The Audience Effect

How spectators, rather than participants, shape our politics.

This week, several bits of the right wing padded out their pre-Budget coverage with a silly, and seemingly false, expenses story. In short, they turned fire on Torsten Bell MP for spending about a grand on fitting out his office whilst considering large-scale tax increases. It was a classic bit of whataboutery, which both missed the point and failed to appreciate the concept of orders of magnitude. But its existence as a story the press thought people might like is indicative of a broader problem in our commentary – the extent to which so much of what is said is designed to appeal to an audience that has little first-hand experience of the issue at hand, or the modern world itself.

In the Bell story, it was obviously pitched at people who haven’t set foot inside an office, or at least thought about procurement for one, in years. The issue isn’t just that a few hundred pounds is nothing compared to the scale of government spending, but that it isn’t even extravagant for an office. It is just what things cost, and anyone who had cast an eye around their workplace (or kitted out a home office) could instantly see that. Only a piece like that isn’t really aimed for those people.

The residual readers of news, especially in the right-wing print press, skew old. The same is true more broadly of our electoral demography. The power voters, especially for Conservatives and Reform, are older and often retired. This disconnects them from how offices operate and what things cost – yet when papers or politicians talk about work, this is often who they are addressing. It is part of a broader trend in which arguments are aimed more at spectators than at participants across a range of policy areas.

This plays out in politicians and commentators speaking in tropes, far removed from reality. Often they talk about scenarios that are half-remembered and half-invented. They indulge fantasy images and fictional grievances of those with little first-hand experience, which usually outnumber those who have skin in the game. The approach distances our politicians from voters with knowledge of these things and an interest in improving them, and turns them into those who talk from ignorance. It furthers the disconnect between parties and their actual and prospective voters, and also reduces the chances of settling on effective policy.