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In politics, the less beef the better Samuel Brittan Financial Times 19/05/06 The recently elected British Conservative leader David Cameron has attracted attention both by his jettisoning of many traditional Conservative policies and by trying to project a different lifestyle. So far he has had at least some success. But can anything be said in more general terms about the nature of his operation? The British 18th-century political theorist Edmund Burke defined a political party as “a group of men who intend to promote the public welfare upon some principles upon which they are all agreed”. This assumes that voters have definite beliefs about policy, represented by parties expected to implement them. But no mass democracy could or did work in this way. Studies pioneered by the Michigan School of American political scientists showed that most voters were largely oblivious to the policy debates in the legislature and the press. The strongest claim that could be made was that voters had a rough general impression of the stands of main parties on a few of the headline issues when these were sufficiently simple. This lack of detailed knowledge came to be called “rational ignorance”. The chances that any one person’s votes will affect the outcome are so vanishingly small that it does not make sense for voters to immerse themselves in political issues, except as entertainment. In his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph Schumpeter, the Austro-American economist, put forward a rival interpretation of democracy as “an institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for people’s votes”. Politicians are entrepreneurs who deal in votes just as oilmen deal in oil. The competitive theory can explain why the policies of the main parties are likely to resemble each other far more than partisan enthusiasts would like. The fact that most electors have “an indeterminate bundle of vague impulses loosely playing on given slogans and mistaken impressions” is not fatal if the job of the elector is to choose between competing teams. Clearly the theory is an oversimplification. When there is a large majority the party in power can afford to pay an ideological dividend to core supporters, as Labour did with its postwar nationalisations but which Tony Blair has declined to do. The competitive theory gives a pretty good picture of how politics operates in normal times, at least in a two-party system. It could be seen best at work in the first postwar Conservative government of 1951-1964 – which Labour dubbed “the 13 wasted years” – and again under the Blair regime since 1997. Mr Cameron marks a return to the non-ideological competitive model on the Tory side. Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer, would no doubt make a few gestures to Labour’s hard core; but it is a safe bet that his main effort would be to reassure the mass of voter-consumers in the middle. None of this means that argument about policy is a waste of time. The big difference between the “wasted years” and today is that while in the earlier period policy innovators tried to gain the ears of civil servants and the academic establishment, today it is at least as important to gain media headlines and the ears of political advisers. That indefinable quality called charisma is helpful but not absolutely essential for a winning leader. No one ever used such a word about Clement Attlee, Britain’s postwar Labour prime minister. The outstanding fact about charisma is that it nearly always fades away. The British 19th-century historian Lord Macaulay explained the process in his essay on the downfall of the poet Byron: “His writings and his character lost the charm of novelty. He had been guilty of the offence which, of all offences, is punished most severely; he had been overpraised. He had excited too warm an interest; and the public with its usual justice, chastised him for its own folly.” Obviously, democracy on the model described has weaknesses. But the media demand that Mr Cameron should produce “policies” will only make matters worse to the extent that it is heeded. It does not require great foresight to realise that detailed undertakings produced by a mixture of backroom boys and businessmen with time to spare will be at best outdated and at worst harmful by the time an opposition party has come to office. At most the voter needs a very general steer of the kind given, for instance, by Kenneth Clarke, the former Conservative chancellor, when he said that in any given situation the tax burden would be less under the Tories than under Labour. When Gary Hart, the US Democratic senator, was contemplating running for his party’s presidential nomination the press hounded him for his insufficiently detailed policies by chanting “Where’s the beef?” Beef in that context meant handouts for special-interest groups financed at the expense of the taxpayer or consumer. The less “beef” we have in the run-up to the next UK election the better.
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