What's the big idea?

We don’t like ideology in this country. Beliefs and principles make us uncomfortable and suspicious. We don’t think of ideology as a platform to stand on proudly, but a guilty secret. If you can find a way of calling your opponent ideological, you’re half way to branding them a maniac.

We have two parties of government, a left-wing one and right-wing one. But they do everything they can to avoid being described in that way. Even their names are rather avoiding the point. No one ever asks Labour why they’re called Labour any more. It would make sense if the other party were called Capital, but they’re not.

And Conservative is an equally useless name for a party. This is presumably a hangover from a time when ‘conservative’ and ‘radical’ were the most common political labels. But they are really not useful descriptions, as they do not represent any kind of political principle. Conservative and radical are not ideologies, they are two kinds of psychosis.

If you were asked, ‘Should we change this thing, or keep it the same?’ you would, quite reasonably, want to know what the hell we were talking about before deciding. Some things should change, and other things should stay the same. Generally, bad things should change, and good things should stay the same. Stop me if I’m going too fast.

Some people are inclined to want to keep things the same, and others to rip things up and start again. And some people manage to keep these two instincts in check, and simply judge matters on their merits - but we can ignore that kind of weirdo for the time being. Conservatives reckon things should stay the same, without first checking if any of those things is an alligator in a playgroup. And radicals are just as bad, entirely apathetic about the difference between a baby and some bathwater.

And although we no longer group our politicians into pro-change and anti-change, those two flabby ideas still disproportionately inform the debate. Often, the argument against a reform says nothing more than: “We can’t change that, because then it would be different.” The case against the Alternative Vote was shaped in exactly this way. “If we have AV, then the winner might not win!” they would carp. Wrong. If we changed the system, the winner would still win. It might be a different winner, but that’s what ‘change’ means. Surely there was a better argument against AV than ‘it’s not the same’.

And the mindless love of change - the ‘something must be done’ tendency - is just as dangerous. We see this in areas like education, where successive governments tinker constantly with the school system. Occasionally, there is an ideological trend: comprehensive schooling belongs to a left-wing agenda, and free schools to the right. But between these two inventions lie 45 years of education policies, very few of which have made a useful contribution towards the education of the nation’s children. And if you randomly selected these policies out of a hat, you would struggle to name which party had introduced them. (This excellent game is a very useful way of getting rid of lingering dinner party guests.)

These days, it’s not particularly a party political issue, as the Tory party is no more or less conservative than any other party. The Tories’ most conservative statement of recent years was ‘no top-down re-organisation of the NHS’ and we know how that ended. Once in government, the conservative instinct was replaced by a right-wing desire to introduce the market into as much of the NHS as possible.

Whatever you think of the disgusting changes to the NHS over the last few years (I must remain judiciously impartial, as you can see) at least there is some thought under-pinning it. The Tories’ promise to leave the NHS alone did not come from a feeling that the NHS was perfect as it was, but from a weak conservative instinct to leave well alone. But the decision to start changing it came from a firm ideological position - though they would never admit it. The only people calling it ideological were its opponents - ‘ideological’ has become an insult.

When I argue with a right-wing friend, I try to remember that they are not secretly trying to take over the world, using the poor as fuel, food and furniture. My ideology may say that their policies will lead to those ruinous outcomes, but their ideology says that it won’t. It’s not that they hate the poor and don’t care what happens to them. It’s that they think their policies will ultimately do so much good that even the poor will benefit. And they think that my left-wing priority of starting with the poor would actually be counter-productive.

I think they are wrong. I think they are totally, disastrously wrong. But only according to my ideology. According to their ideology they are right. We have that in common - the belief that your political ideology should inform how you think the world should work. The argument becomes a fascinating search for our fundamental differences, and once we understand each other there is mutual respect - without either side necessarily shifting an inch. This imaginary argument ends in a hearty handshake, an increased love of the diversity of humankind, and a round of drinks.

Why does no national political debate ever look anything like this? When political opponents go head to head, there is never any investigation of the ideological under-pinning of the opposing policies. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a parliamentary debate concluded with both sides saying, “I have a new-found respect for my opponent’s views, as I find them to spring logically and coherently from a central belief. I respect, but do not share, that belief.”

It is, of course, never anything like that, and the argument gets stuck on the points-scoring level. They say: my opponent is lying. The last time my opponent’s party was in charge, there was a disaster. My opponent’s party hasn’t yet officially got round to jettisoning a discredited policy. My opponent’s colleague has recently said something foolish, been photographed making a silly face, or been exposed in the tabloids in an adulterous act of baroque depravity, which I secretly admire.

Some say that politics is not ideological any more. Politics is still ideological, it cannot be otherwise. Any policy is a choice: individual freedom against collective responsibility; state interference versus the law of the jungle, and many others. The policies themselves still bear the imprint of fundamental political ideas, but we have lost the discursive tools with which to analyse, understand, and improve them. It is political debate that is no longer ideological.

But we could get it back. The politicians aren’t going to do anything about it because they don’t see any competitive advantage in changing the tone of the debate. But the media could, if it started to take a more adult view of what neutrality is. Neutrality, as currently practised in the broadcast media, is a brainless process of recounting each side’s position, summarising each side’s critique of their opponent, and ending it all with a shrug and an ‘I dunno’.

But if we had intelligent neutrality in the media, a political commentator would explain the ideological under-pinning of each side’s argument. They would ignore the point-scoring, the cheap shots, and the 'I’ll take no lectures from…'. The ultimate message to the audience - and, importantly, the electorate - would be so much more than the current ‘it’s over to you’. It would explain that this party’s policies represent a particular set of principles, that they have made a choice. This kind of political comment would get its hands dirty and say, ‘If you believe x, vote for this party; if you believe y, vote for the other lot.’

Then maybe the politicians would spend more time explaining why they think their policy is a good idea, and less time sticking their tongues out at the opposite bench. And maybe eventually, somewhere, a politician might quietly confess to believing something.