23. THE NOT-SO GREAT DEBATE - On The Need For Intellectual Self-Defence In An Age of Stupid

It was the poor state of political debate in the UK which brought me into teaching.  Considering career options in the Spring of 2010, I watched our country’s first ever General Election debates with intrigue and, eventually, great disappointment.  Weirdly billed as the “first time” our leaders had sparred in public, for a TV audience (ignoring the many decades of televised Prime Minister’s Questions we have been able to witness since 1989), the UK succumbed to the American model of empty soundbite “debating”.  A TV news spectacle of broadcaster, a studio audience, and important questions given very little time to actually be considered, all with a view at pushing candidates towards “gotcha” moments, repeatable barbs, and memorable slogans largely void of content rather than anything actually resembling a battle of ideas.  As a dual US/UK citizen, and as a thinker, I had suffered the lamentable version of Presidential “debating” which went on across the ocean for years, and was both interested, and worried, to see how this American import would translate over here.

It certainly created an impact.  It is highly unlikely the Liberal Democrats would have done as well as they did in 2010, leading to the first coalition government in my lifetime, had TV audiences around the country not watched Conservative hopeful, David Cameron, and Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, spend so much of the first broadcast repeating the mantra “I agree with Nick”, in reference to then-Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg.  A major failure of Prime Minister’s Questions, and most of British political reporting at the time, was to paint UK politics as an entrenched two-way battle between Labour and Conservative, with the Liberal Democrats always portrayed as the eternal third place “also rans”.  For the first time, by seeing the three Party leaders on an equal footing with equal TV time, the British public got to hear previously marginalised ideas amplified and liked what they heard.  And being sensible ideas, with no sense of their impending political threat, the other two leaders’ lifetime of non-competition with the Lib Dems allowed, in their naive hubris, them to be honest and agree that they were sensible ideas.  It wasn’t until the next debate that they realised agreeing with Nick Clegg might make Nick Clegg actually seem electable, and so “debate” returned to the predictable American format of well-rehearsed soundbites and put-downs, talking points and stump speeches.

What made me want to become a teacher was seeing the poor quality political discourse the debates spurred.  I had watched every one of them, even attending a Question Time taping directly afterwards, watching the April 29th debate at the University of Birmingham, together with a roomful of voters, and then asking our questions to Ed Balls, Vince Cable, Liam Fox, Alex Salmond and, of course, Janet Street-Porter, to little avail.  

What struck me was how poor the thinking always was.  Both of the politicians, and of the audiences watching.  How cheap put-downs carried more weight than facts; how repetition of lies or misinformation swayed people’s minds more convincingly than appeals to the truth. In short: how easily people were led.

The big issue that bothered me at the time was how the entire country could have been convinced, as they were, that the 2008 economic crash was somehow the fault of the UK Labour Party, when all around the world it was agreed and generally held that the cause of the crash was US subprime mortgages and deregulation in the American financial services.  While the UK Labour Party had certainly continued the deregulation started by the UK Conservative Party in the late seventies, eighties and nineties, this was an issue to be had with capitalism – specifically the rising trend of neoliberal free-market capitalism and its supporters in government– which was, globally, at the behest of think-tanks and well-paid academics, winning a war of ideology in its advocacy of “less red tape” to “free up” previously protected markets.  A policy which, if it were to be attributed to any one UK political party, could demonstrably be considered a cornerstone of Conservative economic policy and merely a controversial anomaly of the governing Labour Party.  A policy which many Labour activists and party members rejected, identifiable with a specific branch of the party rebranded in 1997 as “New Labour”; embracing some Conservative economic ideas in a bid to woo centre-right voters, just as Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party had done in 1992 to pick up votes from those disillusioned with Republicans, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

But repeating the outright lie that somehow the Labour Party in Britain had caused global markets to crash due to their overspending on schools and hospitals, the lie became the truth to voters everywhere.  A lie considered laughable by US President Barack Obama when asked about it at the time.  And worse still, then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was also ridiculed in these debates for his suggestion that investment in public services, rather than austerity, might be the correct solution to the global economic crisis; a policy the US President also agreed with, and implemented, in America to great success.  So while the US economy got back on track using the Obama/Brown approach, the UK economy suffered and the population suffered under what has now been nine years of damaging and unnecessary austerity.  Austerity which has been acknowledged now to be a political choice rather than an economic necessity.  Austerity which has destroyed community and public services up and down the country and led to a massive increase in homelessness and the use of food banks amongst other social ills.     

All of which should have been clear to audiences of the TV debates in 2010 with just a little bit of thought, information and analysis, but was made absent from the media narratives that told us the unfolding story.  Despite easily available facts, the lack of critical thinking on behalf of the voting public meant that most believed Labour had ruined the global economy and only Conservative austerity was going to save us from their misspending.

I remember seeing the headlines, having conversations with people, and thinking: people need to be taught better about how to see through rhetoric and fallacy and be intellectually armed to defend themselves against this nonsense.  Without being able to do so, we do not have a democracy, we have a puppetocracy, where the public are given only the illusion of choice as their strings are pulled via the propaganda and overwhelming force of repeated media narrative.

So I applied to a teacher training course the following month, and by September that same year I was starting to teach RE and Philosophy.  My small effort to give young people the tools of critical analysis.  It was not an effort to put out propaganda of my own and ensure they voted a particular way any more than it was an effort to put out an agenda for them to end my RE courses following a particular religion (or not following any at all).  I didn’t care if my students left my classroom theists or atheists, Tories, Lib Dems, Labour or Greens so long as they actually thought about what they believed in, questioned what they had been told, and were able to make up their own minds without being manipulated by soundbites, slogans, or lazy journalism repeating easy lies for access and creating false but compelling narratives.

I’m not sure if I’ve had any impact.

But the need for such intellectual self-defence continues, and this week, nine years later, as we face our third General Election in four years, we had our first televised debate between Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, and Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn.  And for me, the central fallacy I felt needed calling out by someone during the leaders debate was an idea, constantly bashed home by Boris Johnson, and repeated ad nauseum the next day across all shades of media, that Jeremy Corbyn somehow failed to be convincing because he needed to clarify which position a Labour government would take if it won the election and presented its own second referendum about Brexit.

The argument went something like this:

1)     If you put a question to the public, as government you need to pick a side and campaign for that side.

2)     Jeremy Corbyn won’t say which side his government would pick and campaign for.

3)     Therefore he shouldn’t put that question to the public and shouldn’t be elected because…

4)     …inability to pick a side and campaign for it shows a weakness as a leader.

The problems with the argument(s) are many, and they all centre around the assumptions in premise (1).  There seems to me to be no necessity at all for a government to pick a side and campaign for it in any referendum that may be put to the public, the very point of a referendum being precisely that it is down to the people, not the government, to decide what we ought to do.  Of course the government can advise, but must they campaign?  Must they all agree?  If they did, and we already elected them, surely then there would be no need for the referendum in the first place? The existence of a referendum is, itself, a cue that the matter being decided is not one the government has sufficient weight to advocate on one side or the other.

Furthermore, historically, such campaigning doesn’t even work when it does happen!  Consider the Conservative government’s campaign for us to Remain in the EU in 2016.  They may have campaigned for us to Remain, but we didn’t.  And other members of the same party led the campaign for us to Leave.  The idea there needs to be some agreed shared position of the ruling party doesn’t seem to be an actual thing either in theory or in practice.  And then there’s the fact that the new deal Labour may negotiate should they win the December 12th election doesn’t exist itself yet, as it hasn’t yet been negotiated.  Negotiation means back and forth between us and Europe, meaning the terms of the deal may be deeply subject to change as the process goes on. To commit oneself blindly to campaigning for a deal to which you don’t yet know the terms to is dangerous and unhelpful – as, perhaps, the current Brexit mess has shown us!

But this is the line the Conservative Party wanted to keep repeating the following day: that Corbyn’s failure to tell us which side he would campaign for is sufficient reason not to vote for him. And it was a line which the media were more than happy to parrot.

Further compounding this was a horrible false equivalency shown in the reporting of the debate.  In an effort to seem unbiased and show the failings of both sides, Corbyn’s refusal to commit to a position on that irrelevant question was framed alongside Johnson’s far bigger problem on the night. In this case, Johnson’s debate failure came when audience members instinctively laughed at the current Prime Minister’s claim that he genuinely cares about truth and has personal integrity.  A claim so preposterous given his track record of demonstrable untruths (most recently that we will definitely be leaving the EU on October 31st) that the laughter which greeted his claims was almost expected, and made even more preposterous given the fact that, at the same time that he was suggesting what an honest person he was, his own press office was intentionally misleading people on Twitter by rebranding the Conservative Campaign Twitter feed to look like an independent fact checking site in order to put out biased and misleading anti-Corbyn tweets as if they were objective facts. A strategy continued by the party a few days later when, on the launch of the Labour Party manifesto, the tories bought the site labour manifesto.co.uk and put up more slurs and shade on Corbyn in a second intentional effort to mislead the public with dirty tricks.

The idea that a potential Prime Minister who routinely lies and has a shaky relationship to the truth on many of his public statements (lest we forget his Brexit bus campaign promising fictitious millions to the NHS) is just as bad as a potential Prime Minister who, were he to put forward a second referendum on Brexit, would not commit in advance to campaigning for one side over the other, is clearly wrong-headed. Corbyn’s flaw here is not a real flaw. It is just a way of doing things differently than other people have done it. However, Johnson’s flaw of having lost the public’s trust in what he says - being a Prime Minister for whom the truth is an alien concept - is clearly of far greater concern. There is no equivalency here.

The same thing continued on Friday, during the BBC’s Leaders Question Time. Corbyn this time laid out much of the above argument, explaining he felt it was important to stay neutral as Prime Minister so he could carry out whatever the people voted for, while Johnson, again, faced questions about the numerous times he has publicly lied and the general sense of distrust we have for him. The next day headlines were dominated by Corbyn’s neutrality on Brexit. Johnson being a liar was simply not considered as newsworthy.

It is imperative in a democracy that we voters are informed and know what and who we are voting for, making a choice based on the best information available and for the good not only of ourselves, but of everyone we share our society with. We cannot do this if we do not think about the ideas we are presented and fail to unpack the spin that is flung in our direction and repeated by those whose concerns are not democracy, but clicks and ratings. Luckily, for us philosophers, we are used to unpacking arguments and analysing the meaning behind the words that people use. During an election, it is vital that we use that intellectual training to try and see beyond the soundbites of the moment and narrative fictions imposed on reality by myth-makers trying to tell a story, and get to the truth behind the slogans of the people seeking our vote.

A week is a long time in politics, and there are still three weeks left before election day. That gives us all three weeks to fine-tune our radars for misinformation and fallacy and apply all our philosophical rigour to the arguments presented to us, on all sides, until we find ourself in that polling booth with a pencil in our hand and a big decision to make. There is a truth out there, beneath the soundbites and clickbait. There are actual facts about what our politicians have done and what they are planning to do and it is our duty as citizens, whoever we are voting for, to make sure our vote is as fully informed as is possible. A television debate will never give us that. They are nothing more than a PR stunt. Another stop on the campaign trail. A mechanism for repeating buzzwords and talking points. To treat them as anything more than that is to abdicate our democratic responsibilities and leave ourselves open for manipulation and propaganda. For the sake of our democracy: we must do better.

Author: D. McKee