Get Real: How to Tell it Like it is in a World of Illusions. Eliane Glaser
the new vogue for public apologies. In February 2009, the four bankers most to blame for Britain’s financial meltdown prostrated themselves before the Treasury Select Committee. Or did they? Lord Stevenson, the former chairman of HBOS, said: ‘We are profoundly and, I think I would say, unreservedly sorry at the turn of events’ (the word ‘unreservedly’ invariably signals an underlying reservation). Andy Hornby, the former chief executive of HBOS, said he was ‘extremely sorry for the turn of events that’s brought it about’. And Fred (‘the shred’) Goodwin, the former CEO of RBS, issued an ‘unqualified apology for all of the distress that has been caused’. Caused by whom? Or rather, by what? It seems it was the ‘turn of events’ wot done it. Rather like that ubiquitous ‘I am not a racist/sexist, but I apologise if others happened to take offence’ formula, so much is said, and so little meant.
Or take David Cameron’s ‘listening exercise’ after his plans for the reorganisation of the NHS were comprehensively slammed amid talk of a supposed ‘humiliating U-turn’, or Rupert Murdoch’s pledge to make Sky News independent while bidding for full control of BSkyB, or his subsequent decision to close the News of the World. These performances of compliant submission make me think of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of subversion and containment. In an essay entitled ‘Invisible Bullets’, the influential Renaissance literature scholar argued that far from undermining Prince Hal’s royal status, the Falstaffian revelry of his rebellious years actually consolidates it. Monarchy thrives on dissent; it needs subversion and apparent weakness to appear truly strong. Sometimes it even produces subversion – the agent provocateur. This is power as theatre, as display rather than brute force, invisible rather than real bullets. It’s power that is perfectly suited, Greenblatt notes, to an Elizabethan government with no standing army; and it’s also just the ticket for a polite, mature democracy like modern-day Britain or America. It’s an answer to the oft-repeated question of how Elizabethan plays that appear to stick two fingers up at the monarchy could be put on in an absolutist state: because they weren’t really subversive at all. Of course, not all subversion is containment: it’s more up for grabs than that. And there’s also a fair amount of brute force around, too. But the theory of subversion and containment helps to explain why modern politics is so exasperating: because all this apparent weakness is actually a form of soft power. Once you start spotting examples, you see them all over the place: at the height of the phone-hacking scandal Cameron called a press conference in which he told reporters, ‘The truth is, we’ve all been in this together.’ This seemingly blanket admission was simultaneously the exact opposite – a ploy designed to diffuse the focus of blame.
The people-power rhetoric fits right in with a broader delusion. Politicians and the public alike are colluding in a collective act of worship at the inverted altar of the underdog. This is the age of the utopian belief in Twitter and Facebook, the public adoration of ordinary heroes, fictional and semi-fictional: the Susan Boyles, Billy Elliots and Slumdog Millionaires; and Antony Gormley’s ‘democratic’ art project, One & Other, which placed 2,400 ordinary people on the pedestal of Trafalgar Square’s empty fourth plinth. Bring on the bonfire of the vanities: those ivory-tower universities that value educational excellence, the avant-garde exhibitions that don’t cater for school parties, and the professional establishment – those doctors and lawyers who dare to follow their own codes of conduct, to exercise independent discretion, to claim specialised expertise. Down with the professional literary critic: step forward Devon-based health visitor Lynne Hatwell, courted by magazines and chat shows, whose blog champions ‘the voice of the people’.
After the financial crash none other than the former head of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed that ‘Today, as we sit among the ruins of the old order, we can think of ourselves as active participants in the process of creating a new world.’ I heard a hundred pronouncements that these ‘active participants’ would no longer tolerate the telephone-number salaries and lavish bonuses of the Square Mile and Wall Street. But those warnings are looking more and more like a containment strategy to me. Yes, there were protests against the subsequent public-spending cuts in the UK, but they were dwarfed by the large-scale uprisings in the Arab world, and also by the million-strong crowd that gathered in central London in April 2011 to celebrate Kate and Wills’ wedding. And the fascinated mixture of horror and glee with which spectacles of disorder are represented is a sign of just how rare they are. During the student protests against tuition fees in 2010, the cameramen far outnumbered the windowsmashers. The scale of the coverage served to contain the protest by overplaying its extent. The demonstrations didn’t exactly enjoy widespread public support, either. On my favourite mood-of-the-nation phone-in programme, caller after caller ticked off those ‘feral thugs’ bent on destroying private property. On the eve of the cuts’ implementation, a poll revealed that 57 per cent of the British public supported them; 29 per cent thought they should go even further. The destruction of Ireland’s economy by casino bankers hardly created a winter of discontent. The line about all sectors of society needing to ‘share the pain’ of the recession seemed to go down well enough. Blitz-spirit austerity chic was everywhere. Since we were ‘all in it together’, we had to ‘pull together’. We’d been abusing our TK Maxx storecards like there was no tomorrow, and this strong fiscal medicine would do us good. David Cameron even ‘consulted’ the public on which cuts they ‘wanted’: a performance which the SDLP MP Mark Durkan termed ‘the axe-factor’. And the City minister Lord Myners was able to get away with a Guardian article on bankers’ bonuses with the maddeningly patronising headline: ‘You are Right to be Angry’. This apparent kowtowing was a smokescreen for the reinstatement of the old global financial order.
The real outrage is that our unquestioning belief in the new grassroots revolution goes right alongside a massive reduction in the political will exercised by ordinary people. People power is a figleaf for the real power deficit. The worthy parade of the institutions of ‘monitory democracy’ is a sop to genuine accountability, a compensatory gimmick to plug the hole left by the decline of representative democracy. Focus-group politics is power-seeking dressed up as voter empowerment. Public inquiries are sham. Regulatory bodies are toothless. Complaints procedures and ombudsmen sound great on paper, but try to use them in practice and you’ll quickly find yourself in a Kafka-esque world of box-ticking and the virtual keeping up of appearances. There’s a procedure for everything, but none of them has bite. The British Parliament is increasingly a rubber-stamp exercise controlled by the whips. Parties now routinely ignore their election pledges, the most recent and most brazen culprit being the coalition government of 2010, whose long list of broken promises includes an end to ‘top-down reorganisation of the NHS’, followed by an attempt at the biggest top-down reorganisation the NHS has ever seen. The role of prime minister is becoming more and more presidential. Governments appear to lop their own limbs off in the name of small-state localism, but this just ends up consolidating elite control. Because the state doesn’t just impose power; it’s a mechanism for implementing the people’s will. Despite the displays of humility, political leaders seem to be able to get away with anything: after the débâcle of Iraq, it’s not clear what would now constitute a resignable offence. The phone-hacking scandal that flared up in 2011 revealed yet another cognitive dissonance: all the cant about modern transparency was shown to be plainly at odds with the reality of the corruption infecting a huge media empire, the police, and successive governments.
In addition to being intimidated by media tycoons, politicians are ultimately beholden not to the electorate but to the financial markets. After the announcement of massive public-sector spending cuts, an economist at BNP Paribas bank said that ‘If the austerity measures had not been delivered the markets would have gone mad.’ Everywhere, corporate and financial lobbies influence politics on an unprecedented scale: for all the talk of protecting what’s left of British industry, the government didn’t stop the sale of Cadbury to Kraft, or prevent Diageo closing the Johnnie Walker plant at Kilmarnock. And in the US, the Supreme Court has reversed a century-old ban on companies funding political campaigns, ensuring even greater corporate clout. The privatising demands of credit-ratings agencies trump Greece and Portugal’s national democracies. Just as capitalism hides the reality of powerful, deadening monopolies behind the fiction of the bustling marketplace, modern politics is the art of disguising top-down as bottom-up.
Yes, the protests across the Arab