An aspect of the political mess in the United Kingdom is the poor standard of a lot of media commentary which influences political discourse and the actions of politicians. If you scan the comment sections you can find plenty of writing which is:
1.Flavoured with words like “moderate”, “radical” or “pragmatic” which are meant to sound like authoritative judgements but really just mean “I like this” or “I don’t like this.”
2. Preoccupied with personalities over social or political forces. It’s all Sunak this or Starmer that. Where social forces are invoked, they often become a cliche which deadens debate (the “Red Wall”, the “moderate centre” or the current lapel badge for wannabe Fascists: anti “woke”).
3. Immensely parochial, with almost no reference to foreign countries other than the United States or to anything in history beyond some obvious markers (the World Wars, the founding of the National Health Service). Europe only exists as a stick to beat British pundits with conflicting views. Countries outside Europe barely exist at all, except for China which is not an place where actual people live but an amorphous sinister shadow on the horizon (Russia ditto).
4. Indifferent to the privileges of the writers themselves, who are less commonly male than they used to be but still seem to be mostly white, prestigiously-educated and aligned, in terms of values and interests, with the high-paid white-collar professional classes whose de-facto acquiescence in the decline of British public institutions is one of the causes of our current mess.
(There’s another whole discussion about the political – i.e. highly selective – uses of facts in media commentary, but I think it’s too much to cover here).
Reading this kind of political commentary is like eating a stew which has been over-salted and boiled to a mush. You can’t get much nourishment from it, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. So here’s an idea for a competency test for pundits. It’s a rhetorical exercise. If nothing else, you could have it in mind next time you dip your spoon into the pundit-stew.
No pundit is going to score 10 out of 10. I would fail Question 7, for example, and struggle with some others. But any pundit who can’t get at least six out of 10 shouldn’t be taken seriously.
The British Political Pundit Test
Based on your own knowledge, and without looking anything up, answer the following:
1. Explain in detail the workings of a British public institution which is not the Houses of Parliament or the media.
2. Explain in detail the political system of a foreign country which is not the United States.
3. Name the key tenets of a major world religion which is not Christianity.
4. Name a foreign country where you have lived or worked continuously for more than three months, and which is not the United States.
5. Name a foreign language in which you have at least basic fluency.
6. Explain in detail the significance for contemporary British politics of a historical event or process which took place before 1945 and is not a war.
7. Explain in detail a major scientific process or discovery.
8. Name six common British trees or birds which you can identify by sight.
9. Using the most recent annual report and accounts of any FTSE-100 company, explain in general terms whether that company made a profit and if so, how it was made.
10. Explain what a financial derivative is.
You could reword some of these questions or add different ones, but the general point is that too many pundits are claiming an intellectual authority which they evidently don’t have.
You might point out that media pundits aren’t really meant to inform public debate, in an abstract sense, as much as to rally opinion behind some part of the establishment, provide a useful impression to the wider society that elite-level discussion is “inclusive” or offer pungent opinions which can lure more eyeballs towards ads. That would arguably be true but we can’t, in one step, get entirely outside the political culture and habits and institutions that we have.
We’re in an era of crisis and deep change, some of which is causing terrible human suffering and destruction of Nature, and we need an opinion-shaping machinery which is less self-regarding, less parochial, more interested in structural problems than courtier-politics and more honest about its own increasingly visible limitations. How we get one, I don’t know. But insisting that well-paid explainers should explain themselves might be a way to start.
Puck 