All Over Bar the Shouting

Sunak, Starmer, and the Clash of the Tin Men

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, the late, great Neil Postman tells the story of the famous 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Judge Stephen A. Douglas in Ottawa, Illinois, about slavery and the extension of slavery in the union. According to Postman, in the first of these debates, Douglas spoke for one hour, after which Lincoln was given an hour and a half to reply. Douglas was then given another half hour to respond.

In an 1854 debate between the two, Douglas spoke for three hours, before Lincoln was allowed to respond. When his time came, Lincoln pointed out to his audience that it was 5 pm, and suggested that the audience go home for supper, before returning for another four hours of debate.

That is what happened, and Postman described the political culture of mid-nineteenth century America and the tradition of the three-hour ‘stump speaker’ that made such debates possible. The Lincoln-Douglas debates were conducted ‘amid a carnival-like atmosphere. Bands played (although not during the debates), hawkers sold their wares, children romped, liquor was available’. Once the debates began, the atmosphere changed:

Although audiences were mostly respectful and attentive, they were not quiet or unemotional. Throughout the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for example, people shouted encouragement to the speakers (“You tell ‘em, Abe!”) or voiced terse expressions of scorn (“Answer that one, if you can”). Applause was frequent, usually reserved for a humorous or elegant phrase or a cogent point.

Such applause was not sought. As Postman tells it:

At the first debate in Ottawa, Douglas responded to lengthy applause with a remarkable and revealing statement. “ My friends,” he said, “silence will be more acceptable to me in the discussion of these questions than applause. I desire to address myself to your judgment, your understanding, and your consciences, and not to your passions or your enthusiasms.”

Postman argued that such debates had become impossible in the late twentieth century, in part, because the visual medium of television encouraged a form of knowledge acquisition and public discussion that was based on ‘amusement’, brevity and constant distraction. Nineteenth century American audiences, he suggested, had a longer attention span; they were capable of following ‘lengthy and complex sentences aurally,’ and they lived in a ‘typographical’ age in which ‘the use of language as a means of complex argument was an important, pleasurable and common form of discourse in almost every public arena.’

There is no space here to do justice to Postman’s compelling reflections on typographical culture versus visual culture, or his prescient analysis of the degradation of ‘public discourse in an age of show business’. But bear in mind that his book was written in 1985, long before Smartphones, the Internet, Twitter, Tiktok, and a range of other distractions, and yet it really does speak to the degraded public discourse of our own era.

Take the excruciating encounter between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak last week. Personally, I loathe these ‘debates’ at the best of times, as some men hate hell. I detest the pugnacious ‘debate me’ gladiatorial format; the tedious slogans and soundbites; the shallow search for bursts of applause and ‘gotcha’ moments; the ludicrous game show format, in which the contenders - or should I say ‘contestants’ stand in a glitzy studio like guests on Pointless.

I dislike the ‘Strictly’ voting criteria through which these confrontations are judged, which too often seems to be based on whether your guy ‘crushed’ the other guy, or got the most applause, or talked over his or her opponent.

I rarely, if ever, learn anything from these debates. If I manage to stick them out to the end, I invariably regret it, and go to bed feeling a vague sense of existential horror, wondering how it is that a country filled with intelligent, thoughtful people can produce such excruciating interactions at supposedly critical moments in their histories such as a national election.

Even by these dismal standards, last week’s not-so-great debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Some of my frustration - and I don’t think I was the only one to feel this - concerned the ‘showbiz’ format itself, which as always closed down any space for discussion, reflection, exposition, or serious analysis. You’re not going to get much Lincoln-Douglas oratory, when policy discussions are reduced to one or two minute interactions - if that.

But the real problem was the quality of the participants, who had so little difference between them and so little to say of any substance. Inevitably the subject of taxation came up, and we were immediately back in the same tedious ‘Labour will put up your taxes versus Tories have put them up even more than we would’ pointscoring territory.

What about an argument that properly-funded public services require higher - calibrated - taxation? Forget it Jake, this is UKtown. And then there was immigration, which as always revolved round acrimonious accusations about who had/would let more immigrants in.

Political debate in the context of an election should give voters the opportunity to consider and reflect upon the wider ramifications of whatever is being discussed, and make informed choices on the basis of issues that are honestly explained and presented to them.

This almost never happens in the UK. What we get instead are carefully-rehearsed comms exercises and choreographed ‘clashes’ aimed at producing the desired social media soundbites and - from the point of view of the broadcaster - a few moments of ‘good tv.’ We get politicians who often have no interest in nuance or complexity, and every interest in avoiding both, in order to present themselves as the solution to the problems they’ve described, even if it isn’t clear whether they can actually solve them.

This is how we ‘amuse ourselves to death’, but there was nothing amusing about last week’s angry, shouty, badly-chaired confrontation between two equally uninspiring and unconvincing politicians.

Sunak was the worst offender. He’s obviously under instructions to push back against his empty hologram persona and demonstrate that, contrary to the perceptions of many, he is, in fact, a human being. He did this primarily by shouting - and also by lying.

No wonder Starmer was visibly wincing. Someone must have told Sunak to sound ‘passionate’, but he mostly sounded angry, manic, petulant and disrespectful, not only to his fellow-contestant, but to the hapless interlocutor, and to the studio audience and the millions unfortunate enough to watch this profoundly depressing spectacle.

Because really, if your child behaved like Sunak, you would have a quiet word and perhaps suggest the naughty stair. But Etchingham did nothing to interrupt his performance - great television! And the next day, the right-wing press hailed the arrival of ‘fiery Rishi’ - seemingly oblivious to the fact that behaving like an angry road-rage driver or a late-night drunk does not make you fiery - it makes you rude and a bit of a jerk.

Leonardo da Vinci once wrote, ‘where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge’, but knowledge was not the aim of Sunak’s hyperactive inbetweener-on-crack play-acting. He is the despised prime minister of a political party heading for a defeat unlike anything it has ever known, almost entirely because of its own moral depravity, fanaticism, corruption, incompetence and stupid political decisions.

In these circumstances, Sunak - elected by no one outside his own party and unloved by most people in and outside it - can only seek to obfuscate and distract from that outcome, by telling lies, drowning out his opponent, and braying scurrilous soundbites ‘£2000 taxes!’, ‘No plan!’’, ‘Won’t press the nuclear button!’

Yes, the good old nuclear button - can’t have an election without knowing who is tough enough to incinerate a few million people without qualms somewhere, can we?

Meanwhile, Sunak’s opponent is a man who has nothing to do except not be Tory, and is so terrified of saying anything that might be construed as being even the teeny-weeniest bit radical, leftist, or controversial, that he ended up sounding like a Tory from another era.

How dispiriting is it to hear the next Labour prime minister attacking Sunak for having too liberal an immigration policy? Particularly coming from the man who once said, in 2017, that ‘Any approach that prioritises immigration control above all else must be resisted because it will mean a weaker economy, an impoverished society and a self-defeating isolation mentality.’

Don’t like those principles? Starmer has others. And so last week, he was criticizing Sunak’s Rwanda policy not for any moral or ethical reasons, but purely on the grounds that it’s too costly, and because Labour can somehow keep people out more effectively - even by enlisting another third country in the UK’s ‘offshore’ asylum-processing.

Asked about his position on Gaza, Starmer couldn’t even bring himself to use the word ‘Palestinian’ to describe what he called the ‘catastrophic’ situation in Gaza, referring only to ‘people’ being killed there. Who are these ‘people? Who is killing them? Don’t expect Starmer or Sunak to tell you. Only at one point, did Starmer say anything you might describe as principled. Asked by Etchingham whether he would seek private treatment for a loved one on an NHS waiting list, he replied that he wouldn’t.

Starmer was clearly trying to stand up for the notion of a publicly-funded national service in principle, and make the point that not everyone has the ability to pay for private healthcare, but this position was inevitably translated into right-wing speak as ‘hypocrite millionaire won’t pay for private health care.’

As for Brexit, well the entire political class have clearly decided to keep their lips sealed on this debacle, and last week’s shouters would not even whisper the accursed name, for fear that the Evil One might appear. If Sunak was to mention it, he would have to admit that Brexit has been another Tory failure. If Starmer mentioned it, he would be accused of wanting to ‘undo Brexit’- an accusation that is already being dredged up by the atrocious Johnson.

And so Sunak shouted and Starmer played safe, offering nothing much to as many people as possible, while tiptoeing across the shiny floor of the debating studio, carrying the ming vase of a Labour victory. And between the shouty head boy and the ming vase carrier, there was no true science, and absolutely nothing to move the heart, or make you dare to dream.

Vote Starmer and get the certainty of uncertainty in uncertain times. Vote Sunak and you get the certainty of division and chaos in uncertain times - probably true, to be fair. And the essential hollowness and evasiveness of these utterances was only confirmed by the usual ‘papa was a humble toolmaker’, ‘my humble parents used the NHS’ personalisation to remind viewers - and voters - that these are people with a personal story that is also your story.

And the end of it all, the footie. What was their position on the footie?

The least that can be said about this deadly ritual is that it was a very weak response to 14 years of political failure - and a failure of politics - from two politicians with questionable ideas about what to do about it. In his 1858 Ottawa debate, Lincoln spoke in the following manner to his audience:

I ask you to consider whether, so long as the moral constitution of men’s minds shall continue to be the same, after this generation and assemblage shall sink into the grave, and another race shall arise with the same moral and intellectual development we have - whether, if that institution is standing in the same irritating position in which it now is, it will not continue an element of division? I so, then I have a right to say that, in regard to this question, the Union is house divided against itself…

That sentence goes on longer, quite a bit longer in fact, but Lincoln clearly expected his audience to follow his train of thought. He posed questions, instead of simply unrolling shiny policies or reassuring slogans like a door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman, or seeking to ‘crush’ his opponent. Like Douglas, he recognized the importance of what they were discussing and wanted his audience to grasp what was at stake.

None of that was even attempted last week. I don’t want to idealise Lincoln, and especially Douglas, or their times. These were men whose views on slavery and racial inequality deserve to be critiqued and condemned. And whatever attention span their audiences may have had, and however appreciative they may have been of their fine phrase-making, within three years of that debate, Americans were slaughtering each other on the battlefield.

Nevertheless, a fraying, fagged-out democracy like ours needs more than the demeaning spectacle we witnessed last week, if democratic politics is to become meaningful again. If this country is to have even the slightest chance of a better, and more hopeful future, it will need more politicians who appeal to our judgement, our understanding and our consciences, and fewer shouters and pub bores.

If we are to avoid this calamitous race to the political bottom that we have seen in Europe in the last two days, we will need politicians of the left and centre-left with courage, humility and vision, who recognize the deadly threat posed by the far-right populist surge, and the social decay on which these movements thrive, and don’t simply discard the ideas and principles they once had simply in order to please the latest focus group.

But to get politicians like that, we need voters who demand them. We need informed, knowledgeable ethical citizens, who won’t accept pseudo-gladiatorial political contests that are full of sound and fury, and signify nothing much at all, except another notch in our headlong descent to the bottom of the barrel.