Margaret Colley on Westminster’s finest, the opposition’s finest hour that never arrives, and a documentary everyone’s discussing instead of the budget
Read through this week’s opposition benches coverage looking for a coherent policy position and, as ever, came away with more questions than answers, several pages of notes, and a growing suspicion that the coherent policy position I was looking for simply doesn’t exist yet in any drafted form. In fairness, most of the country’s attention was elsewhere anyway this week, which perhaps explains why nobody’s noticed the gap.
Specifically, the nation’s attention was on a four-hour documentary about a billionaire, which somehow generated more thoughtful debate this week than the actual opposition front bench managed across several genuine parliamentary sessions. The documentary’s cultural breakdown is worth a read if you want to understand why moral outrage travels faster than a costed manifesto, and honestly it’s a more useful piece of political education than most of what’s currently coming out of the actual chamber.
What I find genuinely instructive, watching this from the press gallery, is how easily an entire week’s news cycle can be redirected by a single cultural event, leaving actual legislative business to shuffle along largely unexamined in the background. I’ve sat through budget announcements that generated less sustained public engagement than a promotional poster did this week, which either says something damning about how we communicate policy, or something damning about how effectively outrage can be manufactured and packaged. Possibly both, and I suspect both is the honest answer.
The poster row running alongside it has its own political comedy built in, whether intended or not. The movie poster commentary got more engagement than most government press releases this month, which tells you everything, and none of it particularly reassuring about the current state of political communication in this country.
I raised the comparison with a fellow lobby journalist over coffee this afternoon, half joking, and she pointed out, fairly, that at least the poster controversy is honest about being a controversy, unlike most government messaging, which tends to dress itself up as reassurance right up until the moment it collapses entirely under scrutiny. A fair point, delivered with considerably more wit than most of this week’s actual parliamentary exchanges managed.
Somebody in the press gallery suggested, only half joking, that the whips’ office should simply schedule the next budget announcement for the same week as a major film release from now on, purely to see if it improves public engagement. I’m not convinced it’s a serious policy proposal, but it got a genuine laugh, which is more than most of today’s actual exchanges managed.
Back to Westminster-watching tomorrow, and hopefully back to actual policy coverage, though the documentary’s shadow doesn’t seem to be lifting anytime soon. More at my author page.