Today's satire is deeply cynical, depicting British politics as a nest of fools. It may make us laugh, but its impact is not funny
Who is the single most influential voice in modern British politics? The constitutionally correct answer to this question is obviously David Cameron, because he is prime minister. A more culturally subtle answer might be Tony Blair, since he defined so many of the questions with which mainstream politics still grapples. A more cynical answer, even after recent events, might be Rupert Murdoch, or whichever of his minions gets to write the Sun's election leaders.
Increasingly, though, it strikes me that the answer is none of the above. My candidate for Britain's most influential political voice has never stood for office, has never been elected and has never, as far as I know, made what he, you or I would recognise as a traditional political speech. He shows no sign, either, of harbouring conventional political ambitions. Yet for 20 years he has shaped the way that millions of people in this country think about politics, and has done so from an unrivalled pulpit.
Even in the social networking era, TV still remains the most potent means of mediating politics to the people. Yet even this fact does not make the BBC's Nick Robinson or Sky's Adam Boulton the answer to my question, influential though they both are. No. For his sheer ability to drive the national political conversation, for his success in fostering some of the most persuasive political narratives of modern Britain, the answer is the only ever-present on the country's most watched political content programme. And since that show is Have I Got News For You?, it seems reasonable to argue that Britain's most influential political voice belongs to Ian Hislop.
And what is Hislop's principal message? Week in and week out, it is that most pretty much all politicians are corrupt, deluded, incompetent, second-rate and hypocritical. Hislop's message is delivered with enviable deftness and wit, and very often it is irresistible. But it is also good-naturedly merciless. And extremely repetitive. There is never any sign that Hislop allows of exceptions; or that he has a political hero; or even, with the occasional honourable mention for Vince Cable, that there are politicians whom he respects. The impression he always gives is that today's politicians are uniformly unworthy of their inheritance, not to be compared with some previous golden age of statesmanlike effectiveness.
There's no denying that Hislop speaks for Britain on much of this. The general public may not share Hislop's tendency to quirky nostalgia, but they certainly think that today's politicians are scoundrels. According to a 2009 survey, 62% of Britons believe that "the giving and taking of bribes, and the abuse of positions of power for personal gain" is "widespread" among MPs. Such a cynical belief in endemic bribery is not rooted in fact, and only 3% of the same voters claim to have any direct experience of such corruption, but it is the far more widespread perception, not the fact, that matters.
It would be ridiculous to put all of this accumulated and long-standing public disdain and suspicion towards politicians down to Hislop personally, and I do not seek to do that. Hislop is merely one very prominent example among many satirists and comedians, on screen, online and in print, who portray British politics as a nest of fools, knaves and incompetents. The political satiric tradition in British life has deep historical roots and it takes myriad forms from Hogarth to The Thick Of It and from Dickens to Have I Got News For You? In feeding it, Hislop and these others undoubtedly reflect public opinion that has been formed by many facts and influences. Like any good entertainer, Hislop knows what his audience wants, and delivers.
Yet even satirists are citizens too. They surely have to at least consider whether what they do is harmful as well as enjoyable. Nothing a satirist or anyone else does can be entirely without moral content or meaning. Everything has effects, often unpredictably so. That's why the current satirical onslaught against politics as a whole, which amounts sometimes to monomania and increasingly to cliche, ought at the very least to be a proper subject for discussion. Sneering at politicians should not simply be waved through on a permanent tide of approbation in which those who are troubled by aspects of the fashion are dismissed as conservative or, even worse, humourless.
This weekend in Edinburgh, the annual Festival of Politics is hosting a discussion on the interaction between comedy and satire on the one hand, and modern democratic politics on the other. It is more than timely. One of the participants in Saturday's session, Professor Steve Fielding from Nottingham University, believes that a satiric culture that came as a breath of fresh air in the 1960s, has now blown itself out. He says that the idea of the corrupt, lying, pompous politician has become "the equivalent of the mother-in-law or Irish joke of the 1970s". The comedian Helen Lederer, who is also taking part, will argue that politicians get what they deserve. "They don't have to behave in the way that they do. Satire opens up political conversations that would not otherwise be taking place."
Sensible liberals should accept that both things are true. Satire can open minds up. But it can also close them down. In the current cultural climate, though, it is Fielding's view, not Lederer's, which struggles to get anything like a proper hearing. The dominant belief that all politicians are contemptible, promoted not just by public entertainers like Hislop but by rightwing libertarian blogger Guido Fawkes among many others in the media, is not grounded in fact, is profoundly pessimistic, and is far from being a dispassionate depiction of the world. If all politicians are useless, then all government is useless, all authority is useless, and probably all sense of collective improvement is useless too. Ultimately, this view of politicians embodies a profoundly despairing individualist view of human affairs.
Often when we sneer we also fear. It suits many in the media very well indeed to depict politicians as objects of contempt. Most of the media, including sometimes the BBC, have an active interest in weak government and an equal interest in narratives of political decline and failure. The last thing most media want is the restoration of trust in politics.
Modern politics is inherently difficult. It is full of contradictions, inconsistencies and nuances. It reflects the people who make up the society it represents. But politics matters. It is work of noble worth, even when it is imperfect, as all things are. Plato's republic it is not. But then Plato wanted no place in his republic for artists – and that probably included satirists too.
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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/25/corrupt-lying-politics-satire
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