- Back home, our politicians are busy calling each other names, trading insults and engaging in verbal contests that seem to have very little to do with the lives of the people they want to lead.
- Who is empty? Who is foolish? Who is irrelevant? Who has the bigger crowd? Who can deliver the most devastating put-down?
A few weeks ago, Andy Burnham, the Prime Minister of the UK,
posted a video complaining about people playing videos loudly on their phones
on trains, without headphones, inconveniencing everyone else. He said something
needed to be done about it.
Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the UK Conservative Party,
responded with her own video, arguing for more police officers and stronger
enforcement.
Two politicians. Two different approaches. A debate about a
problem people actually experience in their daily lives.
Now, imagine that.
Back home, our politicians are busy calling each other names,
trading insults and engaging in verbal contests that seem to have very little
to do with the lives of the people they want to lead.
Who is empty? Who is foolish? Who is irrelevant? Who has the
bigger crowd? Who can deliver the most devastating put-down?
And in all this back and forth, where are the ideas?
Disagreement is the very essence of democracy. We should want
our politicians to challenge one another, question each other's proposals and
offer competing solutions. That is how voters get to compare alternatives and
make informed choices.
It takes very little to throw an insult. It takes considerably
more to develop a credible policy, explain how it will be implemented, where
the money will come from and how the public will know whether it has worked.
Perhaps that is why the insults are so easy to come by, while
the substance is so difficult to find.
And we, the public, have become spectators in this theatre. We
debate who won the exchange, who landed the better punch and whose video
attracted more views. Meanwhile, the questions that should matter most remain
unanswered.
Of course, the British political scene is hardly a model of
civility. But the example offers a useful reminder: Politics can be a contest
of ideas, approaches and solutions. Politicians can disagree about the problem,
let alone how to solve it, without making the entire debate about each other's
personalities.
We must stop confusing entertainment with competence.
The business of politics is not to prove that your opponent is
an idiot. It is to convince the public that you have something better to offer.
So, the next time a politician takes the microphone to tell us
how useless, foolish or unqualified their opponent is, perhaps we should ask a
simple question: Fine. But what, precisely, would you do differently?
Because the contest for political power should be about who
can make our lives better, not who can insult the other person more creatively.
That’s my take.