Election overload - politics v statesmanship

The difference between a politician and a statesperson,” remarked James Freeman Clarke, “Is that a politician thinks of the next election while a statesman thinks of the next generation.

Today, British Prime Minister Theresa May announced a snap general election to be held on June 8 of this year. From today, that effectively sentences the British public to seven more weeks of droning political debate, hyperbole and misdirection.

Mrs May is either being very brave or remarkably reckless. Her character to date suggests that she normally wants to be seen as a safe pair of hands and a measured voice in volatile times. However, she is leaving herself open to the charge that in this case she is listening too much to her inner politician and not enough to the potential statesperson.

Media pundits are already rushing to judgement, despite the fact that they were as surprised by the announcement as anyone else. The fact is that it is highly unlikely that anyone will predict the outcome of this election with any degree of accuracy, for two reasons.

The first is that prediction in politics has become a wildcard enterprise. In futurism, we use the term “wildcard events” to describe occurrences which have a low probability but potentially high impact. They’re unlikely to happen but when they do they leave huge and unsettling changes in their wake.

Tsunamis are usually wildcard events, as are plagues of disease. Now more than ever, elections are wildcard events. In the USA as in the UK, even the most celebrated pollsters seem unable to read the runes of modern elections.

Where politics was once a river – with strong currents but a relatively predictable course – today it acts more like a large and very unpredictable wave. We may see some sort of change approaching, but the wave could break in any of fifty different ways.

This high degree of unpredictability produces fatigue in an electorate which is already arguably dealing with more life decisions in a month than its grandparents might have faced in a year.

Most people elect politicians for one purpose only – and it is not to promote party affiliation. Parliamentarians are elected to solve problems, to add value to those areas of community life which the public deems most important at a particular point in time.

Predicting outcomes for this election will also be difficult because of a high degree of voter fatigue among the British public. Fatigue often produces unpredictability. People will respond to polling questions off the tops of their heads, having neither the interest or the energy to fully think through the issues involved.

We had our last general election in 2015, a surprise outright win for the Tories. This was followed by the seemingly never-out-of-earshot Leave and Remain campaigns leading up to the Brexit vote in 2016.

Meanwhile, in addition to this, the UK’s various devolved regions have held their own elections. Pity the good folk of Northern Ireland, for example. They’ve endured five elections for their devolved assembly since its inception in 1998.