US ‘destroying’ world order, EU leaders in emergency meeting, China vows it will ‘fight to the end’ with US in trade war – or any other war. These are just a handful of the headlines from this week. While the news benefits from stirring up anxiety – fear sells after all – it does seem as though the world is becoming a more dangerous place. Long-gone are the woes of publicly-financed duck houses or secret ministerial affairs seizing headlines. And yet, despite such fears as war and economic turmoil rearing their head, the political problems I hear people talking about are somewhat less dramatic in stature. Besides the usual lamentations about potholes, one fellow pub-quiz attendee directed his ire at Reeves’ scrapping of the Winter Fuel Allowance.
Besides the fact that a lot of the recipients of the Winter Fuel Allowance are more likely to spend their benefits on wine than they are winter fuel, I think it also speaks to something about the perception of what politics actually is.
While this is certainly a personal anecdote, something I’ve noticed while being back at home is that there is a generation of adults that do not understand politics. Having grown up in some of the best economic conditions in world history and in some of the safest security conditions (The Troubles and nuclear Armageddon aside), the current voting population, as far as I can see, largely understands politics as an exercise in management and administration at the national level. Forgotten is Bismarck’s declaration that politics is the “art of the possible”. Where once Martin Luther King Jr could inspire masses with his dreams, it seems the best that UK politicians can muster are promises about reducing NHS waiting lists.
To be sure, governance is about delivering services. But it is not just about delivering services. It is about operationalising aspirations.
The Problem
Some of this commentary may seem like an over-zealous international relations graduate whining that no one is interested in foreign affairs, but it really is a problem endemic to UK politics. One of the points that has been emphatic across the podcasts I’ve recorded is that for the UK to take a direction, there needs to be some domestic will behind a decision. Without that, No.10 can be reluctant to stir the pot until some shocking event does the stirring for them.
A starting point for this problem is voter turnout: older generations turn out to vote in greater proportions, and there’s more of them who can vote. Politicians, naturally, cater their manifestos and policy stances towards those who will vote for them. This creates a distinct bias towards older generations when we are faced with an aging population. Not only are their specific preferences linked with age: a focus on inheritance tax, complex health care, and pensions; but there are also distinct experience differences between generations.
Compare the experiences of someone aged 65 with someone aged 25. A 65-year old witnessed the struggles of the miner’s strikes, the Falklands, and the Troubles. But they also witnessed decisive leadership from Thatcher, and Blair, the joining of the EU, the Good Friday Agreement, and the introduction of garlic bread into the national diet. Fundamentally, the British system worked – the flexibility and decisiveness that the British system is known for was on full display.
By contrast, someone born in 2000 had as their first memories of politics the Iraq War, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and the coalition government. Since then, we have had austerity, the near breakup of the Union, Brexit, COIVD, the corruption of the Johnson era, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Following World War II, the UK (poorly) navigated the return of its empire to locals and in place of international responsibility, focused on national social care. The generation following this has had an experience of politics that worked and a perception of politics as a method for delivering services. The big questions of the day were largely left to the US and the USSR to haggle over. The smaller ones were managed by the occasional leader and the odd landslide election. Real thought and imagination as to what the UK ought to be wasn’t needed, only an analytical knack for figuring out who best to vote for to get public services back on track. My generation, however, has had an experience of politics failing and faces the challenges of threats that have no guarantees of finding resolution.
Back to reality
Newly-elected MP Torsten Bell wrote in his book Great Britain? that beyond our social contract of sharing prosperity via the state, as a society we also have an intergenerational social contract. ‘We measure the success of our society by how we provide for older generations, and whether we enable each successive generation to have a better life than the one before’ but as it is we risk ‘a generational conflict, as older voters stand in the way of economic growth – and pretty much anything getting built – while the millennials understandably resist bearing the brunt of tax rises needed to deal with record NHS waiting lists’. Without vision, we are stuck in a cycle of an increasingly demanding older generation hamstringing a younger generation with ever-more burdens. To quote Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, the UK will simply become more accustomed to ‘managing stagnation’.
In a different time period or in another place, politics is the art of the possible. It is the method for bringing into reality those hopes and dreams that are worth striving for – and some that are not. It is just a shame that in this time, in this place, politics is strangled by a generation that can only understand politics as a form of administration.