General Election 2010: Why does Britain seem so silly?

By Jenny McCartney

Less fluff and more substance: It's time to start watching Newsnight again. Photo: PA

In the run-up to the election, Britain's political leaders were playfully requested by the women's magazine Red to make some snap choices, of which one was: The X Factor or Newsnight? Gordon Brown and David Cameron both plumped for The X Factor. Brown even hinted that he fancied Cheryl Cole. Only Nick Clegg, to his brief credit, admitted to Newsnight.

When I read the replies, I felt a despair that extended beyond the interview itself. Did I really believe that Brown and Cameron were more concerned with a televised talent show than a leading late-night news programme? If so, it was very troubling. If not, then the fact that they needed to lie about their essential seriousness was arguably worse.

 And so it went on. Throughout the campaign, Brown couldn't shut up about The X Factor: he even made a clunking mention of it, along with Britain's Got Talent, in the first debate. Meanwhile, Clegg was frantically overusing the names of the questioners in the audience, as though pleading with them to like him.

This style of relating to the British public, in which politicians attempt to endear themselves to us through an aggressively assumed ordinariness, is a legacy from the Tony Blair era. It was creepy enough as practised by him then, during the sunshine years of an economic boom. It is downright unbearable now.

During the Blair years, New Labour promoted activities of which Old Labour, with its chapel-going roots, had always been instinctively suspicious. The state zealously splashed the borrowed cash and encouraged the public to do likewise. It was sanguine about the acquisition of personal debt: indeed, with soaring house prices and university tuition fees, it was often difficult for people of modest means to progress any other way. It backed 24-hour licensing: five years on, Hogarthian mayhem continues in our city centres into the small hours.

Today, as the New Labour project grinds to an embarrassing halt, Britain's national pride finds itself severely dented. We are forced to contemplate the size of our national deficit, and the potential downgrading of our credit rating, with the dull nausea of a compulsive shopper who hears the bailiffs banging on the door. In the Gulf of Mexico, oil spews uncontrollably from a British Petroleum well, destroying the US coastline while lawyers circle the flailing company. At home, British Airways is beset by threatened strikes, losses, and the crippling effects of the Icelandic ash cloud. Masses of voters are turned away as polling stations descend into a shambles.

Every so often, a window opens on the grim existence of what is termed our underclass, in which child neglect and abuse are commonplace. Our culture is saturated with reality television and magazines that breathlessly chart the erratic fortunes of a handful of big-breasted, surgically altered women, but the sedative effect of even these diversions is beginning to wear off.

I grew up in Belfast, in a family with Unionist sympathies, and once had a rather idealised, outsider's notion of Britishness: ironic, perhaps, since the Britishness of Northern Ireland is so frequently called into question. Yet Britain, at its best, seemed to stand for the triumph of reason over emotion, an innate restraint, a stoic ability to get things done without complaint under adverse circumstances.

Those qualities are still manifested daily, by ordinary people in every walk of life. But the public face of this country invites the question: when did Britain start to seem so silly?

In the immediate post-election crisis, it is no longer the job of our politicians to be liked, so long as they are tolerated sufficiently to retain power. They must prepare to be disliked, if they are to take the decisions necessary for economic survival. Regardless of whether one welcomed or condemned Mrs Thatcher and her legacy, it was to her credit that she had the personal courage to be widely loathed.

Too much of the sweet stuff from our politicians has left Britain in terrible, flabby shape: we must brace ourselves for a dose of castor oil, preferably administered with the minimum of cant. If Britain is to claw back any international prestige, our leaders might start by reclaiming their own dignity. It's time to start watching Newsnight again.

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Kind Regards;
VK Pandey