Our Politicians are in an impossible position! They want to be trusted and for us to give them the benefit of the doubt when they make difficult statements, and they want to be able to show leadership when it comes to hard decisions. We want them to lower public debt levels and reduce our taxes, whilst caring for the needy in society who we would rather not have to get to know such as the homeless, looked after children and those too weak and aged to care for themselves any longer. It is impossible to satisfy the appetites of the wealthy and the needs of the poor at the same time, and many in the middle side with one group or the other for different reasons. Meanwhile once a week the opportunity to speak at the despatch box in the House of Commons as part of Questions to various Ministers including the reviled PMQs seems too hard to resist in a manner that leaves any of them with dignity intact. Then there is the now twice yearly publication of official Govt papers that consistently show that previous Governments were not entirely honest with their public statements. Our Politicians have little room for manoeuvre and they move inexorably towards deeper and broader appropribium. If the MPs and Cllrs themselves are not damaging their own reputations, their supporters seemed determined to help them.

With the publication of the official papers from 1984 the issue of who closed the most pits has arisen again. It is now widely accepted that the largest number of pits were closed by Labour under Harold Wilson, but it was Margaret Thatcher who denied having a secret plan to close certain pits, despite constant accusations by Arthur Scargill. Now this has been proven to be the case, there are protaganists on both sides claiming that the others are bigger liers or thieves. What they both seem to miss is that we don’t need help to imagine that these people have lied to us. We are already sceptical of their truth telling and honesty. Each time an accusation is made, we assume both sides are complicit, even if one is clearly guilty. This is a reputational race to the bottom, one that they cannot lose!

When I was being taught how to sell in the early 1990’s one trainer explained that we should ask to see what the client already owned. We were encouraged to tut and shake our heads and look a little sorry for the client. “Who sold you this?”. However what these trainers failed to understand is that every time we made a disparaging remark about what the client had bought, we were in effect telling them they were stupid, and none of us want to be told we have made a bad decision. Every time a Politician takes to twitter or facebook or gets a few moments on TV to explain how bad the people on the other side of the Political argument are, they give the impression to around 30% of those watching or following that it is them, the voter who is stupid and naïve. They also reinforce to another 30% that they were wise not to go out to vote in the first place. Their communication might strengthen the resolve of the people who voted for their party last time, but most of us eventually hear from all political sides. In the end we can’t remember who it was who made us feel stupid, just that Politicians generally make us feel stupid.  A classic example was the way David Cameron gave a speech to Andrew Marr on the Marr show on Sunday Morning. He didn’t want to be put off track so he just launched into his statements and barely stopped for breath. None of us were in the studio able to interrupt or ask him questions, but his approach made it clear that if he won’t listen to Andrew Marr, who does know what he is talking about, he certainly won’t listen to us when we tell him the foodbanks are needed or the floods have damaged our homes.

We need a new generation of Politicians and Political structures, ones that will accept that making mistakes is not the cardinal error, in fact pretending that “we don’t make mistakes” is. If they can’t learn from other people “I won’t take lessons from …….” then they are arrogant and should not be trusted with our foodbanks, let alone our clearing banks. Because of the change from the 30 year rule to the 20 year rule, we can now expect revelations about how many lies were told every six months. In August we will hear about the mistakes from 1985. Now might be a good time for some in our Political Parties to work out what is going to be disclosed (good and bad) and not make the error that Norman Tebbit and Charles Moore did when Nelson Mandela died a few weeks ago. They talked up Thatchers advocacy for the ANC prisoner, knowing full well that the whole truth would emerge within weeks. They clearly did not know what she had said in private meetings, but they could have avoided the risk of raising our expectations in the way that they did, only to discover that actually they had lied, she had lied and we trust none of them any longer.