Politicians - What are they (in it) for?

Something is wrong when an elected representative of a civilised country is so confident in her superior standing with regard to the citizens she is elected to serve that she is able to make graphic and disparaging comments on Twitter about someone whose vote she presumably would like to keep. Something is wrong when another highly placed politician makes arrogant aggressive remarks to a police officer. Something is also wrong with a police force which seems to operate on a points basis whereby ‘performance’ matters more than people, whichever side of the law a person appears to be on at the point of arrest or detention. Something is wrong with the way we do politics.

We have a political system which relies on trust and accountability, if it is to function for the greater good and so enable us to remain a free society. The greater good is the basis of good governance and ought to be the underlying motivating factor for anyone who seeks election. But the good is easily compromised by the all too human tendency to literally ‘err’, to use a rather old fashioned sounding word for what otherwise might be called sin. To err is not simply to make a mistake. It is to go wrong. In the case of politics and public service, to err is to stray from the path of a commitment to serve the electorate or those to whom public servants, such as the police, teachers or doctors, have pledged themselves.

But to return specifically to politics, all of this begs the question of motive when it comes to seeking public office. The cynic would say that a person only seeks to be elected because they desire power. The cynic has a point. To begin with, and as a person of integrity, the aspiring MP may only desire a little power, enough to ‘make a difference’, enough to ‘influence’.  But power is addictive, which is why it never satisfies and invariably corrupts.

Standards and norms for civilised behaviour, including at times the law of the land, impede power satisfaction. They get in the way and this, as we saw in the cases of both Emily Thornbury and Andrew Mitchell, leads to frustration, anxiety and aggression of one kind or another. Addiction to power requires determination and aggression for the power need to be satisfied but, like other addictive habits and substances, the need is never fully met, with the resulting frustration playing itself out in the kind of macho aggression to which we witness almost daily on the floor of the House of Commons.

Irrespective of gender, those who are addicted to power are also testosterone driven, even if the ‘drive’ is purely subliminal. The Emily Thornbury tweet may have been made in haste in a surge of subliminal power driven energy – or frustration, but it revealed the fact that power matters to those who hold it, irrespective of gender. Power is more necessary to them than the people who gave them power in the first place. We can draw similar conclusions from the final outcome of the Andrew Mitchell ‘Plebgate’ affair. Being testosterone driven, whether your are male or female, gives you permission, it would seem, to be as rude, arrogant and indifferent to the humanity of the persons you are there to serve, and in some cases to the rule of law, as you like.

This aggressive power drive lodges itself in a person, overtaking that initial calling to work for the common good and threatening the innate goodness, the inner light, which made it possible for them to discern and obey that calling in the first place. The more aggressive the power drive, the further it drives politicians and others away from that inner light, and the further they err from the truth of their calling.

What seems to be happening, therefore, is that a kind of powerful negative energy is at work driving leaders and politicians of all persuasions away from their true calling which must have originally been a desire to serve the whole nation with the best of themselves. Power addiction causes us to lose sight of our higher nature, the best of ourselves, to the point that it is hard to believe that we were ever capable of speaking or acting wisely or in a spirit of sacrificial service.

In all of this, it is easy to forget that the best of ourselves is not, strictly speaking, ours to own. It is a given. The best of ourselves is pure gift. It comes by God’s grace, as it did in the case of my neighbour whose passport was delayed in this summer’s notorious bureaucratic mayhem. She appealed to our MP who took the time and the trouble to ensure, with constant re-checks, that her passport was processed so that she and her partner were able to go on holiday. Was this political vote-catching on the part of the MP? I would say it was grace surprisingly at work in one powerful person.

Something similar happened when David Cameron took an interest in a skate park which has just been built near our local town. The skate park has hit a sudden and very belated planning objection which threatens it with destruction. The Prime Minister asked to be kept informed of developments when he originally met the person responsible for the project. We hope that when he is informed of this setback the grace will be there. We believe that it will.