Mission Statement

There’s one theme that unites most of the stories in the news over the past few months or so. That is, with rare exceptions, they’ve been unbelievably boring. In Britain in particular, there’s a good reason for that – no-one wants to make a brave or bold move when they know that Tony Blair will be stepping down in the next few months. Why waste time publicising new policies when Gordon Brown can assimilate them into his programme the minute he gets the keys to Number 10? But it’s a similar story in America, too, where the Presidential candidates are jockeying for media attention without wanting to give the bloodthirsty hounds any meat to tear into.

The key reason for all of this is that our political thinking is heavily conditioned by the electoral cycle. The voice of the people is heard only periodically – so election days become moments of seizmic shifts. Anyone connected with politics knows that direct, tangible results are only ever seen at the ballot box, and so all their efforts go into making sure that everything goes right on one given day. And when so much work is focused on such a specific aim, the reporting of politics is necessarily skewed towards election day. Besides, without a focus on elections, how could you manage personality-driven news so easily?

Yet when historians come back to write their version of the Noughties, elections will only figure loosely in such a narrative. Of course election data is important – but it is important only insofar as it helps mark the passing of far broader trends. When historians will look at opinion polls, it will not be the headline “who will you vote for” figure they concentrate on most; it will be their attitudes to different rafts of legislation. I suspect that the debate about ID Cards will fit into a broader narrative of civil liberties that stretches back to Michael Howard’s tenure as Home Secretary at the very least, and will be increasingly divorced from Blair and Bush’s political fate.

My aim as I start this blog is to think about the issues defining the political landscape today in wider perspective. Sometimes this will take the form of historical parallels; sometimes it will mean a consideration of other occasions an issue has been raised; sometimes the discussion will be firmly rooted in the present, but developing strategies over a longer period of time. History, after all, is primarily an approach, a way of thinking about the world and about the influences of change over time. And it is an approach that can allow us to take a more detached view of problems – to avoid short-term thinking and reacting to minutiae that in the long run are of little significance.

For those of you who have followed me here from my blogging at Militant Moderate, thank you for joining me, and I hope that the more specific focus of this blog allows me to entertain and inform you even more!