Hurty words

I have in the past been often very critical of Kemi Badenoch, and on other occasions guarded with my praise. So let me seize on this opportunity to ride out firmly in her defence: what she said about Bridget Phillipson was absolutely fine.

To be sure, I think this in part because I think it’s true. Well, partly true: however obvious seems the role of spite in Phillipson’s policies as Education Secretary, I’m much less certain that she can be fairly called a “class warrior”. That would require a coherent idea of class, and Labour doesn’t have one.

But spite? Certainly. The VAT raid on private schools was at best an effort to squeeze easy targets which backfired horribly, but Labour is hardly shy about its hostility to private schooling. The most damning evidence, though, is her decision to scrap state-school Latin mid-year. Even if you don’t think Latin a good use of state resources, robbing state pupils who’d spent more than a year studying it of the chance to get their GCSE is just contemptible.  

Another reason one might be inclined to take a dim view of all the pearl-clutching on the subject is the rank hypocrisy of it all. As a rule, Labour politicians absolutely love calling their Conservative counterparts nasty things. Just before Wednesday’s PMQs Phillipson had branded Nick Timothy a “racist”; David Lammy is on record as calling Brexiteers “Nazis” and refusing to retract it; Angela Rayner has been recorded ranting about “Tory scum”. 

Hypocrisy is not a slam dunk, as arguments go; something is still right or wrong, regardless of whether one’s opponents have done it. But it is still important to point out the absurdity of the pieties currently being offered up by Labour MPs, even — or perhaps especially — if you want a more civilised public discourse. Because you won’t get one if politicians can get away with imposing such requirements only on their opponents.

The tone and content of what Badenoch said yesterday is just fine

Most important, however, is to make the case that the tone and content of what Badenoch said yesterday is just fine. It was robust and somewhat caustic, to be sure, but that is why it is good. Actually holding people to account does not always involve being nice to them, and it is greatly to the detriment of our economy and state that so many of our institutions now try to pretend that isn’t the case.

Yesterday I was invited onto LBC to discuss this topic; my role was to balance a pearl-clutcher who thought Badenoch’s comments were entirely beyond the pale and that all the workings of Westminster needed to be reworked to end such practices (starting by abolishing Prime Minister’s Questions). Her case was indistinguishable from a right-wing parody of it: that politicians should take instruction from a primary school teacher use their “inside voices”, that nothing like PMQs would happen in business, and that it’s absurd to defend a tradition like Westminster’s adversarial set-up when witch-burning was also a tradition and we abolished that.

Now the witch point is very much the sort of argument made by somebody who has come up through a padded cell of a discourse with absolutely no predators in it, and has thus rarely if ever been punished for bad points and thus learned to distinguish them from good ones.

But the PMQs point is more interesting. No, perhaps few businesses would have such an eristic arrangement these days. Yet politics is emphatically not like businesses, it is a fundamentally different thing that operates on a fundamentally different basis. Badenoch and Phillipson are not colleagues in the way that I and, say, Tom Jones are colleagues, and it would be a bizarre conspiracy against the public to demand that Badenoch — who I remind you is leader of the Opposition — to show the same deference to the Government’s good image that private sector workers are expected to show for that of their employers.

Pushing the boat a little further out, however… it is at the very least not obvious that the wholesale shift towards running public and private organisations on the basis of primary school niceties has been good for either. Britain now has one of the largest HR departments in the developed world and one of the most stagnant economies, whilst our political and policy sector is crowded with deeply mediocre people whose terrible policies never get called out. Discomfort with assigning blame inside quangos leads to nobody being held individually accountable for the success or failure of projects, which creates the worst incentive regime for the least impressive worker.

At this point, Swarbrick started rolling his eyes a bit and talking about the “return of name-calling”. But the term name-calling implies something trivial; branding somebody “spiteful” (or indeed “racist”) is an allegation. It might be wrong, but it can hardly be off the table to call somebody spiteful if you think they’re spiteful. Ditto the criticism of “playing the man not the ball” – people’s motivations matter, and if they fail it is right and proper to pin that failure to them. In politics, ball and man are not so easily distinguished; one might as well bleat about blaming the crop, not the soil.

Consider Alec Baldwin’s famous speech from Glengarry Glen Ross (if you’ve never watched it, stop reading and watch it, it’s worth it). Is it a masterfully-executed kick up the backside for a bunch of salesmen in desperate need of one — or an archaic, macho throwback? Different people will see different things, and I’ll leave it to the Last Psychiatrist to explain why you only want to be governed by one of them:

If you were in that room, some of you would understand this as a work, but feed off the energy of the message anyway, welcome the coach’s cursing at you, “this guy is awesome!”; while some of you would take it personally, this guy is a jerk, you have no right to talk to me like that, or– the standard maneuver when narcissism is confronted with a greater power– quietly seethe and fantasize about finding information that will out him as a hypocrite. So satisfying.

One can have too much of anything, of course; it is certainly possible to have a yah-boo politics that contains no substance whatsoever. But it is equally possible — and in our present age, vastly more likely — to have the opposite, a prim and decorous culture which is pathologically averse to conflict and assigning blame, and thus prioritises the egos and feelings of those who work inside it over the results it produces for those it governs.

And this being Westminster, of course, plenty of people are free to demand one thing with their words whilst their deeds make plain the case for the other. After all, how many of the journalists and commentators insisting that Badenoch make her points more nicely had actually covered the fact that Phillipson got a zero per cent approval rating from teachers before Badenoch’s words on the subject were made the focus of the Hurty Words Pearl-Clutchers Variety Hour?