The City is used to ignoring MPs, because they don’t matter. Or at least they didn’t

4 February 2012

It’s not strange that bankers have so much more money than anybody else. It’s like the way that women who work in sweet shops are always fat. Not a profound point, I’ll grant you, but it’s striking how rarely you see it made. In other industries, this sort of thing is pretty much a given. If you went around to Christian Louboutin’s house, you wouldn’t be surprised if Mrs Louboutin had an unusually vast number of shoes, would you?

Sure, there might not be a Mrs Louboutin; not a punt I’d like to make with a French shoe designer, but you get the point. People who work in theatre get a lot of theatre tickets, and people who work in banks get a lot of cash. They’re swimming in the stuff. It all goes through them.

As to whether it’s fair, well, that’s a different issue. And a simple one, too, because it glaringly isn’t fair at all. But ‘fairness’ — although politicians all drone on about in their own special way (Miliband as a whine, Clegg as a plea, Cameron as though it’s something he’s just found on his shoe) — isn’t really why politicians are so keen to have a crack at bankers. Because it’s not about fairness. It’s about power.

This isn’t profound either, but hell, that’s not what I’m for. You know that bit in Bonfire Of The Vanities, when you first realise that Sherman McCoy considers himself to be one of the Masters Of The Universe? That annoyed you, right? No? Well, you probably work in banking, then. It annoyed everybody else. It certainly annoyed politicians. They can stand being paid less than bankers, but they can’t stand being less important than them.

I get where they are coming from. We didn’t invent democracy and have the French Revolution (I’m obviously using the term ‘we’ quite loosely here) just so we could kowtow to that bunch of jumped-up bookmakers, did we? As with gold-plated civil service pensions, the vast pay-packets are supposed to be what they get as compensation for everything else in their lives being rubbish. And yet there they are, basically running the show. As less than flies to wanton boys, are MPs to the City. It simply ignores them, because they just don’t matter very much.

Or rather, they didn’t. But I wonder if they’re starting to. I wonder, in fact, if we’ll look back to now as the time of a great British political power-grab. Fighting the press, through Leveson. Fighting the judiciary, through the attack on Human Rights. Fighting educational authorities through academies and free schools, and that vast NHS bureaucracy through fragmentation. And now the banks. Some of these are projects of the left, some of the right, but they all end up dragging power to the same small spot of SW1. There’s a muscularity to it, and a confidence, and a vigour, and I suppose I should probably approve. Not sure I do, though.

•••

I had that nice James Delingpole’s new book land on my desk the other day. Watermelons: How Enviromentalists are Killing The Planet, Destroying The Economy and Stealing Your Children’s Future. I’ll definitely read it. I love James’s books, but I preferred them back when they were officially fiction.

In the wider world (by which I mean on Twitter, and occasionally in pubs) I have actually spent a decent amount of time defending the right of m’colleague Mr Delingpole to espouse the nonsense he does about environmentalism, and the right of the Spectator to publish it. The usual objection states that giving prominence to voices such as his, or to loonies such as Ian Plimer or Nils-Axel Mörner, many say, gives a false impression. It suggests that this is a debate with two nuanced, competing sides. As opposed to the real picture, which is of one overwhelmingly right side, pecked at for kicks by a handful of cranks.

I daresay it does, but I don’t think that’s the Spectator’s problem. People who read this splendid newspaper and literally nothing else may have impeccable taste, but there surely cannot be very many of them. Plus, and more importantly, illiberal censorship doesn’t stop being censorship just because you’re censoring the dangerously daft.

Critics are on safer ground, I think, when they ask why cranks of all sorts get on television. I enjoy seeing Laurie Penny, say, on my screen as much as anybody, but her growing ubiquity does somewhat give the erroneous impression that there are more than eight people alive who don’t think she’s utterly wrong about absolutely everything. She’s an amusing bogeyman, I know, but if I was on the left I’d feel downright smeared.

This is a problem particularly pronounced with science. I read a blog by the Guardian’s Martin Robbins the other day, in which he bemoaned the way that scientists never end up on BBC discussion panels. He’s right that this is bad, but I think he may have had the wrong target. I doubt it’s that science folk never get invited on Question Time. I suspect it’s more that they don’t want to do it, because they know they’ll get one question on science. After that, they’ll be out on a limb, bullshitting about Syria or the euro like everybody else. They simply don’t have the bottle. Those boffins need to man up.

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.

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Mary M

February 4th, 2012 1:50am Report this comment

Wow. It takes a special brand of sneering adolescent stupidity and arrogance to refer to an outandingly brilliant and eminently qualified scientist like Professor Ian Plimer as a 'loony'! Thank God for courageous and clear thinking men like Ian Plimer and James Delingpole who expose and stand up to the kind of lazy intellectual conformity and groupthink that your piece so perfectly illustrates and unintentionally parodies.