Brendan Hoban: There are no votes to be got in truth-telling                   

Western People 3.12.24

I remember well the famous election of 1977 when Jack Lynch led the Fianna Fáil party to a landslide victory with 84 seats and a whopping 21-seat majority. For some years the outgoing Taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, had been ridiculed by Frank Hall in RTÉ television’s Hall’s Pictorial Weekly. Hall memorably dubbed Cosgrave ‘the Minister for Hardship’

and had him seated against a background of a dark room lit by a dying candle and with a wind howling outside. The infamous Minster for Hardship (Cosgrave) was endlessly lampooned as a spectral figure representing the austerity that he was inflicting on the Irish people. 

Cosgrave had the misfortune to be Taoiseach during an extraordinarily difficult period dominated by the Troubles and the oil crisis, and Fianna Fáil’s giveaway manifesto with its abolition of road tax and rates on houses was in stark contrast to the misery Cosgrave represented. It was the birth of what we now call a ‘populist’ approach to elections – promise everything within reason, or not, depending on the party – and it’s a gospel message that has thrived since then.

There are no votes, as Liam Cosgrave learned, in misery. A decent man with a moral compass, Cosgrave was into telling people the truth rather than pretending to them that they could have everything they wanted. Of the old school, he believed in paying your debts even at the price of necessary austerity. Cosgrave was what we used to call ‘a straight man’.

That was then. Now, it’s different.

In the recent general election, every party seemed to operate on the principle that, to win elections, politicians need to promise not  just what’s ‘within reason’ but much more than they can possibly deliver. Everyone knows that but the gap between what politicians promise and what they know they will be able to deliver is, during election campaigns, camouflaged by obfuscation and denial. Any politician who might admit that there’s a gap between what’s they say and what they can do would be regarded as naive in the extreme and would be quickly shuffled to the sideline.

The Labour politician, Pat Rabbitte, a few years after a general election, once conceded that Labour had made commitments that it wasn’t able to deliver. In the event, even though he pointed out that the country was ‘shipwrecked and needed to be pulled back from bankruptcy’, it was regarded as unacceptable and he was asked to apologise for it. Today it’s taken for granted that giveaway manifestos are really little more than a tactic to garner votes.

Apart from rampant populism, the other defining change on the electoral landscape is what the New Statesman recently called ‘the curse of incumbency’. George Eaton, in a recent column, drew attention to an emerging truth across the democratic world – incumbents (those in positions of political leadership) are finding it difficult and sometimes impossible to be re-elected.

Matthew Parris, columnist in the London Times, offers the experience of Joe Biden as illustrative of this phenomenon. By common consent, Biden was successful in delivering what primarily concerns Americans – money – by keeping both the economy and inflation under control but he was the incumbent and the bizarre, nonsensical promise of Trump was deemed to be preferable. Biden was given the red card.

Parris illustrates the same process around the world with incumbents in France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Poland and Spain all in danger of losing at the next election. And then there’s Kier Starmer who won the recent election in the UK by a record 160- seat majority and already there are doubts about whether he will be re-elected.

So as politicians ritually promise more than they know they can actually deliver, it’s only a matter of time until they are found out and many find themselves ejected at the next election. At election time, truth-telling in the style of Liam Cosgrave is no longer popular.

Indeed truth-telling among the electorate isn’t that popular either. In a recent radio vox pop of comments on the cost of living by prospective voters, a predictable pattern of complaint emerged until one man offered an alternative view. There is, he said, no cost of living crisis. The problem, he continued, is obvious – people are refusing to live within their means. Spending on groceries is often, he said, way above what is available if they go to the trouble of finding it or if they stop buying the tons of food that get thrown out every week that they shouldn’t have bought in the first place.  

I’ve a bit of a theory about that. Have you noticed that the level of complaint has risen dramatically over the last decade or so – and its corollary, a sense of victimhood? Everyone now seems to be unhappy. Everyone at the sight of a microphone or the presence of a camera has a whinge about their presumed victimhood.

Even though we’ve never had it so good in so many ways. Our economy is among the 20 richest in the world. We have full employment. We have a rainy day fund in the bank of €16 billion left aside for emergencies. Where else in the world, Fintan O’Toole, the Irish Times columnist, has suggested are would-be governments able to promise large tax-cuts, massive increases in government spending and big contributions to a rainy-day fund – all at the same time? We are among the most educated nations in the world. Our old age pensioners are among the most cossetted in the developed world – their pensions way above the level of the UK. Almost everyone going to school in Ireland now gets to university. And yet we’re still complaining.

Here’s another question. If everything has to keep improving and everyone has to keep getting richer, is it any wonder that our sense of entitlement is inevitably on a crash course with the unrealistic pledges politicians offer to harvest our votes?

No one today ever has enough.