My mum and I were having a discussion – is political rhetoric less linked to reality now than it was in the past? We both agreed that at the fringes of politics it clearly is – conspiracy theories didn’t use to get much airtime in elected UK politics. But where I feel that politicians are getting more brazen in ‘just saying stuff’, my mum is more sceptical. I guess when you’ve lived through Watergate…
What I want to argue here though is that what is undoubtedly the case is that the information ecosystem from which politics draws is less connected to reality than it ever was, and I am convinced that it is influencing political language in explicit but also more subtle ways.
To see this, let’s take a trip to the Reform party conference. It is sort of amusing. The Guardian noted that the platform at the conference is resolutely united in climate change denial, but what about the members?
You can got an read it for yourself but a crude summary would be ‘they are certain that climate change is a hoax, and they think net zero is a conspiracy to siphon off more of our tax money, money we should be allowed to keep, but they’re angry at the UK Government for not investing in a lot more air conditioners because the weather is getting unbearable’.
Resolve that one as you will. Spend money but don’t raise tax. Climate change isn’t happening but I want air conditioners. Taking actions to prevent the weather getting worse is communism, but failing to take actions to make the outcome less awful is a dereliction of duty.
Or, to resolve it in a more honest way, I’ll believe what I want to believe and I won’t for a second let that get in my way when I want to believe the opposite, and I certainly won’t sacrifice my right to get furiously angry because government isn’t doing anything about a thing I have just said isn’t happening.
And then there was John Swinney saying that merging 14 health boards into two is "the opposite of centralisation". Hold on until I get my ruler out because I used to think that Thurso or Dingwall were closer to Inverness than they were to Glasgow or Edinburgh, but that would be to fall into the stupid trap of believing that mathematics is real and geometry actually exists.
It’s like that time my son told me perhaps the cat eat the last donut
Say what you want about John Swinney but on his worst day you’d never mistake him for Donald Trump, and yet yesterday’s pronouncement that dividing something into two makes the individual bits smaller than if you divide it into 14 is pure Orange One. Primary school kids could successfully cross examine him on that.
Then again, Swinney knows this isn’t true because he’s not an idiot. So why is he saying it? To understand that, let’s have a look at one more story. It was in The Herald today and it caused me to raise my eyebrows.
A think tank has done a survey of 40 departing MSPs and they all have serious criticisms of the parliament – everything is stilted, it’s all factional, everyone votes mindlessly in a party block, questions are weak and scripted for backbenchers by party leadership. And of course I’m nodding along to this as I’m reading it.
And yet all I can think as I do is ‘oh fuck off will you – I know who you all are, I know how you voted, I know how many times you rebelled, I know how free spirited you were at FMQ, I know what faction it was that you briefed against’. This is not the first time I’ve spoken to a former MSP who bemoans the fact none of their former colleagues have rebelled, having never rebelled themselves.
So what is all this telling us and what does it mean? I want to argue that there are three reasons that politics is filled with dubious-sounding content these days.
Reason one for the ‘dubious political statement’ is pure propaganda. Politicians tell you things that aren’t true but with great force of self confidence and they do it for propagandising reasons. Much of Boris Johnstone’s time was performative propaganda of saying nonsense things he wanted you to associate with their agenda.
Equally but at the opposite end of the political spectrum, Sturgeon did the same. She would confidently announce Scotland would be a world leader in 5G technology not because it was true but because it was a useful part of the story she was trying to tell. Propaganda gibberish is planned, considered – and works better than it should.
The second reason is best thought of as ‘get me out of here’. For whatever reason, a politician is trapped being asked questions with no good answers, often in a TV studio. They can’t admit the truth because it is a shitshow, so they have to say something. So they just say anything, anything to get out the room without admitting failure.
That sort of gibberish statement is the most common because it is unplanned and entirely understandable. It’s like that time my son told me perhaps the cat eat the last donut. He didn’t think I’d think this was true but it bought him some time to think up a better story. We’ve all done that.
And both these forms of ‘say things I don’t believe’ are as old as the hills. So is the third, but it is the area where I think we’ve got much worse – the pure psychology of it. In the last 50 years there has been a most almighty social swing into rampant individualism. A world where you were brought up to think being selfish or blowing your own trumpet all the time spoke poorly of you is a distant memory.
This is the emotionally-needy blowhard era. We’re all told to feel everything all the time, that we are a beautiful perfect being, that everything we need is within ourselves, that we must manifest our best life – or whatever. This is a process in which we manufacture imaginary versions of ourselves and then fight to defend and reinforce those imaginations.
From the oversharing pal who is desperate to present you a false, curated version of his or her life to the intricate narrative-building of influencers, the story is what counts, and so seeing that story challenged is emotionally difficult. This is the trap we have created – we manufacture a false version of ourselves and then feel distress if that false version is challenged or unravels.
After all, if the individual is the ultimate ‘truth’ and the ‘facts’ contradict the individual, what else are you going to do but change the facts?
So we just say stuff, anything, confidently, to try and rebuild the story. That too is as old as time, but social media has zeroed in on that fact and monetised it and it has exacerbated the problems very significantly. It has normalised it, and that has made its way into politics.
What therefore does this all mean? Because of this increased emphasis on story-building, this emphasis on surface all the time, the stories have become more important than the reality, and then the contradictions must be resolved. We see that clearly with the Reform members – they see themselves as oracles who can see beyond the lies of ‘the establishment’ and gather information to know climate change isn’t real.
That’s the kind of lone wolf rebel they are. But because they’re so important, so lone wolf, it is a disgrace if their habitat is threatened. Not for them sweating uncomfortably in a hot bed during a heatwave. Something must be done, because the world revolves around me.
That is the result of information bubbles, which in turn is a result of our social media information ecosystem, which in turn creates echo chambers. There was always a degree of brazenness about propaganda and a cringe at people saying daft things under pressure, but this relativistic approach to knowledge and facts is an artefact of this rampant individualism.
After all, if the individual is the ultimate ‘truth’ and the ‘facts’ contradict the individual, what else are you going to do but change the facts? And when you do that you can’t form coherent policy or create coalitions of agreement among the public, because they’re all living in relativistic worlds too.
Reform are an extreme and government in Scotland is creaking badly. The sorts of examples of wild claim and apparent hypocrisy I gave above might be understandable in that context, but that is just to reverse cause and effect. Our bizarre, misfiring politics are (in part) a result of our information ecosystem, not its cause.
We should not tolerate a politics where the First Minister can claim 14-into-two isn’t centralisation or where a political party is demanding solutions to a problem it denies exists. But we do, and we don’t do anything much about it.
I have been creeping towards this for a while. My conclusion is becoming quite firm now; we, collectively, cannot leave our information ecosystem in the hands of seemingly psychotic American tech moguls because they’re interests are not ours.
We put up with this ludicrous politics because we think we can’t change its cause. But we can. We just have to stop thinking that the world is something only rich people shape. We need a public good information environment in Scotland and we need to build it for ourselves because no-one else is going to do it. Otherwise this could all get worse.