Personality vs Policy

Rory Hamilton

Ideas make the best policy platform, not the identity of the leader, and not the identity of the party.

Admittedly sometimes ideas can be assimilated to a party’s identity or a leader’s personality, but at a time when the US Democrats, the UK Conservatives, the Scottish Conservatives, and Welsh Labour are all choosing new leaders we must hold onto the core belief that ideas are what drives politics, not individuals.

In addition to those leadership elections, we have also not long ago seen a new SNP leader annointed, Reform UK reshuffle the ‘official’ leadership team, the French Left struggle to find a suitable candidate for Prime Minister, the Irish Taoiseach change, a new premiership in Stormont, internal battles in Bolivia between Evo Morales and Luis Arce … am I missing anything?

The challenge of leadership clearly is not unique to Scotland - or the UK. But I worry that our politics has turned into something of a spectator sport, where people seek short term entertainment, treating elections (leadership or general) as like a football tournament, and the party leaders as managers to be replaced as quickly as a party’s (or team’s) fortunes change. 

Case and point being the proliferation of chummy centrist podcasts which act as the commentators from the sidelines. Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell’s The Rest is Politics is but one in a series of ‘The Rest is…’ from Gary Linekar’s Goalhanger productions, including ITV’s Robert Peston and Channel 4’s Steph McGovern on The Rest is Money (I mean that’s not even a saying). Then from Global Player (also responsible for LBC) has The New Agents presented by an ex-BBC cohort of Jon Sopel, Emily Maitlis, and Lewis Goodall. Entering the ‘agreeing disagreeable’ fray from Sky News is Beth Rigby’s Electoral Dysfunction with Ruth Davidson and until recently Jess Phillips, alongside one-time dispatch box foes Ed Balls and George Osborne with their Political Currency show.

Much of this interrogation would be fine if that’s what it were - interrogation. Yet, the very premise of each of these podcasts indicates a predisposition towards personality over policy. This type of format might work for those who need something a little more lighthearted to tune into, so for those not necessarily directly impacted by policy occurrences that these podcasts discuss it makes easy listening. Meanwhile, the broader effects of this developing media landscape are played out in the type of politics we get in Westminster, in Holyrood, and elsewhere - it becomes a focus on entertainment, and by extension who can grab the most exciting headline. Now I’m not pretending this is any different from Campbell’s own era of spin, rather the emphasis has shifted from how can we spin this policy to appeal best to voters, i.e. ‘education, education, education’, ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, etc. etc., to how can we spin Keir Starmer/Nicola Sturgeon’s personal relationships to maximum effect. 

The consequences of how this plays out is reflected in the handling of things like the Bute House Agreement - Humza Yousaf single-handedly creating his own downfall through an inability to manage interpersonal relationships. It’s also played out in things like Tuesday’s vote on the amendment to scrap the Two-Child Benefit Cap in the King’s Speech, where seven Labour MPs (no Scottish Labour MPs) have had the whip withdrawn for voting to lift 330,000 children out of poverty, all in the name of party factionalism and an authoritarianism on the right of the Labour Party that punishes - not just left-wing MPs - for compassionate and ideas-based politics.

I highlight the two parts of politics at play here, personalities and policies. Why is this important in the context of discussing politics as a spectator sport? I have no doubt the vote will come to be discussed on some of these podcast platforms, but my fear is that this entertainment-isation of politics will focus on the ‘tactics’ of removing the whip rather than on the issue at hand. 

But in this ‘commentary’ or ‘analysis’ gets lost the fact that 4.3 million children are in some form of poverty in the UK - that is 30%, an astounding number for a G7 country. What good is “growth” going to do them now?

Politics isn’t a game for them. These children and the families that try to support them are not football players on a pitch for games to be played with - there are actual lives at stake. And even then, the actual quality of lives that they live are in many cases beyond fathomable for the glossy boardrooms of the E&Y secondees in the Labour Party HQ policy unit. 

The entertainment-isation of politics reduces them to nothing but statistics and numbers on a page. In all likelihood, the parents of these children didn't even vote at the election because why would they? Nothing in it for them when all the main parties, perhaps barring the GPEW, offered them the same economic model at the ballot box.

So what we need is an injection of ideas, of compassion, of energy into politics. Strip away party names and leadership personalities and what are we left with? Do the policies themselves make sense when stripped bare and naked of their ideological(?) context?

I recently had a number of conversations with people I met whilst on holiday who had no real interest in politics, some of whom chose not to vote. I got into a conversation with one such person about drug use. I explained Common Weal’s proposal for the legalisation of drugs and their regulation and distribution but state-owned stores (much like the state-owned alcohol stores in the Nordic countries), and how this alongside safe-consumption spaces, and a care-based approach to drugs would make drug-consumption safer and support more rehabilitative means of justice as well as control coping mechanisms with the effects of poverty (not to mention that legalisation means you can raise tax and reduce crime through criminalisation of unregulated black markets). Without knowing my ideological affiliations or the Common Weal identity, they agreed with this pitch on practical grounds - it just made sense.

Take another example. Think back to 2017, Theresa May was 20+ points ahead in the polls at the snap election - how could she lose? Then Labour launches its For the Many, Not the Few manifesto, and the gap over the remainder of the campaign narrows significantly, with Corbyn leading Labour to its highest vote share since 2001 and the largest increase in votes between elections since 1945 (what happened then - oh yeah a welfare state was on offer).

Many reflect on Corbyn with nostalgia as a compassionate figure to lead the Labour Party, but as an individual he didn't sway the voters. What brought Labour the 12.8 million voters (compared to Starmer’s 9.7 million) was a policy platform that 1) was transformative, 2) was practical, i.e. people could see immediately how it would change their material conditions, and 3) it therefore made sense, and was backed up with a fully costed proposal by John McDonnell.

Strip away the personality of the leader; strip away the colours of the party of its ideological history. The public are far smarter than political podcasts, the media commentariat, and national politicians give them credit for. They care about things that will make a difference and can assess independently whether policy platforms are practicable or will make any impact, and they vote with their feet. My critics might suggest that 1) Corbyn did not win in 2017 or 2019, or that 2) they got behind Starmer in 2024 despite my suggestion that his platform neither makes sense nor is compassionate. However, as Craig and others have noted, Starmer didn't win because more people got behind Labour, he won because voters stayed at home, or abandoned the Tory party - Labour barely made any gains on ‘the most disastrous election’ in Labour’s history, yet the nuances of First-Past-The-Post swept Old/New Labour to a landslide.

This is not a sop piece crying after the Corbyn years, nor is it whine about centrist dad podcasts. I’m actually - believe it or not - trying to be positive about politics. I have greater faith in the general to treat a good idea with respect when they hear or see it, than I do the political elites who treat most things with their own agenda. 

This is the project Common Weal is trying to build. Ideas stripped of personal agendas and vilifying historical identities. Optimism and practical solutions couched in accessible terms. That’s why we are remodelling the podcast which Craig has done such a wonderful job in breaking down complex ideas to accessible formats. That’s why we wrote a book in the simplest terms we could - without graphs, and not littered with jargon. That’s why we’re looking to re-engage, to hear from you, and to make those practical ideas a reality.

If you want a podcast with ‘agreeable disagreement’, I cannot recommend enough Skotia and Scottish Left Review’s new outlet, Redgauntlet, which brings together those conversations that actually don’t happen, but need to; our first episode featured Kenny Farquharson and Cat Boyd on the independence impasse: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5znlAYFBb54KhBrAdcz9yu?si=bZ7-jSTyS2aP8jpphv6rng

Header Image: "Nandy, Starmer and Long-Bailey, 2020 Labour Party leadership election hustings, Bristol" by Rwendland is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.