Part 2 of an essay on the significance of the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London, both for contemporary politics in general and left in particular. Part 1 is here

Boris and celebrity capitalism

Anti-political sentiments tend to be bound up with a belief in the power of individuals and a concomitant scepticism about the power of collectives – be they nations, villages, or organisations – to achieve anything much. At the level of popular culture, its obvious manifestation is an obsession with the doings of celebrities: those pure ‘personalities’ whose notable achievements in any meaningful field are negligible. Famous for ‘being themselves’, contemporary celebrities appear to make few compromises with the everyday demands of collective or civic life; let alone the commitments that working in groups demands of scientists, nurses, builders or even serious actors.

At the same time, the producers of reality TV shows go to great lengths to convince audiences that living together is impossible, and that competitive, selfish values naturally dominate all human relations. They fall over themselves to prevent or subvert attempts at co-operation when these emerge in contexts like the Big Brother House or the Young Mums’ Mansion, and they demonstrate a relentless invention in the introduction of arbitrary mechanisms and carefully-selected sociopaths to situations where any ordinary group of people would just figure out a way to discuss things and get on with the job of living together. The implicit message is clear: don’t believe in democracy, collectivity, or society; realise instead that the natural state for human beings is the mind-set of a neurotic, cocaine-addicted TV producer, whose colleagues of today will be tomorrow’s competitors for the next 6-month contract with Endemol.

Like it or not, these have been the defining cultural phenomena of our time. In this context, the belief that commerce and competition are the only legitimate sources of authority, and that fame and personal charm are the only real measures of value, is bound to thrive. Without any countervailing cultural force, the chief criterion for winning Big Brother – possession of a distinctive and likeable TV persona – starts to inform voters’ attitudes in selecting candidates, while “being political” comes to seem both incompetent and inherently untrustworthy. Within this universe of values, Boris Johnson appears as the one honest man: unashamed of his lack of principle, contemptuous of the whole political process, indifferent to the public distaste for racist language (although Boris the mayor, as distinct from Boris the candidate, is sensitive enough to this issue to have appointed a black deputy already).

Unembarrassed by the personal privileges which he has exploited so effectively since leaving Eton, Johnson presented himself explicitly as a celebrity who had achieved little of substance and promised more of the same: his editorship of The Spectator, his most significant real achievement to date, was hardly one of the points on which he sold his candidacy to the voters of Bexley, and nor was his policy-light manifesto. Boris’ persona resonates with the sense that politics itself is a futile circus, that collective action is impotent, that media notoriety and personal wealth are the only really effective forms of power in contemporary culture.

However, this is not a situation which can simply be laid at the door of the evil ‘Media’, because the government itself has been sending out much the same message throughout the tenure of New Labour. Even in recent months, Brown’s self-defeating promotion of figures such as Digby Jones, Alan Sugar and David Pitt-Watson has manifested precisely this set of assumptions. More fundamentally, New Labour’s attacks on the core values of the public sector and its efforts to commercialise and privatise public services all work to reinforce the idea that the world of commerce, with its emphasis on competition and profit, is a fit model for every possible sphere of human endeavour and interaction. The PFI programme, foundation hospitals, city academies, retreats from collective pay bargaining and the massive outsourcing of various strands of service delivery all point in this one direction.

Indeed, such policies do not only imply that the values of the market are the only values that matter; they actively make this true by forcing public servants to play by commercial rules even when they do not want to and when their clients derive no obvious benefit from them doing so. In the process, relationships between service ‘users’ and ‘providers’ are re-engineered on the assumption that such relations must be inherently antagonistic, that only market disciplines can protect the interests of ‘consumers’ from the lazy, self-serving ‘producer interests’ (i.e. public sector professionals).

How can government and politicians expect to be trusted when they organise their entire policy agenda according to the assumption that all other public servants are untrustworthy? Johnson’s victory surely emerges from this matrix of assumptions. His persona resonates with these beliefs because of his unashamed privilege and contempt for the post-Macpherson anti-racist orthodoxy. Surely the reason the Tory leadership allowed Johnson – widely regarded as a political liability – to run at all, was that they recognised this, if only on an unconscious level (so much of politics, like the other expressive arts, is about intuition, inspiration and unconscious genius).

In voting for Johnson, some must experience the pleasure of letting go of their lingering resentments against the privileged caste to which he belongs and they never will. In doing so, they assent – blissfully – to the anti-political world view, according to which we shouldn’t worry at all about such issues as social justice, elite power, the divide between the publicly and the privately educated, the persistent realities of racism. To ignore the social politics of a figure like Johnson is a self-permission to accept that nothing can be done to alter a society which produces such anomalies,to stop worrying and get on with the business of running up credit-card debts.

The message that we don’t have to bother with politics, that it’s frustrations and compromises merely mask an empty reality in which individuals struggle for personal gain – just as they do in the workplace and on the high street – is comforting for people who can no longer relate to the idea of a positive public realm. The seductive message of Boris, the insouciant adventurer who finally made Ken seem earnest, however effective: don’t worry, it’s all nonsense, just have a laugh, have a drink and go shopping.

At the same time, for some a vote for Boris clearly meant a vote ‘for change’, however unspecified. Again, it’s an easy mistake simply to dismiss this as a generic effect of disillusion with Labour, or the consequence of the Evening Standard’s relentless anti-Ken headlines. Clearly these factors played a role, as did opposition to Ken’s radical cosmopolitanism, and the anti-immigration rhetoric of the BNP. But it is more important to understand this apparently empty vote ‘for change’ as a protest against the apparent impotence of the kind of democratic politics which Ken has come to represent, expressed in the anti-political values embodied by Boris.

Ken himself then compounded his vulnerability by failing to renew or articulate what had been his hallmark. Instead he traded on his “experience”, presenting himself to voters as a safe pair of managerial hands rather than as a campaigner for their collective empowerment. As a result, voter turn-out in those areas which backed him was significantly lower than in those which backed Boris. The enthusiasm with which suburban voters rejected the idea of themselves as cosmopolitan Londoners with a stake in the democratisation of society was not matched by any equivalent defence of this ideal by those with the greatest stake in it. Livingstone had made no obvious effort to mobilise such a constituency; but if he had tried, there is no reason to assume that he would have failed.

The Realities of Power

Overall then, a deplorable situation. Government and media elites collude to produce a culture which generates disdain for real politics and a veneration for irreverent celebrities. Mayor Boris is the result. But is that the end of the story? Here is where I want to depart from the chorus of voices on the ‘centre-left’ who have bemoaned the devaluation of politics in recent years. For while bodies like Demos, the Fabian Society, the IPPR and the Power Commission have produced reports diagnosing and deploring this state of affairs, they have almost entirely missed the central point. What most of these documents have in common is a narrative which blames government for failing to engage the citizenry, or sections of the public for failing to engage with politics. Incompetence on the part of government and bad faith on the part of journalists seem to be the usual imagined culprits. But major cultural shifts do not happen merely because of bad faith and incompetence. They happen also because someone, somewhere benefits.

The legitimacy of politics itself has been undermined from within and without, to the point where the most effective progressive politician of his generation can be defeated at the ballot box by a figure better known for his punch-lines than his policies. Who gains? The right-wing press, perhaps the most biased and under-regulated in the ‘free’ world, which New Labour has not made the slightest move to check after 11 years in power, is one clear winner. The other, most importantly, is the super-rich elite of ‘non-doms’, city bonus-earners, PFI-profiteers and public-school alumni, tied together by their involvement with key financial institutions, corporate media and the speculative property market. What would be required to work against this array of interests would be something much more than a few well-meaning voter-participation initiatives, but the rebuilding of social forces strong enough to challenge corporate power.

A society which lacks a strong labour movement – another situation which a Labour government has done nothing to remedy – also lacks a strong sense of collective empowerment and political possibility. It will need a revival of democracy, a genuine attempt to reconfigure and reinvent local government, trade-unionism and political participation for the 21st century, to reverse the trend which has so demeaned the very idea of democracy in contemporary culture. But such an effort could only be meaningful if it was led by politicians who recognised the obstacles such a project faces, and the fierce conflict with powerful vested interests which it would require. With the defeat of Livingstone, we have lost the last prominent British politician who understood this political reality.

Despite narrowly losing his election, Livingstone did much better at the polls than the Labour Party nationally, which suffered massive defeats in local elections across the country on the same day. He remains the most popular and successful radical politician of his generation, and Johnson beat him in part because he was even more populist, irreverent, outspoken and seemingly-authentic than Ken became in his last, more diplomatic years. The implication is clear: at least among the crucial swing constituencies of Southern England, the kind of ponderous self-righteousness embodied by Gordon Brown, his presbyterian purposefulness barely concealing his deference to hedge-fund managers and media moguls – is unlikely to convince anybody of anything. On the other hand, an uncowed populist Labour leader, willing to tell people the truth – that corporate profits do not equal social benefits – might yet be able to capture the imagination of voters as Johnson did last week.

The way to engage with the anti-political ‘common-sense’ which has brought Johnson to power is not to preach about the virtues of civic participation: it is to acknowledge that in fact the public is right to disengage from a process which does not offer it any scope for meaningful participation. Politics today is thoroughly corrupted, and democracy is often a meaningless sham, because those charged with administering it will not defend it from the encroaching power of corporations, commercial media and US militarism. We need politicians with the nerve to admit this, and to take on the vested interests which maintain this state of affairs. Only then will the voting public start taking them seriously again.

Jeremy Gilbert is Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of East London. His publications include Discographies: Dance music, culture and the politics of sound (with Ewan Pearson, Routledge, 1999); and Cultural Capitalism: Politics after New Labour (ed. with Timothy Bewes, Lawrence Wishart, 2000)

Also by Jeremy Gilbert in OurKingdom: Who is the Democratic Candidate for Mayor? (30 April 2008)