“We’re not pitching you a new Netflix series,” intoned Labour’s shadow business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, this week. “We’re not putting on politics as entertainment.” And certainly absolutely no one could accuse the extremely likely next government of that. The thing about a new Netflix series, of course, is that the streamer will want to have an absolutely nailed-down idea of how much it is going to cost and how it will be funded before it gets the green light. Weirdly, you have to do this if you are pitching Is It Cake?, but not if you are seeking to run the world’s sixth-largest economy. This means it’s possible that the thing the frontrunner party tells you is the manifesto is not actually a manifesto, but something else. Cake, maybe. Is it cake?
“We want to return to serious government,” Reynolds continued loftily, “to effective policy and to politics as public service, not as pantomime.” Right. One of the things we’ve heard for some time now is ordinary people saying they just want politics to be boring again – which is understandable, but always feels rather cargo-cultish. It is as though the fact that politics was boring back in the good times logically means that the good times can be restored by somehow making politics boring. I … don’t think it works like that. Without wishing to unleash any spoilers for the season ahead, the UK faces huge and deepening problems – and anyone who tells you they can be fixed by “boring politics” is selling something.
