Time to ask ‘why’

Reading Comment is free today I was struck by this article by Dan Hancox, who believes Cameron, and the coalition more broadly, has succeeded in bringing Britain into some great state of uniformity against his politics.

For one thing, Hancox is clearly wrong. While support for the Lib Dems has clearly ebbed (to put it mildly) the Tory vote has held up fairly nicely. According to ukpollingreport.co.uk it currently sits around 36%. Not a stunning achievement, but roughly similar to what they achieved in the election. So there.

However, what is more interesting is what it reveals about political thinking on both right and left, a category I hope Mr Hancox won’t mind me putting him in (I am, after all, a lowly blogger on my own website, while he’s on the Guardian, so he can dismiss me as a nutter if he wants to…).

Too often, commentators view those who fail to see things from their point of view as tragically stupid, and this accounts for the hatred-filled vitriol of people like Melanie Phillips and the patronising intellectual arrogance of Johann Hari.

Debate is too often lowered to simple assumptions. A great number of people like that the coalition is shaking up the school system, reforming welfare and trimming the deficit. Yet to many, it is impossible to understand why otherwise sensible people could support shambolic plans to release schools from central supervision and rigour, rob people of benefits and deliberately crash the economic recovery.

Rather than assuming that those on the other side of the political are simply wrong, and dismissing them from the political narrative, as Hancox appears to do in his article (if you support the coalition, you’re clearly in a tiny minority, he infers), more people need to ask why. Why do over a third of people in the UK still support Cameron? And why do slightly more support Ed Miliband?

It is refreshing to see that more and more are coming to this more nuanced opinion, expressed most frequently by Philip Blond, the ‘red Tory’. But as long as articles appear like today’s in Comment is free, political debate will continue to be dominated by those shouting from across an empty hall, rather than engaging in the delicate dance of policy-making.