Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of the professional politician.

I gave a short speech last week at a Catholic church in Manor House, North London.  Ostensibly an ‘announcement’ at the end of the service, the idea was to collect the names and contact numbers of about 15-20 people within the congregation who would be interested in getting more involved with London Citizens and the concept of Community Organising.  

The speech was utterly brilliant.  I can say this, purely because none of it was my own – I started with Barack, repeated a key passage from within the sermon, swapped London for Athens via Pericles, and then swung back via the new President’s Iowa Caucus victory speech.  At the end of it all when people were coming up to me to sign up, one man asked “so what political party do you belong to?”  “Oh… no, no, no,” I started, in my pre-rehearsed script about broad-based organising being political but non-partisan…  He cut me off: “Yeah, I know,” he said.  “But what party are you personally a member of?  What are you going to do after this?”

Politics as an end in itself

I’m not a member of any political party I told him, which is true.  But I didn’t have the heart to tell him the real answer.  If I had given in and been brutally honest – as I contemplated for all of about half a second – I would have responded, “Mate, if I wanted a political career, there is simply no way on earth I would be standing around here, wasting my time, talking to the likes you.”  Perhaps I should have said that.  Because if I had, it really wouldn’t have been a slight upon him.  Rather, it is my honest and very sad reflection upon how ‘democratic politics’ in this country is currently in the process of being sewn up for generations to come by a new class of professional politicos. 

I love young people – they’re politics is glorious, no matter which side of the aisle they sit.  I owe the world to the student movement – it is one of the proudest institutions within our democracy and helped shape so much of what we can be proud of about the post war years.  But our generation – aided and abetted, I might add, by the marketisation of higher education – is lining up to carry out Thatcher’s children’s legacy and fuck democracy for generations to come. 

It is a new class system.  That’s all it is.

In the bad old days, at least you knew where you stood.  Eton, Oxford, Westminster – possibly via a country estate – you were a Tory MP for life.  But with the coming of the Education Act of 1944 and all the expanse of higher education that follow thereafter, we now have a lot more progressive young individuals floating around Westminster.  The problem is, they too are forming a political class.

As much as I revile the public school system, I know full well that it is no more a young student’s ‘fault’ that they were sent to Eton as it was my ‘fault’ that I went Hazelwick Comprehensive.  And, of course, any rational individual then tries to get into the best university they can.  Where ‘fault’ does come into it, however, is when these young guns proceed to live in their middle-class parents houses free of charge whilst undertaking a six-month unpaid internship (see previous fuming rant on unpaid internships), immediately after which, at the tender age of twenty-something, they seemless swan  into role of apparatchik, extol their wisdom upon legislation and the working people of this nation, and never look back.

Guardian Reading Parents –> Good School –> University –> Policy Analyst / Parliamentary Researcher –> Speacial Advisor / Think Tank –> MP –> Cabinet Member.  And we wonder why they are so out of touch…

Special Advisors: do as you are told often enough so you can get to the top, who cares who you once were?

Don’t misinterpret what I am saying here.  I am not suggesting that we start imposing quotas for ‘real working class people’ in parliament.  Nor am I lamenting Labour minded civil servants, or arguing that personal ambition is evil per se.  I simply feel that – like Boris Johnson, of all people, bumbled somewhat insincerely last week – only when “If, like Cincinnatus, we were to be called from our plough, should we serve.” 

So what am I trying to say here?  Put simply, just this: a worryingly large proportion of our generation is getting its careerist cart before its supposedly moral horse.  These people need to get out of Westminster and plough a fucking field, or at the very least speak to someone who does.  Because despite all their Chardonnay induced a priori prophesies to contrary, trust me when I say to you that YOU WILL BE NO BETTER THAN THOSE YOU PRESUME TO EXIST ON A LOWER MORAL PLANE until you treat the office with the dignity it deserves, and that only comes through a genuine experience of what you are trying to change.