This post was first published by Labour List in August 2013. It bears posting again, as in the months since we have seen the Tories reject their purported attempts at a new politics as they return to the methods of smear, half-truths and downright lying about the opposition which (presumably) they believe have served them well in the past. The employment of Lynton Crosby - specialist in the Dead Cat School of politics - suggests the next 18 months of campaigning ahead of the 2015 general election will involve concerted Tory attempts to drag Labour into similarly dirty forms of fighting. Upshot: the electorate will decide you are all as bad as each other and by not voting, allow the Tory core vote to win the day.
There is another way and Ed Miliband's statement that Labour will call the Tories out every time they resort to such methods is welcome. So is ensuring that our focus is on political campaigning that foregrounds the issues that really matter to people: falling standards of living, stressful working conditions, a recovery for the few and recession for the many.
It also means showing that there are different ways of conducting political life, and this means thinking again about how human life is valuable in and of itself, and what this means for our life together. It is with that aim that this post was written.
Taxes, Death and the
Kindness of Strangers
As Benjamin Franklin famously remarked, nothing is certain
in life except death and taxes.
Current political discourse is shaped almost entirely by one
of this duo and it isn’t the Grim Reaper.
I’ve lost count of the number of times a discussion has been
framed in terms of what ‘the taxpayer’ will or will not stand; any debate about
any policy or project ultimately starting and ending with the question of
whether or not it is ‘good value for money.’
That the language of economics should frame all political
consideration of how we might live together has a diminishing effect; not just
on political debate where we seem to be struggling to find a Big, Bold idea of what
it means to be Labour in the 21st century. How we understand what it
is to be human is itself diminished if all is reducible to the economic ‘bottom
line’.
In an age dominated by economics, each person is viewed as an
economic unit, their success or failure determined by the extent to which they
have used their talents to achieve status and wealth. To be wealthy or
self-sufficient is to be virtuous. To be poor or dependent on others is to be
at best weak, at worst immoral.
Despising the less fortunate is not a good starting place
for constructing a vision of the Good Society. Shaping a vision of politics through
the abstraction which is ‘The Taxpayer’ will not allow for policies that
support human flourishing. A more likely result of this obsession with money is
the kind of dismissive cruelty that sees in the vulnerable person only an
expense that has to be paid.
To reflect on the certainty of death proves more useful than
reflecting on the inevitability of taxes. None of us is invincible. All of us,
one day, will die. This titbit of wisdom from Philosophy 101 is not meant to cause
despair. To accept the reality of death is to reflect on what a politics might
look like that placed our shared vulnerability is at its heart.
To accept that all will die is to accept that all of us are fragile.
If we are to survive in such a world – more than that, if we are to live well –
all of us will be dependent on the kindness of strangers.
Kindness is a much ignored political virtue. To be kind is
to approach those around us in a caring way. To be kind is to recognise the
things that unite rather than divide. To be kind is to treat the other person
as we would like to be treated if we were in their place. Kindness depends on
being able to see the other as like ourselves with the effect that we go
beyond our own concerns in order to think about theirs. And when dealing with
the most vulnerable in our society, it means seeing them not as different but
as sharing a common humanity that seeks to live in the face of death.
Kindness, though, is about more than adopting a particular
attitude to those we meet. It’s also vital for fostering a political space
where vulnerable others are seen not as burdens to be ignored or rejected, but
as people whose flourishing must be nurtured if we are all to live well. It
does not surprise me that Labour’s Welfare State should have emerged out of the
horrors of the Second World War where death was a shared reality. To have stood
in the face of death was to recognise the responsibility we each have for the other
and to shape the state accordingly.
No doubt placing kindness at the heart of Labour’s politics will
sound weak to some, not robust enough to cope with the demands of today. I
don’t think that’s true. Kindness takes effort and energy and a willingness to
go outside of ourselves in order to meet other people whose lives may be quite
different from our own. It necessitates meeting the other person with a
generosity of spirit that recognises that everyone has something to teach about
how we might live more fully.
If Labour is to truly change our nation we need a compelling
vision of the rich, full life. A return to kindness and generosity provides a renewed
context for thinking about the things we need in order to really live. For when
it comes down to it, we are not, in fact, taxpayers: we are human beings, with
all the messiness, vulnerability and need for human kindness that entails.
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