Honesty in politics
A recurring theme of late is honesty in politics or, rather, the lack thereof. Politicians want to appear as straight-talking but frequently are not. Three things have struck me on this today.
Brian Paddick, the Lib Dem candidate for Mayor of London. As the Evening Standard reports, he has said that the Underground is the most expensive railway in the world at £40 a mile. To do this, he took the maximum possible zone 1 fare and divided it by the shortest possible zone 1 journey. The comparison is ridiculous; Embankment station is very close to Charing Cross. The quickest way to get from one to the other is to walk. It would be like saying British Airways is the most expensive airline to Australia from Glasgow because you left the plane at Heathrow, or buying a month’s interrail to do a single train journey.
£4 is a lot for a single journey. It is that high to encourage people to use the Oyster swipecard. The benefit of that is obvious it speeds up the whole process. If you want to recall the difference it has made, take a trip to South Kensington underground, where you can see tourists who don’t have Oyster cards taking a long time to get through the gates with their paper tickets. When you look at what Ken Livingstone has done, from cheap and free travel for schoolchildren to capping daily fares, it is disingenuous to criticise him in that manner.
I don’t want to go into the arguments around referenda1 but I will say that the impression given by most newspapers is of a broken manifesto commitment on behalf of Labour and the Lib Dems. It is not helped by BBC News announcing the piece as ‘Britain will not have a say’; at best, that is a gross oversimplification.
It is, however, wrong of David Cameron to claim a breach of trust and that he is seeking a ‘new kind of politics’ when he deliberately asks questions that cannot be answered, as he did today at PMQs. Asking any question on the resignation and so on of Ken Livingstone’s adviser, Lee Jasper, was, at best, a waste of a question as it would have been completely inappropriate for the PM to make any comment. I say at best because I find it hard to believe that Cameron would not have been aware of that and so I find it much more likely that he was trying to trip Gordon Brown up in an effort to improve Boris Johnson’s chances in the upcoming mayoral election. That is no part of any new politics I would like to see.
The third one that strikes me is not from politics, but the adverts from the Halifax bank offering sixty times the rate of interest of some other banks. What is only mentioned in small print at the bottom of the screen is that this is a limited offer for the first £2,500. After that, the interest rate is a much less impressive tenth of a percent. Oh, and you have to pay in £1,000 a month. The advert is accurate but not truthful; correct but not honest.
I am increasingly coming to the opinion that politicians and other people in public life who demand and offer a ‘new’ politics but continue to play by the old rules do more damage than those who just play the game. They make people even more cynical. It is, of course, a hard cycle to break because you can earn a larger slice of the cake by doing so. The cake, though, is shrinking all the time. It happens, too, with commercial advertisements, as with the Halifax. This is all a little negative; it may be time for people to have a collective sit down to discuss how we do achieve the ‘new politics’ we all seem to desire. A part of that will be the media and will have to be critical of the media; I don’t know how we convince the media to accept criticism of themselves. Until then, politics will keep going for cheap headlines. Cheap, but dishonest.
xD.
1 - mostly because I am generally pretty hostile to referenda
March 6th, 2008 at 10:46 am
The whole thing is very depressing, all the more so because the newspapers brainwash people into believing that there is no other way of doing things. One positive is that the internet allows freedom of expression and could wield greater influence than the papers. It is to my mind appalling that we hear of murder cases everyday with the media baying for blood and basically calling the accused guilty before the verdict. I also think they shouldn’t broadcast the grizzly details of these cases.
March 6th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
I once went on an all-night drinking spree in fair London town, but at 6am I had nowhere to go. So I went on the Circle line, at Great Portland Street, and slept there for four hours. Then I got off at Baker Street.
‘Guard! My card does not seem to be working’
‘OK, I’ll have a look…you’ve been on here four hours??’
‘So?’
‘Look, san, it does NOT take four hours to get the Circle line from Great Portland Street to Baker Street!’
‘Is that why my card isn’t working?’
‘Yes, you stupid boy!’
ANYWAY everything was sorted in the end.
March 7th, 2008 at 9:14 am
1. Cameron is the worst leader they could have.
2. Why are you hostile to the will of the people being expressed, Dave? I should have thought you’d be for that.
March 7th, 2008 at 10:22 am
WW,
I agree with you, although quite a few blogs try to emulate the gutter press. I think a part of the solution would be in a revamping of the BBC, as I wrote about in an earlier post.
Mike,
What have you been smoking?
James,
I’m not hostile at all to the will of the people being expressed. I just don’t think referenda express the will of the people. To an extent, I agree with the Keith Vaz proposal that the LibDems have taken up; there should be a referendum on Europe as a principle. However, the referendum that is now not going to happen would have been as much about party positions as anything else.
xD.
March 7th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Dunhill International, of course.
March 7th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Touche