The politics of the platitude – the statement with which no reasonable person could disagree – has been dominant for at least the past 20 years. Who doesn’t want zero hunger? Who thinks education is bad? Who doesn’t want clean and sustainable energy or responsible, pro-social businesses? Who wants poverty entrenched, children from poor families to have no aspirations, opportunities for only some, inequality to thrive and some people to be treated as worth less than others?
The language became so anodyne and meaningless that we had to look for the sense of it in the cracks, in the things that went unsaid. What did “lacking aspiration” really mean? Did it mean a person didn’t want a good life, or just that they weren’t middle-class enough? How was it that all unfortunate circumstances were driven by their hapless or feckless victims, and there were never any other factors? Why, when everybody was against inequality and for human rights, did equality get further away, and “human rights” become the new “red tape”, amorphous, troublesome, indistinct, someone else’s idea?
In tandem with the new discourse, where everybody wanted the same thing – better, less impoverished lives for all – and all that was left was for decent people to choose between a suite of practical options, the actual decisions meted out by politics have become cruel. The “hostile environment” for which Theresa May is rightly castigated today has become the norm not just for immigrants, but for everyone who falls short of what the “decent citizen” of her conception should be. Anyone economically unproductive, unless they are old; anyone insufficiently healthy, unless they are in the Paralympics; anyone who doesn’t belong here, a category whose dimensions have become theoretically limitless, now that the criterion for belonging is that you can prove you belong, yet the Home Office holds the proof and is liable to destroy it at any moment, for “data protection”. It transpires – who knew? – that not every stamp of politics does want the best for everyone. Being unable, under the 21st century’s Convention on What’s Normal, to admit to not wanting the best, instead rightwing politics has reconfigured what it means by “everyone”.
There’s historical precedent, sure, for conservative politicians not saying what they mean. Margaret Thatcher famously wanted to solve her disputes in the industrial heartlands by just putting a wall around Liverpool and leaving them to it. Even though this view was pretty well understood at the time, it took the release of historical cabinet papers before anyone could stick it on her. But the new element, the shiny modern bit of our predicament, is the sluggishness: we’re aways waiting for the hostile environment to explode into human tragedy, for a man to be refused cancer treatment, for a woman to be deported, for a hunger strike, for a suicide, always waiting for a catastrophic injustice to have a face, before we can say “this is unjust”. It’s not a collective amnesia, where we have forgotten what justice looks like, or a sudden, generalised lack of sincerity or compassion. It’s just a logical consequence; there’s no space to argue about principle, because everyone claims to believe the same thing. So we wait and see what it looks like in practice. This has the pleasing scientific veneer of an evidence base, but is destructive to the lives capsized in the process. We need to stop buying it: stop swallowing the rhetoric with which no reasonable person would disagree. Then we might see the meanings beneath it in time to halt the consequences rather than bemoan them.
Pitchforks at the ready on Mumsnet
“Am I being unreasonable?”, asked a woman posting on Mumsnet. That would have been the moment to look away. The answer is always either: “No, that’s fine, though it’s quite unreasonable that you wasted my time by asking,” or: “Unreasonable doesn’t even begin to cover it, you are so boilingly unhinged that someone should tattoo you with a warning sign or stripe you yellow and black like a bee.” But I had got as far as the subject line, whence there is no escape, like a spell invented by Tolkien.
A mother of three was complaining that her husband, having started a job, had announced he needed “full personal assistance” in the morning. I assumed it was a sex thing, but no: he needed his keys and his wallet laid out, and his shoes and suit neatly arranged, unless he was cycling, in which case he wanted them in a bag, but she wouldn’t be informed of his method of transport until such time as she’d already done the other thing. Responses divided three ways: “If my husband said this, I would laugh in his face”; “I used to have a husband like this, then I left him and my current husband is much nicer”; and “How disappointing, I thought this was going to be a sex thing.”
The outrage was superb – I want to say comradely or supportive, but no, it was just so vividly enjoyable. If someone had suggested forging the man’s Brompton into stocks and setting him there in a town square, I would have been in. Any one of us would have been. Which all made me feel a little sorry for the great villains of the internet age, the Zuckerbergs, the Russians trolls, the many facilitators of a social rage that previously didn’t exist. It’s not that the internet is making us angry. It’s just the place that you go when only anger will do, as the corner shop is to the strawberry bonbon.
Dogged questioning not always appropriate
The Queen’s corgi, Willow, passed away this week aged 14, survived by two dachshund-corgi crosses that are probably called dawgies, full name: Inspector Dawgie. The first question, “Do you think you will get another?”, is only natural, but dangerously freighted. “Why not? Didn’t you love Willow?” is the unspoken followup; unless it’s a yes, in which case: “So soon? How could you?” “How long, realistically, do you think you’re going to live?” hovers in the background, along with: “Do you trust any of your children to adopt a young pet, and if not, why not?” Safer, always, to go off on a tangent: taxidermy; chinchillas; tact lies in unexpected places at this difficult time.
