots of big words and tried to describe “society”. It seems like a long lost age. Giddens by the way has written 34 books - and this may be the 35th. I think that makes him a gadfly and the epitome of intellectual decline.
So what you might ask? The book is about the future of Britain’s Labour Party and about how a third way politics might finally be prised from Labour’s decline, which has a lot to do with the trivialisation of ideas wrought by Gidden’s generation of academics.
That makes it an important debate for plenty of other countries. Remember Clinton was the Third Way politician before being smeared for his love of sex (and power). Miliband has intellectual previous - son of Marxism inspired Ralph, one of the big intellectual noises at the LSE in the 1970s.
To his credit Milliband says Giddens doesn’t actually get the future - OK that’s how I read it. But first, Giddens took over as Director at the LSE because he was prolific with ideas (poor ones in my view). He’s a Labour type, forever thinking this would be good and so would that. Prior to his Directorship the LSE prided itself on looking for the proof of a social question/policy option prior to recommending an action. Then it became an ideas’ factory. My local pub is one of those. It takes little to think up new ideas. I know: Why don’t we use computers to record people’s intermittent voting intentions and use those as the real electoral x? That means folks get to vote all day long. Possible and screwy but easy to think up.
Giddens also invested new words for his new ideas (structuration was one), so there you go. There wasn’t even a linguistic or lexical check on the strength of what he was saying.
Still, why am I writing about it on a blog? Because Miliband, being Raph’s son, sees the future in terms of grass roots democracy, open meritocratic social structures, and global interdependence. Great - about time. But what does it add up to?
“In the 21st century the driving ethos is “I can”. People want to make a difference by taking decisions for themselves an with others.”!
I think Millie might have some interesting ideas but he hasn’t yet learned how to express them. The idea that we want to make decisions - wow, is that a political insight? His review reads a bit like an undergraduate class paper. Even so we have a lot to learn about how 21st century consumerism is making people proactive (but sadly apolitical).
We are adults and we can. We do - we complain more and we insist on higher standards. We’re also getting older which means we’re even more bolshie. I doubt our maturity and intelligence will affect the next election in Ireland much but you get by a little longer on hope when the economy still seems to be growing, if slower. Still - if we’re learning our empowerment through the market place how are the Millies of this world going to make us care more about politics? Not simply by telling us we are empowered, I fear.
Instead we need to start thinking of politics in terms of the fragmented range of things we really want. There are no easy classifications of people any longer, no parties that are a brand for the majority of us. Politicis is no longer about the art of the impossible - it is about the delivering to a very wide range of needs. Uhum. Who is currently benefiting?
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