Improvisational Policies in the Age of Jazz Politics

Truss and Sunak are making up as they go along....

By the time you read this, proposals to electrify the English coastline will have been announced by one or both candidates for the Tory leadership. Or perhaps not given the price of kilowatts hours these days. Maybe they’ll have other ideas involving sentient vegetables that pick themselves or an army of militant squid or.. well… we really don’t know what’s coming next from these two. Their campaigns have reached the Jazz Age, where candidates loosely riff over their talking points.

Be-bop-a-billions-cut-from-the-civil-service…

She-ba-do-ba-let’s-do-something-about-windmills…

There are now so many policies being made up on the hoof, Truss and Sunak should be investigated by the Jockey Club. Yet for a party trying to convince the country that we’re in this mess together, the two prospective leaders are doing a rather shabby job of it. Such is the nature of the contest when it’s not Joe and Jennifer Public they need to win over but Rupert and Belinda Tory who are totally unrepresentative of the rest of the country. The candidates frenzying in their wish to please, grabbing for any point of leverage, however crude and ugly the consequential politics.

Fa-la-bing-a-ling-a-bring-back-flogging…

Na-na-nanny-o-nominate-Big-Dog-for-NATO…

The big U-turns will occur much later, of course, once a leader is elected and they need to convince a very different electorate that they’re not the Tories they promised to be at all these hustings. They are really right-leaning centrists with a social conscience and oodles of compassion.

Fa-fa-diddly-oh-free-kittens-for-all…

Yet it exposes the ridiculous intellectual vacuum lying at the heart of our politics. Politicians believe what they believe for the time it’s convenient for them to believe it. Politics is increasingly becoming the art of knowing what people mean despite the words coming out of their mouths: low tax when they mean high tax, big government when they say small, for the people when they mean for the few. Up means down and libertarianism is the new term for what was previously known as revolutionary Marxism (yes, I’m thinking of those shitheels over at Spiked).

In fairness, it’s not just the Tories who are playing this game. Labour’s quest for power asks many of them to make sacrifices that they are clearly finding unconscionable, like not joining picket lines or appearing on pro-Russian propaganda channels blaming the West for prolonging the war by arming Ukraine. Many on the Left accuse the leadership of betraying true socialist values and the very meaning of the labour movement. They might have a point, even if it is a naïve understanding of how winning elections works. But wouldn’t it be so refreshing to hear any politician state clearly what they believe without the constant need for political answers?

In terms of the Tory race, however, it’s all about a fresh start that continues the good work, being the continuity candidate whilst being entirely different to what came before. And then, of course, there’s also the belief in freedom, uncensored speech, and the value of a free press, which is probably why Liz Truss’s campaign team were quick to blame the press for what they called a “wilful misrepresentation of our campaign”. What they actually meant was “accurately reporting something we didn’t properly think through” after Tory MP’s reacted to their proposal to cut wages for civil servants outside London. Some had termed it “pay-cuts for northerners”.

Gee-gaw-googly-good-luck-in-those-red-wall-constituencies-chaps…

It’s perhaps no wonder that Sunak is sensing a slight uptick in his chances. It’s one of those contests where the more the voters get to see the front runner, the less attractive they begin to look. Being the underdog might be an advantage in a race to obscurity, where the winner is the person who the voters have got to dislike the least.

Dip-da-doddy-you-didn’t-see-me-right?