Jonathan Todd

Charlie Brooker is typically pugnacious and amusing when he writes:

“Right now all our faith has poured out of the old institutions, and there’s nowhere left to put it. We need new institutions to believe in, and fast. Doesn’t matter what they’re made of. Knit them out of string, wool, anything. Quickly, quickly. Before we start worshipping insects”.

Denis MacShane may not be rushing towards his knitting needles. He wrote to Michael Martin in May to say:

“The great historian Macaulay wrote that there was nothing “so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”. The British public is in one of its fits of morality right now but this will pass”.

Thomas Babington Macaulay may have been an historian but he was once described by John Stuart Mill as an intellectual ‘dwarf’. Perhaps, Mill would not have been so quick to dismiss as ‘ridiculous’ the collapse of trust in institutions like parliament and the City that Brooker lampoons. He was a genuine progressive and may have seen the spirit of our age as a harbinger of something more profound than that which can be dismissed as ‘ridiculous’. He might have agreed with Matthew Taylor, who writes in this summer’s RSA journal, that “our political model is broken”. He goes on:

“The polls-driven, triangulating nature of modern politics, exacerbated by the Westminster electoral system, encourages politicians to promise we can have our cake and eat it too. Having been told that anything is possible if we only elect the right guy, we are quickly disillusioned, and so the gulf between us and our leaders widens again. In my first RSA annual lecture, I spoke of the need to move away from a government-centric model of politics in which we demand that politicians solve all our problems (while all the time expecting them to fail), to a citizen-centric model in which we, the people, try to agree what we want while recognising the responsibilities and trade-offs involved”.

As Taylor writes elsewhere, ”we find ourselves unwilling to be governed but not yet willing to govern ourselves”. This is the essence of our times. This is the next step on what G. W.F Hegel – a truly great nineteenth century historian – called “the long walk through the institutions”. It is far from ‘ridiculous’. Knitting needles may or may not help. But we must think imaginatively and boldly to create the new politics that we need.