The politics of connection

Watching Channel 4 News on, I was (not for the first time) very impressed with Stella Creasy. Her performance was much more than being on top of her brief, with all the facts and figures to hand. The facts and figures were there, but they were skilfully interwoven with the wider policy context and the challenges of everyday life:

 The research showed that 67% of those taking out payday loans couldn’t get credit from anywhere else. Actually, these aren’t customers who have a choice on how to manage the fact that because the cost of living is going up, because wages are being frozen and because unemployment is hitting millions of families across this country, they simply have too much month at the end of their money. The choices they have about how they deal with that are very very small. That means all these payday loan companies, because this is unregulated in the UK, are just preying on them.

It’s clear, well-reasoned, and completely genuine. She is the sort of politician that could restore faith in the political class, and we are right to be proud to be in the same party as her.

Her opposite number, John Lamidey (chief executive of the Consumer Finance Association), could not have been more unlike her. Getting to open the debate made little difference as he spluttered incoherently about the quality of the data, brow puckered with false indignation (think Thomas the Tank Engine). He was trying (and failing) to do that…thing that politicians do, where they answer a question that no-one asked. Literally any PMQs will do if you need an example. It drives me potty, because you know in the case of politicians, minutes later they will be scratching their heads, wondering why it is so hard to engage normal people in politics.

Dodging bad questions, or expanding narrow ones, is quite necessary in politics, particularly when facing a mischievous, ill-informed or otherwise partial interviewer, or a political opponent. Hard won or natural, the ability to frame the wider debate while assembling the facts needed to win that battle is a skill that politicians need. But when that goes wrong, it jars – two people having different conversations. This is compounded by the language, “a riddle of insiders’ speak couched in bewildering jargon,” as Deborah Mattinson puts it in ‘Talking to a Brick Wall’. Bad conversations make people switch off, or walk away.

Socrates referred to bad conversations as ‘eristic’ – in tribute to Eris, the Greek goddess of strife. We know her best for kicking off the chain of events that led to the Trojan War with a judiciously-placed golden apple (those were simpler times). In an eristic conversation, there is a winner and a loser. There is clearly a role for her in our politics. But not exclusively – the Socratic ideal was dialectic conversation, dialogue. The pursuit of truth, the pursuit of genuine answers. In so many political interviews, the answers are completely arbitrary; sidelined so that someone can ‘win’ the interview. And sometimes, nobody wins. We’ve all seen those interviews.

People aren’t disengaged from politics, but they are disengaged from politicians – and framing the debate will not be enough. There’s no point winning battles if you end up losing the war. But I think politicians like Stella show how both are possible.