The Pointless Guide to Political Literacy

As Left Unity nears our formal Lift-Off, John Tummon says we need to take full account of the nature of political literacy in 21^st century Britain.

As a regular viewer of the BBC-1 Quiz ‘Pointless’, which assesses contestants by how obscure their knowledge is in comparison to 100 people given the same questions before the show, I feel I now have enough evidence to back up my long-held contention that political literacy is at an all-time low in this country. Earlier this week, only 34 of this sample of 100 people knew that Nick Clegg was the Deputy Prime Minister and only 10 that Vince Cable was the Business Secretary.

These results are not outliers; Richard Osman, who sets the questions, is often seen visibly aghast at the low level of political knowledge whenever such questions come up. The pattern is consistent and so is the reaction of contestants when told that politics is the subject for the next round of questions – on no other subject to they feel the need to say how much they dreaded this subject coming up, or how they have no interest in it; their faces and entire body language consistently tell the same story.

Such a small sample may not be statistically valid, but when the pattern is so consistent – over years, not just months – then it tells us something important about the context within which we, as a new organisation, try to take radical political ideas and calls to action to people. Yes, the disillusionment with conventional politics has become entrenched, for reasons we are well aware and, yes, Russell Brand has drawn blood from those who stand by our current political system, but we would be fools to imagine this is just unambiguous good news for those of us who want fundamental change and, in particular, a move to a participative, accountable democracy in place of the medieval political structure called Parliament.

Left Unity seems to be committed to participating in elections under the current system – the child of a political class that has turned down the chance to implement proportional representation, a system that propels broad left organisations to become a well-known part of the political scene in other countries. Without PR, the most we could hope for is to elect one MP, like the Greens and Respect have managed. It would take almost a pre-revolutionary situation for anything more ambitious to be possible, because it would mean that something like a quarter to a third of all voters were with us, which is what the Liberal Democrats offer for their meagre representation in the Commons.

Although I am a supporter of the Socialist Platform, I am not making this argument just to bang Left Reformists on the head, because it would seem that the ‘Pointless’ scores reveal a political apathy that goes much deeper than just the UK political system; for many, many people, it reflects a conscious choice to spend that part of their lives when they are not working or looking for work in their living room, escaping what society throws at them by watching hour after hour of uninterrupted TV, and the answers on ‘Pointless’ show clearly how much more most contestants – and a majority seem to be middle class and usually educated to degree standard – know about all types of popular trivia and culture. You just couldn’t know as much as many of them know about these things unless you watched TV for more or less 4 hours every night. Pointless shows that a considerable proportion of formally educated people are almost totally disinterested in politics and, if they vote at all, will likely do so for reasons other than working out which party best reflects their own views, which is perhaps what makes them the target group for all 3 mainstream parties and explains the unpolitical basis on which their votes are sought.

Outside this large group of people who use TV to escape social reality and bury themselves in entertainment, there are other significant groups like gamers as well as the millions who take recreational drugs, hundreds of thousands who follow their Football team home and away and so on. The media plays its part in replicating this – right now they are showing us crowds of gamers queuing for the new Sony gaming device and we will be seeing much more of this in the run up to Christmas. Even larger numbers demonstrating against austerity, as in Manchester recently, get hardly any airtime and far fewer interviews with people involved. The entire culture encourages passive entertainment and ‘Pointless’ just reflects the reality of this materialistic culture.

The contrast between all these groups of people, who have rejected politics in favour of enjoying the recreational diversions capitalism provides to the populations of the rich countries and, on the other hand, the 300,000 or so members of political parties (all political parties) in this country is massive and growing. The level of political debate reflects this, as does the gross mismatch between public opinion and known facts on issues like crime and immigration.

I think LU needs to become as clear as we can on what the implications of this are for the types, overall nature and level of political activity we set for ourselves and the expectations we give people who become interested in what we are trying to do. I can do no more than sketch a few preliminary ideas about this and here they are:-

1 Most past and existing Left Groups seem to have a culture of hyperactivity, of vainly substituting our own activity for the inactivity of the mass of working class people and keeping it constant regardless of the changes in the level of struggle. This has scared a lot of people off Left Groups in the past, as the lifestyle choices most people on the Left have made to accommodate this hyperactivity seem to be so very different from that of the rest of society and stay like that until burnout hits. LU needs to break with this cajoling culture of 20 or so emails each day all saying ‘come to so and so and protest against this or that!’ – we need to accept that some people will be able and willing to do a lot less than others but have the same right to vote that the more active members have.

2 The Left has also tended to assume that if you come to public meetings apparently committed to and having a radical or revolutionary understanding of a single issue, that this automatically transfers to every other issue with which the Left is centrally concerned, or should do. This assumes a coherence to Left wing ideas which has often not been there at all, whereas more often it is just a rule of thumb mindset that tells the Left what position it should adopt; for instance, the Bedouin principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend seems to be the Left’s litmus test on most  international issues. The assumption underlying this way of behaving seems to be that there is a political learning curve in which people who attend the odd meeting or demonstration are at the lowest level and members of the central committee, or equivalent, are the designated priesthood, able to show the rest the way. The reality is that there are an enormous number of people outside organised radical politics who are at least as aware as those who are organised but who have either left one of the many Left wing organisations, were turned off by Left culture many years ago, or don’t feel that the changes they would like to see are possible anymore. Others, especially but not just from minority groups, don’t trust a wider agenda to respect, allow for or properly reflect their particular experiences, circumstances and concerns. If LU is to be a broad organisation that tries to break the mould, then, we have to be sensitive, tolerant, empathetic and undemanding towards each other and to people interested in us and, crucially, reverse the habits of a political lifetime by becoming better at listening than at talking. There are times for discussing and debating things through to some kind of resolution, including between the various platforms formed in the run-up to this founding conference, and there are times for putting this to one side.

3 ‘Question Time’ audiences have recently begun to show a new pattern, whereby the more radical interventions come from the audience and receive more applause than contributions from the platform, especially when audience members contrast the experiences of the majority of people with the fixations and limited awareness of the political class. This is a quite different distancing of people from the political class than the one revealed by ‘Pointless’; it is the growing gulf between the political class and thinking, aware people in general, including a lot of the groups I referred to above in the previous point and who tend to apply to take part in QT. This tells me that if LU can find ways of successfully interacting with aware people in general, many of whom are hardly or never to be seen in organised protests or at other forms of action which are the Left’s habitual modus operandi, then we can steadily build our way out of what has become a ghetto. The devil, however, is in the detail.

4 The large group of people who have a growing, almost bullish, distaste for politics in general are likely to continue seeking escape from capitalist reality until such a time as this becomes untenable for them, when they will become confused, scared and prone to populist appeals. Even a minority are barely reachable by the mainstream parties and the historical decline in General Election turnout reflects their steady growth as a group within the population at large. This is probably something to bear in mind whenever we feel knocked back by people in general – they don’t just want to get away from us, but from everyone who wants to talk to them.

5 As I have only ever been dragged resentfully into Left wing election activity, with the sole exception of opposing Fascist or racist candidates, I am not the person to draw out any implications of all this for an LU electoral strategy, except to say that we need to rack our brains to find ways of using elections to build our organisation and the wider opposition against austerity policies which does not involve holding or asking others to believe that we could get elected in more than one parliamentary constituency. This probably involves a lot of lateral thinking, or should do, and there is hardly anything to be learned from the past, with maybe the sole exception of George Galloway’s success in Bradford, which really did involve people – mostly women – in the Asian heritage communities leading their community away from a decades-long tradition of allowing self-appointed community and Biraderi leaders to sell votes to the mainstream parties in exchange for favours. How much of this is transferable to other situations is a moot point, though.

I put this out to start a discussion, not to give a compelling argument, which I don’t think I have done. I am ringing an alarm bell, that’s all.