Choices

Writing in The Post, David Cormack contrasts the trivial nature of much recent political "journalism" with the substantive issues those same journalists are ignoring. Workplace dogs! Politicians drinking! Statistical whataboutism! Versus poverty, domestic violence, covid, and climate change. And ultimately, he compares this with the trivial nature of our politics - "tinkering around the edges... student politicians playing grown-ups". But behind the trivia, there's some very real choices we're making:

All of the above issues hurt the individual. The individuals they hurt tend to be those at the lower end of the socio-economic ladder. And all of those issues have solutions that politicians all around the world actively choose to not do.

Which means all of those problems are a choice. We choose to let families go hungry. We choose to not divest from fossil fuels. We choose to allow capitalism to run unfettered, ruining huge numbers of lives as it makes a small number of people unfathomably and unnecessarily wealthy. We then choose to not tax them fairly.

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We choose to shake our heads in disappointment or mirth at our political figures for not knowing the exact CPI, or unemployment rate, or some other obscure figure when we should be shaking our heads at the inaction on helping those who most need it but are least likely to ask.

Its easy to criticise politicians for being trivial and ignoring real problems. But they're that way because they can be, which means ultimately that they're that way because we let them. Its time we stopped letting them. In three months time there's an election. Its time we made some different choices.