If I were the Prime Minister…

I’ve just been watch­ing a new BBC series about a shop man­ager from York­shire who becomes Prime Min­is­ter on a wave of pub­lic sup­port and euphoria, but without hav­ing the fog­gi­est about polit­ics, the eco­nomy, or really any­thing except run­ning a super­mar­ket and look­ing after a fam­ily. On one level it’s just another drama, with laughs and spills like any other, but on another it’s a pretty ser­i­ous ques­tion. Are politi­cians so far removed from ‘real life’ that over­whelm­ing pub­lic sup­port would fall upon a com­plete lay­man? Prob­ably not, thank­fully. But they are quite far removed, aren’t they? As far as the old test goes, I doubt many of them know the price of a price of milk. But then, I’m not sure that I know the price of a pint of milk and most people would say that I too am pretty far removed from real life.

I may seem to have strayed of topic, but I’m not sure I have. In today’s world, polit­ics isn’t about every everyman’s every­day life. The gov­ern­ment has to deal with every­day prob­lems, it’s true: Schools are fail­ing, hos­pit­als are too, so the papers say, although the NHS is still one of, if not the best health sys­tem in the world. But what is grow­ing to be the most import­ant thing that the gov­ern­ment has to deal with is not the every­day, but the extraordin­ary, things that most people couldn’t even con­ceive of or ima­gine. Ter­ror­ism, eco­nomic crisis, war, eth­ics; all of these are things that, without an in depth know­ledge, can­not be dealt with, or often even understood.

Now I’m not try­ing to exon­er­ate the gov­ern­ment, of our coun­try or any other. In fact, there are a few things that they’ve made a com­plete hash of, the edu­ca­tion sys­tem being, for me, the big­gie. But we com­plain that our politi­cians are devi­ous and dis­hon­est, when really, if they weren’t, Eng­land wouldn’t last a moment. It’s a big, mean world out there, run by big mean people, and I’m quite glad we have our own abso­lute bas­tards to match them. I’ll be hon­est, I have no idea where I stand on this. I have no idea how to fix our schools, hos­pit­als, eco­nomy or any of the other things that the gov­ern­ment is charged with doing. Maybe they don’t either. One thing I am sure of is that nor do most of the people who claim that they can. Hardly any­one thinks they can fix a boiler, a car or com­puter, so why does every­one think that they could take on a coun­try, espe­cially one as com­plex as our own.

The point of demo­cracy, and by exten­sion of polit­ics, is to ful­fil the util­it­arian ideal, to do what is best for the major­ity, and what the major­ity wants. It is to del­eg­ate to an élite of experts and spe­cial­ists the respons­ib­il­ity of run­ning the most com­plex of all machines: a state. I wouldn’t let a plumber remove my appendix; I prob­ably wouldn’t even let a plumber fix my com­puter. So why should I let any­one but a politi­cian, be they a brick layer, a doc­tor or a pro­fessor at Oxford Uni­ver­sity, run my coun­try? This task, as with everything else, is best left to the experts. A coun­try doesn’t run itself, and though we’ve taken the rough with the smooth, ours is still run­ning, or at the very least determ­inedly limping.

And if I were Prime Min­is­ter? I’d be brick­ing it…

Related posts:

1. Tak­ing a Stand