In the 1950s photos appeared in the Newspapers of British Soldiers holding the decapitated heads of Malay men that they had killed. Some said they were faked but they were proven to be genuine. It didn’t warrant a single mention by any member of Parliament at the time.
What else is new?
Shortly after the start of Keir Starmer's term as Prime Minister, his party was embroiled in ‘Freebiegate’ whereby rich friends of the Labour party had given gifts - all declared mind you - to multiple higher ups such as Taylor Swift Tickets or nice new outfits. The Guardian had a headline: ‘how freebiegate rocked Labour’. New rules were announced in which MPs couldn’t accept clothes as gifts anymore. But it begs to question why anybody cared.
Will you be resigning Prime Minister?
I don’t think anyone actually did care, it’s partly the media having to sell outrage to keep you engaged. Partly people having something to talk about. But mostly I think that our standards of how politicians “should” act has become completely unreasonable. And this is causing serious damage to the democracies of the developed world.
In the last 10 years, the United Kingdom has had 5 Prime Ministers (soon to be 6). None of them finished a full term, even with historically landslide victories. This was through some of the biggest crises of a generation including Brexit, Covid-19, and the Ukraine war. But if you were to take a step back and lay out what the biggest mistakes of their terms were, you may think that these were ridiculously no big deal. Look at Starmers transport secretary Louise Haigh. Previously she was mugged and listed her work phone stolen, but it turns out she forgot it was actually at home and never notified the police. Last year she resigned after only 5 months as a member of cabinet because of this mistake she made 11 years ago.
France is no better, they’ve had 7 Prime Ministers in the same time. President Macron has had to use a controversial section of the French constitution to bypass the National Assembly 24 times. Again if you were to ask people why Macron, who is a mild centrist, is so unpopular you’d struggle to not sound like a radical. He raised the pension age by 2 years? It’s still lower than the majority of western democracies. Remember the yellow vests protests? That was because of a small increase in fuel taxes, and it nearly resulted in Revolution.
The public has backed all of this Chaos, polls consistently show that the governments of France, UK, and Germany have historically low polling numbers. Lower than the majority of the planet, lower than Trump, FAR lower than Putin, and lower than South Africa which has had rolling blackouts and 1/3rd of adults are unemployed.
At least they're not alone down there?
None of this means we should go back to photographs of severed heads and find nothing worth mentioning. The point is not that we care too much. It’s that we care too much about juicy stories that don't matter. It doesn’t affect our lives, or our democracies. Outrage is not scrutiny, and churn is not accountability. When no government survives long enough to do anything difficult, the difficult things simply don't get done and then we punish the next government for the consequences. And the people watching this most carefully are the ones who benefit from it. It's no accident that the leaders we hold to impossible standards poll below the ones who have none.
All of this makes our democracies ripe for populism. On the right and left. The right will say that immigration and culture war issues are to blame, the left will say we need to tax more and give out more freebies. Both poll well in focus groups.