I should point out that I missed the Radio 4 program on this subject this morning, but saw enough tweets and comments about it to feel that a mild rant might be in order…

There is a strange but constant narrative in British politics, that revolves around politicians being out of touch with the population.  Many reasons are suggested as the root cause of this, everything from wealth and education to isolation from the public and ideology.  Personally I have come to a slightly different (although not new) conclusion.

Quite simply politicians are no more disconnected from the general public than any other group.  If you took a group of IT professionals and put them into a room and asked them about the general population the responses would probably be somewhat negative, comments about people not bothering to understand, failing to appreciate what is done for them and so on.  I would bet that applies to essentially every group from retail workers (it was certainly true when I worked my first job in Woolworth’s way back when..) through to doctors.

More importantly of course the reverse is true too, ask a random selection of people about any given group that they are not a part of and you will find that they feel that they are different. Those asked will assume that members of the group in question don’t really understand what they want or need, “they don’t really understand us”.

The class system, racial tension, regional rivalry and a whole host of other factors play into it too, how can a southerner understand the problems in the post-industrial north? What does someone in Oldham understand about street crime in Farnborough?  There are so many legitimate differences and so many more related to (often flawed) perception alone.

The difference of course is that unlike IT professionals or retail workers, politicians are supposed to be representing us (or trying to get to a position where they can).  Our individual MP’s are certainly people who should be in touch with us, our government should broadly understand what is important to us and act on that basis.  Unlike doctors and IT professionals, their level of ‘connectedness’ is deemed central to their ability to do their jobs.

And yet striving to understand the issues that we all face and finding solutions, either due to an idealistic wish to serve or in pursuit of power, makes them different.  Just like the activist who believes in an issue and works to change the world to deal with it, they separate themselves from the average person in their desire to identify and fix what they see as the problems.  Granted, they often compound that perception of difference by claiming solidarity with everything and everyone, by pretending that they are like everyman, by doing things that are so blatantly false that it is cringe inducing to watch.  But in theory at least they are doing it for the right reasons (or maybe they started doing it for the right reasons..).

Politicians do live in a bubble, they do apply different priorities to different issues and they do get it very wrong on a regular basis.  We should however not forget that they are not alone.  If I look at my twitter feed, or my discussions on reddit and slashdot or listened to my (rather rare..) discussions in the pub, you would be forgiven for thinking that the country was full of people who cared passionately about electoral reform, see the DE bill as the some of the worst legislation ever written and is composed largely of people who both hold and advocate and ideology as well as being engaged in the political process.

Of course you would be wrong.

So what is the solution? I would say that for the politicians it is all about real communication, talking to people and really engaging, not just before an election or during a campaign, not just in areas where there are votes to be won and not just on political matters.  Getting rid of the gimmicks would help, ceasing the headlong rush to appear to be ‘like’ the people they seek to represent in every aspect.  But then again, what do I know? I can hardly claim that I am in touch with people who are significantly different from me, people in significantly different situations than I am, all I can say is that I do try and listen and that I might be able to understand some of their issues on some level.

Maybe there is also something in the idea of greater unity, solidarity and tolerance, but again that is something lots of government and political parties have striven for with varying degrees of success and no doubt almost always against a resisting public for a long time.