The World Is Lovely Sporadic trivialities aimed to please

Adrian Sanders on Tittle-Tattle; or, Look What I Made Out Of This Molehill

Radio 4 is a wonderful station to wake up to: you never know if you’re going to get hard-hitting political discussion or Evan Davis attempting to play Bohemian Rhapsody on the paper and comb. But if you can’t get it on FM, there are severe downsides. If you’re up late, or you leave the radio on, there’s a very real risk you’ll end up listening to the Daily Service. And, worse still, your morning will be rudely interrupted by Yesterday in Parliament, a mere five minutes of which is enough to make even the most optimistic among us break down in hot, salt tears over the way our elected representatives behave.

Normally the awfulness is simply that many of the people we have sort-of chosen to serve us think that shouting ‘YAAAAAAH!’ at every possible opportunity is a valuable contribution to democracy. This morning, I caught an exchange that nicely captured some of the more nuanced ways of being a useless tit that Westminster has to offer. It starts about an hour into this video, if your setup is deemed suitable by the PICTsies, and there’s a handy transcript on Richard Taylor’s blog.

The discussion centres on Adrian Sanders’ belief that local websites can’t fulfil some of the functions of local newspapers because ‘Most of what’s online is [...] tittle tattle’. Now clearly, that's a ludicrous opinion, and I think Sion Simon's response to it – utter stupefaction coupled with insistence that ‘that’s a ridiculous view’ – is just about the only possible one. It’s troubling that an elected leader should be so hopelessly out of touch with the modern world, and revealing that Sanders thinks online voices perfectly respectable so long as they are his. But there are plenty of people lined up to defend online media and to demonstrate how much of print media really is nothing more than ‘tittle-tattle’, so I’ll lay that aside. Because, as is so often the case when we say something stupid, what really troubles me isn’t what he said, but how he said it.

Not only does Sanders fail to offer any justification at all for his opinion, he seems entirely untroubled by any sense that his opinions require justification. His first remark about Stoke on Trent’s Pits n Pots is simply ‘But it’s not news, it’s just tittle tattle’: to Sanders, this isn’t even a matter for discussion. It’s an accepted fact because Adrian Sanders has declared it so. When asked if he’s read it, he has nothing more to say than ‘No’, in a manner so dismissive Taylor feels he has to gloss it. And just to top it off, when challenged on his summary judgement he thinks that all he needs to offer as justification is ‘It’s a website’, in a tone so patronizingly self-assured he sounds like an nine year old pointing out that Ellie must be wrong because she’s a girl.

His absurd opinion isn’t really that important: the world of local reporting will go one way or it will go another, and besides, he sounds so bored by the whole affair I’d be surprised if he can even muster the will to tittle-tattle about it on his MySpace profile. But it’s suggestive of a dangerous arrogance, a belief that because the people of Torbay voted him in four years ago, his opinions have been granted some special weight.

No. Of course a representative system requires MPs to make decisions and form opinions for themselves, but they have a duty to do so using evidence and reason, not merely gut instinct. A gander at Sanders’ TheyWorkForYou page suggests that I probably agree with a lot of the decisions he makes, but if he doesn’t make those decisions in the right way – if he makes them the same way he made his decision about Pits n Pots – then that’s just good luck and he could stuff everything up at any moment. Hopefully, unlike the Widdecombes of this world, he acts in a more thoughtful and considered fashion when he’s dealing with matters of greater import; sadly, his thought processes are inscrutable unless he makes a habit of displays like yesterday. Projects like Skeptical Voter attempt to examine how well political actions line up with the real world, but even when the wiki is more complete it’ll be naturally limited. Sanders, for example, supported MMR vaccination – but he also supported NHS homeopathy, so why should we believe the former position was any more based on fact than the latter?¹

We need our politicians to be honest about what they believe, to avoid the kind of timid positioning that leaves people thinking there’s nothing to choose between. But we also need them to acknowledge that they have a duty to educate and inform themselves, to form those beliefs based on evidence about the real world and to demonstrate to us that they are capable of doing so. Anything less reduces our votes to a throw of the dice.

1: Skeptical Voter tends towards concerns like medicine, creationism and so on where clashes about evidence-based politics are common, but the principle certainly applies more broadly.