Politics: not talking the talk

By Richard North - September 3, 2023

David Smith, the economics editor for The Times, has an article in Saturday’s online edition, listing what he calls: “The 8 things politicians should be taking (sic) about (but aren’t)”.

In certain senses, it is a facile article. In general, the only way we get to know what the politicians are talking about is through the media, which supposedly keeps us informed about that state of the political discourse.

Further, the media and politicians tend to act as a nexus. The media picks up what the politicians are saying, amplifies it and plays it back to them, whence the politicians talk about what’s in the media. This tends to be something of a closed loop to the extent that, if the politicians are not talking about a particular subject, it’s because the media isn’t raising it.

In his sub-heading, Smith writes, “Productivity is low, housing and healthcare are in crisis”, then asking: “So why aren’t the serious issues facing the country being tackled?” That, in fact, is a different issue. Things that are tackled aren’t necessarily being talked about, and vice-versa.

For instance, the subject of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) was being very actively tackled by the Department for Education (DfE) during the summer, but I didn’t notice either politicians or the media talking about it in the open during the silly season.

In fact, it turns out that the issue was first raised in public by a Somerset-based structural engineer who wrote in 1995 to his trade magazine to warn of a “booby trap” hidden in the fabric of the nation’s schools.

Yet nothing was done to raise the public profile of the issue until the last-minute decision on Thursday to shut hundreds of classrooms and other buildings at 156 schools, days before pupils return from their summer holidays.

Then and only then does the national media wake up to the problem, with the BBC going into overdrive, publishing simplistic “explainers” about a problem that has been known in the industry for nearly thirty years, that it hadn’t noticed before.

Had the media in general been on the ball, it might have noticed that the Building Research Establishment (BRE) issued a warning bulletin in 1996, calling for roofs incorporating pre-1980 RAAC planks to be inspected, and their condition assessed.

This is the sort of thing that the BRE might have raised with one or other of the select committees in parliament, and certainly with government departments, eventually feeding into the parliamentary system so that it was debated in the House. Ministers would be warned to take timely action, that being duly published by the media.

But the system doesn’t work that way anymore and hasn’t for decades. It didn’t work for Grenfell Tower, when the BRE failed to sound a warning about inflammable insulating material, and the EU fudged the issue, despite numerous examples of real danger.

Now, years too late, the politicians are doubtless talking about the RAAC issue, and will be talking even more about it in the months to come. But the damage is done, and the nation will have to bear the burden of the costs, along with the costs of so many other avoidable problems.

For those who might complain that there is an element of being “wise after the event”, one should recall that it is the business of government to be wise before the event, to which effect we pay a very large number of people generously large sums of money, for them to head off problems at the pass before they become expensive crises.

As for media resources, one might note that the Sunday Times spares no expense today in publishing a lengthy article headed “Danny Cipriani: ‘I used to sleep with three women a day’” – this from the newspaper which broke the Thalidomide story.

Thus, to return to Smith’s question, “So why aren’t the serious issues facing the country being tackled?”, part of the answer lies in the failure of the media to do its job, digging into the difficult and complex – and very often very technical – issues to bring them to light.

Instead, the media devotes itself to titillation and trivia, then indulging in overkill when reporting on events of which it had no part in bringing to the fore, expending enormous effort on racy political narratives (often disguised book promotions) while ignoring the reality of core issues which have direct effects on the welfare on the nation.

As to the issues which Smith feels are being ignored by the politicians, as well as the low productivity, housing and healthcare that he identifies in his sub-heading, he also lists in his article: strikes; housebuilding; the treadmill of 14-21 education; affording the NHS; a complex and inefficient tax system; and relations with the EU. Nonetheless, he does concede that there are other issues not being talked about.

What is interesting here, therefore, is not only the issues Smith includes, but the ones he leaves out. I would say that there is endless (if fruitless) political discussion on the NHS, on housebuilding and education, to name but a few. By contrast, high on my list for subjects neglected by politicians is, rather predictably, Africa.

For sure, we are at last getting some media coverage of recent events, even if it is superficial and, at times, contradictory, where different authors seem to be writing about separate continents, while none of them seem capable of understanding the core issues.

In that respect, Smith should not just be asking whether politicians (with or without the media) are talking about particular subjects. Any veteran observer of the debates in the Commons will know full-well that politicians are capable of talking about a wide range of subjects (with many of the debates poorly or unreported). But too often, what they are saying is drivel.

Thus, Smith should also address the quality of discourse, asking why so many issues are treated in such a superficial or even vacuous manner that the input of politicians becomes largely irrelevant. They simply use up bandwidth, without adding anything useful to the debate.

If quality was a concern, at the top of my list would be net-zero – a subject on which very few MPs seems to be able to address with any coherence. One of the latest politico-media contributions is a story in the Sunday Telegraph which tells us that Sunak is to “defy net zero demand to halt airport expansion”.

The government, it seems, is set to rebuff the Climate Change Committee’s recommendations on this matter, with ministers believing that airport growth will have a “key role” in boosting the UK’s global links and helping to grow the economy.

Yet, the ST tells us, rejecting the CCC’s recommendations would set the government up for a major legal clash with environmental groups. Last year, we are told, a High Court judgment said that “considerable weight” should be given to its advice.

And, as we know, a group including Greenpeace is about to present its case in a full judicial review hearing, on the implementation of the government’s net-zero targets.

There, we now learn, the group is planning to cite the committee’s latest recommendation on airport expansions, with the likelihood that Sunak will have to fall into line and tone down his ambitions.

In any honest and comprehensive discussion, therefore, the public should always be reminded that, on net-zero, the government is bound hand and foot by the Climate Change Act and has no scope for discretion. Any talk of “defiance” is so much meaningless rhetoric. As long as the Act is in place, the net-zero agenda will remain intact.

We need, therefore, for politicians to do something more than simply talk the talk. What they say must have meaning and direct relevance to the issues at hand. Not talking the talk is the least of our problems.