The other day, I was scrolling through Facebook when I happened to see a video of Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg. In the video, Rees-Mogg declared that the public were unnecessarily “carping” about the shortage in coronavirus tests across the UK and that instead, we should praise the government for its “phenomenal success” of a testing programme. I see plenty of things on Facebook that annoy me, but this seemed to touch a nerve. Perhaps it was because it was just the latest in a long line of incidents where the government- and especially Conservative Party politicians- have persistently refused to acknowledge its failures. As the coronavirus case numbers soar again and there’s talk of increasingly stringent measures to combat a second wave, it’s easy to see how the way in which our government repeatedly refuses to admit its mistakes has directly brought about the second wave which we are now facing.
This government has experienced many failures, even before we all heard the word “coronavirus” every-day. Not a week has gone by under Johnson’s government that we’ve not heard about another “blunder”: the prorogation of Parliament; the mishandling of Brexit; the mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic (not forgetting the particularly symbolic “Cummingsgate” scandal); racial injustice or the refugee crisis are just a few of the most noteworthy. Yet for all of these examples, there has seldom been an admission from the government that they have made a mistake. If there is such an admission, it’s more likely to be a generalised statement involving the line “mistakes were made” as though the mistakes weren’t caused by the politicians themselves, but by some mysterious higher power. However, it wouldn’t be fair to say that this inability to admit mistakes is solely a feature of the UK government. It extends far and wide, to the likes of China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Russia, the US and Brazil. An apparent infallibility seems to have become just one of the lists of traits which world leaders have to display. A government which is able to hold itself to account is rapidly becoming rarer than a Siberian tiger- but has it always been this way?
The problem with refusing to acknowledge failures- beyond the fact that it’s extremely frustrating- is that it also signals that a person refuses to learn from their mistakes and develop into a better person. It’s something we are told from primary school: it’s okay to get things wrong, because that’s how you learn. So why does our government, a government of adults (the last time I looked) struggle so much? Perhaps it’s worth exploring exactly why politicians so often refuse to acknowledge their failures. Humans- not just politicians- instinctively hate acknowledging their own failures. I know I hate doing it. I hate it less than I used to, admittedly, but I still find it difficult. By acknowledging our failures, we suffer from cognitive dissonance, which can often be uncomfortable, because it causes suffering to our egos too. Beyond this, for a politician in particular, making mistakes reflects poorly on their ability to govern because the public are supposed to trust politicians. If they make mistakes too often, public trust will be eroded (ironically, trust will also be eroded by a refusal to admit to these mistakes). Moreover, admitting that we made mistakes has often been incorrectly misconstrued as a sign of weakness. Therefore, politicians are usually reluctant to show any sign of weakness, largely thanks to the prevailing machoism which still unfortunately dominates modern politics. It’s almost like game of “survival of the fittest”, and those who do not appear to have complete confidence in all of their decisions are conflated with being weak-willed and indecisive. So, on one hand, acknowledgement of failures may be perceived by a politician as a career disaster, although the brand of politics which advocates his view is perhaps not the brand we should be adopting in today’s society, where there must be no room for prioritising political expediency over peoples’ lives. It is inevitable that politicians will make mistakes: what truly matters is how a government tackles these mistakes- and our government has not been doing that particularly effectively.
This government’s repeated U-turns over the last few months may well be interpreted as an acknowledgement by the government that they have failed staggeringly. In the sense that a U-turn involves a radical turnaround of a particular policy and its replacement by another policy (usually favoured by the people) then it’s true that the government have essentially enacted the equivalent of saying “we were wrong, and we’re going to do something about it”. However, surely the sheer number of U-turns are only a further indication of the government’s mistakes in the first place? More worryingly, these U-turns were only made after significant amounts of public unrest- whether it was the U-turn for A-level and GCSE exam results, the U-turn for the NHS Track and Trace App, the U-turn for publishing the inquiry into the disproportionate COVID-19 death rate for BAME people, the U-turn for the track and trace programme or the U-turn for the food voucher scheme for schoolchildren eligible for FSM, (and the list goes on). The U-turns I mentioned were just the ones which led to public outcries. Once these U-turns are made, there’s never an apology from the government for the disruption they will inevitably have caused (which was especially notable after the A-Level and GCSE scandal). Instead, there’s an expectation that we should be grateful that the government have even made a U-turn at all. It was an attitude exemplified by Rees-Mogg’s indignancy in the video I wrote about at the start of this post. U-turns are all well and good on the surface, but the fact that they are performed at the last minute, almost performatively, to suppress any further public outcries, does not suggest a strong government whose decisions prioritise the people, and especially its most marginalised people. Instead, they it suggests a profoundly weak government, whose decisions prioritise political self-interest overt the people they are supposed to serve. In a series of blunders even worse (and less entertaining) than those on BBC’s satirical political sitcom The Thick of It, our government then tries to hide their true motives by pretending that a U-turn was done purely for the good of the public, when in reality, it’s only to prevent an already inevitable PR disaster. It’s a cynical approach to take, but it’s also the most apt approach for a government which has repeatedly failed us all and shown scant care for anyone but itself along the way.
In a utopian world, all governments would be able to hold themselves totally accountable. It’s not only the UK which would benefit hugely if its politicians became much more willing to admit their mistakes, apologise, and learn from these mistakes. It would benefit every nation, because no nation- however effective their government- has been totally successful at holding itself accountable for previous poor decisions. Perhaps the public would at last start to trust governments- all the more imperative since public trust in governments across the world has been dwindling drastically since the 2010s. After all, admitting that we have made mistakes humanises us to others, because no one likes that person who never says that they made a mistake! Why would it be any different with our governments? The public have long perceived politicians to be self-serving and power hungry, and their failures to hold themselves accountable has become almost ingrained in the societal image of a politician. But politics should not be that way- because not only is this brand of politics outdated, but as we have seen, it destroys peoples’ lives. Given the state of the world in 2020, we need a brand of politics which places accountability over political expediency, because if there are no people to serve, there are no governments.
A Northern Girl in a Southern World 