Low Grade Politicians

James Melville

via X

August 27, 2024

One of the major problems with politics today is that our politicians are not in the same league of intellectual rigour, commitment to public service, conviction politics and mastering a brief as many of our politicians from the 70s, 80s & 90s.

The decline in standards of our politicians is absolutely horrendous. We have the worst politicians at exactly the worst time. A political race to the bottom. Our political discourse is scraping so far down the bottom of the barrel that it is in danger of striking magma.

Politics should not be about inconsistent, fake slogans to frame binary, simplistic choices. Instead, politics should be about a fundamental understanding that big decisions require a knowledge of big details, a willingness to deal with the complexities and truth. Politicians should have the intellectual rigour and emotional capacity to master the brief.

Instead, we have vacuous political leaders who have absolutely no vision on how to improve societies, show an unwillingness to engage with detail and then when a crisis happens (often caused by governments), they react late rather than lead early.

Instead, many of them appear to prioritise attending the next virtue signalling global jamboree like COP, G20 or Davos where they can hobnob with billionaires and discuss ‘saving the planet’ rather than prioritising saving their own countries. We have exactly the wrong leaders at exactly the wrong time. We are seeing a slide towards a basic-level political narrative. Anti-intellectualism has become the new political populism and politics has become a culture war against insight and knowledge. Idiocracy has become normalised.

We now appear to be at a point in our society where we simply lack the political critical thinking to call out the falsehoods issued within our political leaders. We appear to be learning facts about what doesn’t matter, but not how to think about what really matters and how to solve problems that matter. The damage that rewards the cult of the celebrity politician is considerable.

Their activities dumb down our discourse, do not provide well thought-out, long-term solutions and simply provide an X Factor-style reality TV for political demagogues, and meanwhile, all the important stuff, like fixing the problems that many of our politicians created, remain disturbingly unresolved.

We used to pay taxes for safe communities, libraries, community leisure and sports facilities, fit for purpose schools and hospitals, quick diagnosis and treatments within the NHS, emergency services arriving on time, cost effective and efficient utilities, roads without potholes and drains and rivers that were regularly cleared to prevent flooding.

Now we pay higher taxes yet all of the above are diminishing - yet our tax money is being spent on endless wars, MPs expenses, politicians and royalty flying around the world on private jets, whilst telling us plebs to reduce our carbon footprints, dodgy contracts given to government cronies and endless forms of digital ID and surveillance.

We are being fleeced by our own governments to be on the receiving end of diminished public services and infrastructures but at the same time, the super-rich are benefiting from the biggest transfer of wealth in history.

The social contract is now an absolute piss-take. These political shysters (aided and abetted by our legacy media) have sought to destroy critical thinking, balanced debate and nuance and have replaced it with something much worse: nothingness – except simplistic messages that lead to divide and rule and often dangerous decision-making by voters.

Our politicians frame their pitch during election campaigns as a vote for them equating to a new way of politics. But this is usually a lie. All we get is more of the same. A race to the bottom. All that’s left is the grotesque political emptiness of the emperor’s new clothes, which, in times of crisis, gets dangerously exposed for what it is – complete nothingness.

© James Melville, 2024