How politicians treat people really matters

I’m not always polite. When discussing issues with people I think are wrong, I don’t always keep my cool. I can be a hothead. I enjoy a good barney. Particularly online.

What I try really hard not to do, is be rude to people whose job – explicitly – is to be of service to me. I thank bus drivers while complaining about the bus service. I am polite and friendly to security guards and receptionists. I hold the door open for delivery drivers and I smile and wave at the bloke who inspects the parking on my road every morning.

I don’t do any of these things because I am a saint. I am a crotchety, moody bugger who is incredibly difficult, stubborn and occasionally downright unpleasant. Just ask my long-suffering husband or my poor beleaguered parents. I do it, because I think how we treat people we don’t know is important, and I do so because I know how much I judge others who do not act in this way.

Kicking down has been something of a theme of this Government. Policy that hurts the poor and needy has come cloaked in the language of sacrifice while tax breaks for corporations and the rich come wrapped in promises of never-appearing growth.

But there have also been considerable examples of kicking individuals. For example, Jeremy Hunt’s SPAD gets sacked, Jeremy Hunt gets promoted.

The most recent and most obvious case is demonstrated by the continuing furore around Andrew Mitchell. While Mitchell and the police continue to parry over whether the exact words he used demonstrate his class snobbery, what isn’t in question is that Mitchell felt it was ok to take his “frustrating day” out on someone who was paid to serve him. In that moment, he didn’t have the instinct that should have said to him “this is not the person to do this to” but he didn’t.

People come into politics to serve, but due to the inherent power balance that comes with being a legislator and law maker, you serve from above in politics. This affects people in one of two ways.

Some politicians are incredibly deferential to those they meet in every walk of life. They take the time and they get to know the quiet army whose arrival in Whitehall happens in the evening and early morning when the desk workers go home; the security staff, the cleaners, the cops who police the streets as we pass them staggering from the Red Lion and the St Stephen’s Tavern.

Others are less interested in the people around them. This happens across parties. We all heard the stories about Brown before the last election. I had similar problems with some senior members of Blair’s staff (in fact, I remember joking that Labour’s loss of popularity was because we’d been in power long enough for enough people to have met his events staff).

Politicians are here to literally represent the people; they more than any other profession should strive to understand them, to relate to them and to genuinely be representative. You can’t do that if you see yourself as above others. You can’t do that if you see others not as humans with their own stories, worries, ambitions, hopes and dreams but as a vessel for your own frustrations.

Our democracy is suffering a true crisis. Our politicians seem further from the people they are supposed to represent than they have since universal suffrage. Our political class all look and sound like each other. There are many steps that need to be taken to ensure that the representation of the people is representative of the people. But the first step has to be for us all – elected officials and those of us who move with the circus to treat others with the respect they deserve, the respect they earn by silently doing the jobs that everyday enable us to carry on. A little gratitude wouldn’t go amiss either.

The people I fight with online are welcome to judge me on the way I deal with them. I’m sure it is not always as it should be. But I will continue to judge myself and others on the way they treat not the members of their own tribe, but of the millions of others who pass silently through our lives.