The Crisis of Representation

Populism, as a style of political rhetoric, reflects the crisis of democratic representation. Centrists would have you believe that it is atavistic bigotry, the product of poor education or the machinations of foreign powers, anything in fact other than what it actually is. This is because centrists imagine populism to be outside the bounds of healthy politics, rather than a style that is opportunistically adopted by all politicians. The standard definition of the word is a politics that presumes an antagonistic divide between a "people" and an "elite". This is trivially true in the sense that all democratic politics involves privileged actors attempting to marshall the popular will. The critique at the heart of the populist style is that this dynamic has gone awry, either because some or all of those privileged actors are deliberately working against the popular interest ("traitors") or because they are sincere but have lost touch with public opinion ("fools"). Contrary to the belief that the populist style is to be found only at the extremes, it has always been central to our politics, particularly around pivotal moments of change. 

For example, the Conservative Party under Harold Macmillan was derided in the early-1960s for being out-of-touch and foolish (the Profumo Affair), an impression reinforced by his replacement as Prime Minister by the aristocrat Alec Douglas-Home. Harold Wilson, as Leader of the Opposition, was not just consciously technocratic in style ("The white heat of technology" etc), but populist: a man of humble origins who understood the people. He had the fabled "common touch", despite being a middle class grammar schoolboy who had become an Oxford don at the age of 21. This populist impression probably made all the difference to what proved a narrow victory in the general election of 1964. A later example was Margaret Thatcher's campaign against "union barons" in the late-1970s, which contributed to the Conservative Party's election victory in 1979. Despite her own obvious wealth and privileged social position, she was able to present herself as the tribune of the ("decent, hardworking") people against an unrepresentative elite who were strangling enterprise and inconveniencing the public.

In contemporary politics, attention focused on those accused of "populism" distracts attention from the rest of the political field. The question to be asked is why they, the anti-populists, aren't adopting the populist style, given that historically it was quite normal to do so. To a certain extent they are, but often in a banal way through clichéd tropes, for example wrapping themselves in Union Jacks, praising "ordinary, hardworking families" or burbling about "legitimate concerns". This often appears to be rote because it stems from a desire to close off avenues of attack by the press (e.g. insufficently patriotic or not mindful of the aspirational working class) rather than arising from any personal sympathy. There has been a sea-change in politics since the 1980s, largely as a result of neoliberalism's importation of business practice to the realm of governance. What this means is a rejection of the very premise of democracy, a form of engagement alien to the vast majority of commercial organisations which are run as dictatorships. This has led to a liberal form of managed democracy, which is not that different to the illiberal forms found in Eastern Europe. The manifestation of this is the crisis of representation.

One example of this is the prominence of what we might call para-politicians in the media, particularly on TV. Though he has finally managed to get elected as an MP, Nigel Farage has been the leading para-politician of his generation, and one who shows no sign of changing his modus operandi now that he has a Westminster pass. Even when the Commons is sitting, it is more likely that he will be "asking questions" on GB News than in the chamber. In contrast, a number of Labour politicians who have been rejected by the electorate have been more prominent on TV recently than the newly-elected MPs who defeated them, for example Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debonnaire. Who are they representing? Their claims that their election defeats were somehow unfair is not an attempt to represent the interests of their former constituents but to defend their own sense of entitlement. The fact is that both consider themselves to be members of the political body regardless of the judgement of the electors: the people have squandered their confidence, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht.

These para-politicians are held up as representative of the public interest, but that is an interest heavily mediated by the press and also by opinion pollsters and focus group facilitators, all of whom are disproportionately represented in TV current affairs, and all of whom have a vested interest in presenting politics in reductive terms. Academics rarely feature unless they are willing to behave like crude polemicists, typically of the right, such as Matthew Goodwin or David Starkey. The traditional symbiosis of politicians and journalists is now moving towards partial endosymbiosis, whereby a large subset of politicians are fully absorbed into the media. A good example of this is Ed Balls, a senior politician rejected by the electorate who has made the transition to TV presenter despite having no obvious talent for the job and possessing a rebarbative, hectoring style that has brought regular complaints from viewers. The politico-media caste have no qualms about presenting themselves publicly in this unflattering way. The Spectator garden party isn't a covert conspiracy, after all.

Part of the appearance of managed democracy is the creation of points of conflict that are wholly artificial but which serve as a distraction. The multifarious "culture wars" are one obvious example of this, but the more fundamental dichotomy is between populism, which doesn't actually exist as an "ism", in the sense of a coherent body of political theory, and anti-populism. Because populism is simply a matter of style, all of our politics can be crammed into these two capacious terms and all para-politicians can line up with one or the other. But this doesn't mean that their allegiances are fixed. Populism can be put on and taken off like a coat. While Keir Starmer performs anti-populism as the head of a government committed to restoring the authority of the state, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, spent her first few weeks in office loudly declaiming "Look what they've been hiding from us", as if the Treasury was the equivalent of Imelda Marcos's suddenly revealed shoe collection. Some media commentators sardonically rehearsed the Captain Renault gag - "Shocked, shocked" - but none pointed out that this was a populist manoeuvre.

Perhaps the most interesting act of representation occured on Wednesday when huge numbers of people took to the streets in multiple counter-protests against the rioters. These marches and vigils were clearly organised, and the people attending had coherent political views, even if not everybody subscribed to every opinion on every placard, yet at no point did the media seek to define who the attendees were politically or what they wanted beyond the diametric opposite of the rioters supposed demands (so "Refugees welcome here" rather than "Free Palestine"). Ahead of Wednesday, the government asked that people did not turn out, in order to avoid "inflaming" the situation. In the event, it was the large show of support, a visible representation of actual public opinion, that marginalised the far-right. Shorn of opportunistic looters, the knuckleheads were revealed as tiny in number and organisationally clueless. But who is representing that larger, better organised and coherent public opinion in Parliament? When the Prime Minister is reluctant to even use the word Islamophobia, can it be said that they are represented by anyone beyond the handful of independent MPs currently cold-shouldered by the media or sneered at by the likes of Ed Balls?

Though Wednesday's counter-protests showed up the government's lack of political management, it won't lead to any change of tack. If anything, it will simply reinforce Starmer in his belief that the riots must be dealt with as a law and order issue. This is tactically smart in that the political right cannot criticise such a focus even as they attempt to "understand" the rioters' motivations and squeeze immigration into a debate that was triggered, lest we forget, by the murder of three children by a  clearly-deranged young man who is not an immigrant. But it is strategically dumb because it passes up an opportunity for Labour to reconnect with the communities alienated in the run-up to the general election, including those that unseated Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debonnaire. The inescapable conclusion is that in a liberal managed democracy what matters is not listening to the actual people at the ballot box, nor their organic representatives in the form of large-scale protests, but rather in divining their true feelings through the media and its auxiliary battalions of pollsters and focus groups. Brecht would have understood.