Joyce McMillan: We, the voters, are as guilty as the media for the sanitised politics we are faced with

Published on Friday 23 April 2010 23:27

TO THE Playhouse in Edinburgh, on Thursday, to watch the gala Scottish opening of the latest touring production of the global smash-hit musical Les Misérables, based on Victor Hugo's novel of the same name. It's a strange old show, Les Misérables.

Known to showbiz types as "Les Mis", it takes a radical political subject – the grinding poverty of the working class in 19th-century France and the Paris June Rebellion of 1832 – and turns it into a giant, spectacular, three-hour wedge of hyped-up personal emotion, all sound and fury, signifying surprisingly little.

In the middle of the current General Election campaign, though, the show's vivid images of the Paris barricades, with the rich colours of the Tricolore woven through the wreckage, at least come as a welcome reminder of a time when politics was about passion and eloquence, rage and revolution, rather than about a row of middle-aged men in suits picking fights with each other in pastel-toned television studios.

When I was a child, all my images of the meaning of politics were drawn from the age of outdoor meetings and mighty orators, from John McLean's return to Red Clydeside, or that moment in Howard Spring's Fame Is The Spur when a man in a Manchester meeting room unsheathes the sword from the Peterloo massacre and recites the last lines of Blake's Jerusalem.

In the general election campaign of 1964, I remember standing with my mother in the town square in Johnstone, listening to Norman Buchan – then the hopeful Labour candidate for West Renfrewshire – denouncing 13 years of Tory misrule, and hailing a brave new world of social equality if only we would vote for him and Harold Wilson. I have a feeling that Barbara Castle was there too, supporting him on the stump, flame-haired and eloquent.

Yet I'm not sure that either of them was pretty enough, or bland enough, or sufficiently equipped with perfectly capped teeth, to pass today's television test; and that's to say nothing of the eccentricity, the ugliness, or the questionable private lives of many of our great past orators and leaders, from Churchill the depressive and drinker, to Lloyd George the womaniser.

For the truth is that over the past 20 years, something ghastly has happened to our politicians, perhaps akin to what has happened over a longer period to our food and our beer. They have been homogenised, sanitised, standardised and made safe, to the point where they often lack any flavour at all, beyond the odd spark of superficial fizz.

It's not that they never say anything at all; and it's not that the round of television debates is entirely pointless. We have learned, so far, that Nick Clegg is still a shade less homogenised than Gordon Brown and David Cameron; he deserved a round of applause from the whole British Left on Wednesday for his strikingly robust on-the-stump response to the Conservatives' threat that their pals in the City will stage a sterling crisis if we have the cheek to elect a hung parliament.

And we have learned from the Scottish debate on Tuesday that the four Scottish leaders at Westminster are thoughtful souls, capable of decent and civilised discussion on subjects like the aftermath of the Iraq war.

But passion, excitement, glamour, the raw pulse of rebellion? Not a chance. And if any one of the seven men involved in these debates ever possessed any of those qualities, it's clear that it would have been rigorously squeezed, pressed and pummelled out of him by his party machine.

White, male, middle-aged, clean-shaven, well-spoken, dressed in a good suit, darkish hair cut short, and with an attractive wife and kids in the background; these are the basic requirements for a modern front-line politician, with even Gordon Brown apparently too old, crumpled and Scottish for some.

The sobering truth is that there is less cultural diversity in our choice of prime minister today than there was back in 1874, when Gladstone's Liberal government was ousted from office by Benjamin Disraeli, a Conservative leader who wore his Jewish heritage with flamboyance and pride.

So our society now needs to ask itself some tough questions about why, in an age when we have never talked more about the diversity of our culture and the need to reflect it in our institutions, we have become so averse to the reality of it in our democratic life.

From Menzies Campbell, pilloried in the media for the crime of being over 60, to Harriet Harman, widely dismissed as a joke for being a woman, all those who fail to fit the stereotype are being brutally pushed to the margins of power, as numbers of women in parliament and government fall back to pre-1997 levels, social mobility stalls and ethnic minority politicians become completely invisible in front-line debate.

Our rhetoric says one thing, in other words, while our emotional preference – reflected back to us through the dark arts of spin, marketing and media aesthetics – speaks of a frightened and chronically risk-averse society, able to tolerate only those leaders who reflect the bland, successful, good-looking, middle-of-the-road selves we would wish to be.

And although the media bear part of the blame for this process – for the hounding of eccentricity and difference, and for the unexamined cultural assumptions that shape so much media decision-making – the truth is that we have all played a part in tolerating it. We have let our brilliant political colours – the red and the black, the white and the blue, the green and the purple – fade to pistachio and pink. We have accepted a world where, without real difference of voice or language, culture or gender, class or conviction, our politics can have no fertility – and no real power to bring change.

We stare, now, at the bland political landscape we have made for ourselves; wondering why we find it so dull and so lacking in the grandeur that once inspired Victor Hugo's Les Misrables, in all its tragedy, beauty and joy.