Recently Chris
Dillow wrote about how stupid Westminster politics
(which is most of UK politics) has become. I’m always wary when
oldies like Chris and myself say things are much worse than they used
to be, but he is hardly alone in making this complaint. I have read
many people bemoaning the fact that politicians seem unable nowadays
to present bad news to voters (e.g. Trump’s Iran war will make us
worse off whatever the government does) or to discuss policy
trade-offs (e.g. cutting immigration will require higher taxes). Discussion of policy has been replaced by a seemingly endless game of musical chairs in and around Downing Street.
However what really
convinced me he was right was that he referenced a paper
I wrote some time ago. It was about what I call the
knowledge transmission mechanism between academics and policymakers,
and how it had failed when the world outside China turned to fiscal
austerity in 2010. It convinced me because I would never write that
kind of paper today. The idea that we should presume politicians
might be interested in, or still less follow, an academic consensus
seems very old fashioned and rather naive today.
Perhaps we were
spoiled by the Brown era (I think it was mainly Brown, not Blair). I
note in my paper that my own example of the knowledge transition
mechanism working really well was the Treasury analysis behind the
five tests for deciding on whether the UK should adopt the Euro in
2003, for which David
Ramsden should take a lot of the credit. After these years when
evidence-based policy making was the ideal, it was a genuine puzzle
as to why the Western world had collectively decided to ignore basic
macroeconomics and cut government spending in the middle of the worst
recession since WWII when interest rates were stuck at their lower
bound. Yet from today’s perspective, where everything from
harvesting policy-based evidence to simple lying is so endemic, it
all seems much less of a puzzle.
The Brexit
referendum was decisive in this respect. The winning side didn’t
talk about a trade-off between sovereignty and the economy, but
instead argued that Brexit would have overall economic benefits. Around 2010 there had been some serious and high profile economists arguing for
quick deficit reduction, although still a minority that
became pretty small in size as time went on. In
contrast in 2016 there was as much a consensus among economists as
you will ever get that Brexit would significantly harm the economy.
Yet the Leave side got away with Project Fear because the media let
them.
The press was
overwhelmingly pro-Brexit, and being the propaganda outlets they are,
the truth didn’t bother them. The broadcast media, led by the BBC,
decided that ‘balance’ was more important than the truth, and
didn’t even attempt to explain why Brexit would be bad for UK
growth. Now that these negative economic effects are plain for pretty
well everyone to see, including most voters, those who should be
hanging their heads in shame alongside the Brexiters are those in the
broadcast media who failed to fulfil their mandate of informing
viewers. But they are not, of course, because things have only become
worse since 2016.
Brexit marked the
first triumph of populism in the UK. It was immediately after Brexit
that we had newspaper headlines condemning judges upholding the very
reasonable law that the executive couldn’t just close down
parliament when convenient. The judges were going against the ‘will
of the people’ the papers claimed in typical populist fashion. This
makes it obvious, to me at least, that one reason, perhaps the
reason, that politics in the UK and elsewhere has become
significantly more dumb is the ascendancy of right wing populism.
One of the features
of the austerity period was the absence of balance in political
reporting. The broadcast media quickly decided that the rising budget
deficit was the major economic problem, and it was really quite hard
for opposing voices to get a look in. The media made it hard for
opposition Labour voices to argue that the government was going too
fast, too hard on cuts, so Labour eventually gave up. In part my
paper was an attempt to explain why most journalists in the broadcast
media thought it was so obvious that austerity was necessary.
Politics in the
broadcast media is dominated by political journalists, and they
should be seen as part rather than being apart from the political
club made up of the executive, MPs and those who work for them.
Balance for the broadcast media invariably means reflecting the
balance among Westminster politicians, with outsiders treated badly.
[1] The main exception to this rule is the influence of the right
wing press (particularly if those running the BBC have been appointed
by the populist right, as is the case today), and I argue in my paper
a more minor exception are institutions like central banks. What
doesn’t count nearly so much for the media, beyond any direct
influence on politicians, is expertise in academia and elsewhere.
Hence the media consensus that austerity was necessary, and ignoring
the reality that Brexit was bound to hit the UK economy.
So one possible
contributor to the state of UK politics today apart from politicians
themselves is the right wing media, and therefore its owners. The
right wing media is hardly a source of informed and balanced
commentary. To some extent that has always been true, but it does
seem to have got worse over the last few decades: just look at the
Daily Telegraph, or GB news. The transformation of social media, to
the extent that it influences political debate and discourse, has
been more dramatic, and is now clearly a source of simplistic views
that tend to match those of its owners.
However I’m not
sure these developments in the media should be seen as independent of
the rise in right wing populism. According to the
thesis I outlined here, there has always been a
significant source of voters who would be attracted by right wing
populist rhetoric. However after the defeat of fascism in WWII there
was a social taboo among the mainstream political elite, including to
some extent newspaper owners, against appealing to voters in this
way. Fascism, after all, is just a more extreme version of right wing
populism, and they both share a focus on blaming social and economic
problems on racial or religious minorities. The reaction of Prime
Minister Heath to Enoch Powell’s speech was a polar example of this
taboo in action. The thesis is that what has changed over the last
few decades, and led to rise in right wing populism in national politics, is the weakening
of this elite taboo, allowing key mainstream parties or politicians
to appeal to xenophobic and racist views and not be ostracised by
other politicians or the media.
What caused this
taboo to br…
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