At the end of last week, the Spectator came out with which party they are endorsing for this very shortly to be upon us election. It was, as I fully expected, the Green Party. All kidding aside, there was one sentence in the endorsement article that stuck in my teeth:
“Like so many former bag-carriers who end up elected to parliament, Miliband has no experience outside the world of academia and politics.”
For a start, all of the above could very easily apply to David Cameron (sorry – a few years in a PR agency is hardly “real world” worthy), which makes it hypocritical. But actually, more to the point, who cares if most of Ed Miliband’s vocational experience comes from inside of politics? Given that his ultimate career path is to become prime minister, should the good British public allow it, I don’t see why him having a shed load of experience in his field of choice should be taken as an automatic negative.
Think about this for a moment: you’d never say of a surgeon, “she has no professional experience outside the world of medicine.” This is because it would sound very stupid. Like I say, people spend time in their chosen career paths doing things directly relevant to said career. Why should it be any different for politics?
What’s so strange about the Spectator’s demonisation of this particular aspect of Ed Miliband is that the man has more than enough faults without having to invent some new ones. His slightly robotic nature which causes him to ask people their Christian names in a slightly creepy way, as a for instance. Why is the Spectator attacking Miliband on what is arguably his greatest strength? Think about this again for a moment. Ed Miliband has been a SpAd in the Treasury for an extended period of time, served as a backbench MP, went into government as a minister and eventually was in the Cabinet. Of all the things that make me nervous about Miliband as prime minister, his lack of experience in worlds exterior to politics is literally the very least.
I think we’re all caught in a vicious cycle with this as well. I recall seeing an interview with Ed Balls at Labour conference a couple of years ago. He told a story involving he and Ed Miliband as young aides at 1996 Labour conference, going over Tony Blair’s speech. I remember suddenly thinking about Miliband and Balls in a slightly different light – here are two guys with over twenty years experience at the very top end of British politics. Yet, Balls stopped the anecdote abruptly, realising he had strayed off message. He and Miliband were supposed to be the new guys on the block, the ones who had shed the party of its New Labour wickedness. Again, in no other field would talking up your wealth of experience be considered such a negative.
In the end, I don’t blame the Speccie too much; they are only giving their audience what they think they want to hear. Yes, the politicians of today are mostly not great. But I don’t think it comes down to the fact that they didn’t spend enough time in an office dicking around with spreadsheets, or on a construction site prior to running for office. To think so is simply a projection of anti-politics: that somehow if the politicians were “more like me” they’d be better. But I don’t want politicians to be like everyone else, I just want them to know how to run the country properly. Some previous experience in that department sets my mind at ease – not the other way round.
I agree up to a point. My problem with this is not having lived outside the political bubble makes their ability to judge the consequences of policies on the real world weak. Viz Bedroom tax conservatives, tax credits for high earners labour
Nonsense, there is a serious democratic deficit in British politics with most voters disengaged. MPs are representatives not middle-class administrators. The arrogance of the political elite and their contempt for voters’ aspirations is shown by Clegg#s lies over tuition fees and his utter lack of remorse for ditching a vote-winning policy that has reduced support by over 60%. Politics led by people who see the masses as uneducated rabble who should not expect clever professionals to even attempt to honour pledges is a dead=end and a gift to UKIP.
I can’t say I share your views, but I agree it’s wrong to assume people who’ve succeeded in one field will aautomatically become politics. Politics bears so little resemblance to the corporate world that this often-drawn conclusion is wrong.
I do also think politics IS the “real” world. What is decided at Westminster has a lot more impact than what goes on in a small business in a town I’vee never visited, oreven in yer average boardroom. This is a view shared by no less a man than Ozzy Osborne, Have you read the biography of him by Janan Ganesh? In it, he is quoted as asserting that he chose his career path for precisely this reason, that politicians well and truly get things done and wield power and all that business that some people like, whereas journos simply write about events rather than shaping them, and even businesmen are not as powerful as he hoped to be and now, in fact, is.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of this opinion, it’s a view that is extremely widely held and will survive a change of government.
The professionalisation of politics can go too far, but it is not a new thing: it began in the second half of the 19th century, and it was a response to the growth of government and the extended franchise which made political amateurism implausible except for the very rich. Today, most politicians who have had other jobs spend most of their working lives in politics which they regard as their main career. But if it’s a job like any other, why would that mean they don’t share the experience of the voters who have other jobs? Politicos have to go to the supermarket, take the kids to school, pay the gas bill like anybody else. The main problem in my opinion is not that politics is a profession but that its a London based profession, so they lack local roots.