The Drawing Board [Long]

The drawing board is the place where things begin, or return to. My project has admittedly come off the drawing board, at least temporarily, and I've taken steps to launch it. But every now and again, you should go back to it and see what progress you've made.

For me, the drawing board comes in the form of a notebook I've carried around. In it, I can track the progress of this idea from almost its very beginnings. In it, I touch on a whole range of diverse areas to do with politics, each one that arguably could produce a book. Of course, I have no intention of writing a book about any of those things. So every now and again you need to do a bit of creative destruction.

The way I do this is to make sure I'm asking the right questions. I know one question I want to answer, and each of them in turn needs to have more supplementary questions asked of it so that you can really drill down to what it is you want to do and can accomplish given your resources.

So, this blog is one the layers of filters that gets applied to the colossus of random scribbles that strike me urgently at unsociable hours to demand that they're written down.

And one of the first things I have to filter is what it is I'm trying to do.

So, the aim of this project is to empower young people in politics. So I have to drill down and find out what that means and how it's best accomplished given the constraints I'm operating in. I want to do that here, so that you have the clearest statement possible about what it is I'm trying to do and the rationale behind how I'm going to do it. I also want this blog to be an insight into the raw process of one person trying to do something, whether successful or not. So, yes, like the actual context of building something, it'll be very non-linear and sometimes it'll roll forward at great pace and other times I'll be pushing up against a wall of some sort. Sometimes I'll roll back and re-imagine the thing so that I take into account what I've learned.

But hopefully I won't do too much of that in any single post, I want them to be fairly linear. Indeed, I want this blog to be a kind of draft of the final products in many cases.

I want to empower young people in politics. The first question you might ask is what that means. So let me define the three key terms in that sentence: empowerment, youth and politics. Once I've done that, I think you'll have the best description of what it is I'm attempting to do. The first two are fairly straight forward as I'm afforded great licence with their definitions. The third one I want to linger on and that's where this post might begin to look a bit like a wall of text. I'll avoid this as much as I possibly can, but I really want to muse on this a bit because it's key to how well this goes.

The Youth

One thing I've had to change is the definition of the youth. Initially, I thought between 14 and 18 or something like that but given the general reception to that idea I've narrowed the demographic to 16-19 – I'm happy to make this change, though I'm less than happy about the presumption that younger people don't want to know.

Empowerment

So let's get the simple stuff out of the way. What do I mean when I say empowerment. Well, the way I see it, someone has power in a relationship when they can influence their decisions. How does one influence a decision? Well, there's more than one way to skin a cat. You could be holding the purse strings, you could be offering a quid pro quo. I also may be naive in thinking that you can influence a decision if you have a good point to make. So, I hope, wistfully, that if you are knowledgeable and open to discussion then people will be receptive to you.

The cynic in us all scoffs at the very notion that politics proceeds according to the results of orderly deliberation. And I would say that between politicians, there is a great deal of justification for this point of view, given the carry on at PMQs and the belligerence and mutual contempt we are routinely treated to on programmes like Question Time. But I think between politicians and the public, the tone is set by the public and we have a reasonable chance of actually having a conversation rather than trying to get them on the defence. So, what we're drilling down to here is: how do we get people to be able to have a conversation with politicians where all the power is in their hands?

See, the public has very little to say about politics in general. It's much like going to the doctor's surgery. We can raise problems but not necessarily discuss the treatment. You really have no idea what medication works for your problem, what your problem actually is as a diagnosis, or anything. Well, I think it's absolutely imperative we redress this balance. If we did so, it would be better for the public, who suddenly would be able to pick the leader they think is most  capable, and in fact for politicians too. Because we set them up to fail. We say to these people, go and reshape the world we live in. Solve our problems. But then we say: you're on your own. We expect to take no further part in the fashioning, or restoration of our Utopia.

Politicians are just people. The problems we face - terrorism, climate change, the economy - utterly dwarf the capabilities of just a set of people smaller than we choose to decipher the problems of producing mobile phones. To be honest, they dwarf the abilities of entire countries. The problems cross borders, but we act like the solutions don't. What's more, we fail to prevent groupthink because our politicians come from such homogeneous backgrounds. So politicians need to be able to have a conversation with us because it takes the pressure off. It relieves the burden.

It also makes the ecosystem a lot more diverse.

But to have a conversation, we need to be more literate in politics. We can't and shouldn't devote all our energies to being political obsessives like me. At the end of the day, the professionals will always have better knowledge of the specifics than you on most issues. It is their day to day reality. But we needn't let that be a huge impediment. If you are literate, you know enough to get on and be able to get a handle on the issue such that you at least know what is being discussed and what is at stake. Beyond that, you may already be familiar enough with some special area to get into the specifics of something you care about, be it geology, physics, education, voluntary sector stuff, which with your political literacy you'll be able to make huge contributions to that area because you'll know the mutual implications of political decisions on your subject and vice versa.

Politics

So we know what it means to be empowered in politics: you should be able to have a conversation with a politician expecting to be an equal, or near equal, participant. To get to that point, we need to educate. So, simple? Well, no. What is it we're trying to educate ourselves in? What is the subject? What is politics?

We all know the famous sayings about politics. Ronald Reagan famously quipped that "It's been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first." Clausewitz also said that politics was "a continuation of war through other means". We're told that it's the art of the possible, Aristotle said it was to be "more prized than medicine". (Given the time period, he perhaps made a good shout.) He also said we're fundamentally political animals.

But what is it? I offer this Aristotle-inspired definition: politics is the art of asserting your version of justice. I appreciate that isn't a clear-cut definition and it isn't supposed to be. Any interaction where you're trying to reconcile two views on the right thing to do on the situation in any kind of structure is political. So, yes, I'm including "office politics", "family politics" and "playground politics" as valid politics. The structure doesn't have to be a parliament or a senate, it could be an office, or even a party.

 Again, I offer this definition because it makes us ask all those questions that we invariably classify under politics. And that is what I spent the wee hours of yesterday morning asking myself. I took that definition to the drawing board, and I came up with a series of colourful mind maps. as I asked the questions, I was able to get to the ones that were most relevant to the project. The ones that need to be asked to make politics accessible to those who aren't already interested.

Allow me to take you through that process.

So how do we explore this?

If we take my definition as a starting point then we're led fairly quickly to ask the following (among other things):

•         What is justice?

•         What is your version of justice?

•         How does one 'assert' social justice?

Each of these questions in turn lead us to ask more explicitly political questions. If we ask how one might assert justice, we can trace out the path to such questions as: What framework should we put in place to regulate these assertions? The options are plentiful. You could say that the correct assertions are those sanctioned by the will of God, which gives you a theocracy; you could say, as we do, that assertions must persuade us, which gives us democracy. Those are just two examples.

Then we can drill even further down. What system best represents the will of the people? Again, there are options. Consistent 50%+1? Or does the distribution of your majority mean that you have the risk of one group of people dominating the other? If so, does this mean that you need to change your system to recognise these distinct communities and give  them a degree of autonomy so that their interests are entertained? (For examples, see Belgium, the US, Spain, the UK, who all have  autonomous sub-entities.)

In fact, in asking this question, we've also begun to approach asking how to assert your ideals in the system.

Returning to the 'top-level' question of what it is that you think is the right thing to do, we can use that to argue about specific issues in politics.  Let's take the Leveson Inquiry, released today. It  comes down to the distribution of power and the optimal distribution of power between the government, the media and the people depends on your ideological perspective as to the ideal functions for each of these things. In a way I'd not like to use as a primary analysis of this situation, I think it's fair to say that a conversation about ideology can be adduced from Leveson. The Labour Party, historically left-wing, wants to stand up to vested interests while the Conservatives are torn between that and the liberal instinct to keep the state out of things if possible. The Liberal Democrats are also obviously torn between these two ideals, as the Deputy Prime Minister began his speech by saying.

But that's for another post, perhaps one of my many sidebars. I just want to use this long, long post to give you a sense of where I'm coming from. Maybe I won't get your attention all the way to the bottom. But stick around!