Labour Party Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. Credit: Chris J Ratcliffe / Getty
Is it possible to detoxify the political debate in Britain, as I discussed in my last column for UnHerd? Certainly it isn’t enough to moan about it. We need to determine a practical response, create some rules.
A way to do this would be to identify, isolate and attempt to avoid the tactics which have so demeaned our political conversation. There are enough of these for a long-running series. But the one I’d like to single out here is the increasingly prevalent and flagrant insincere offence-claiming. This has run rampant in the age of social media and often rides pillion with its cousin: the wilful misinterpretation of words. Together they form a potent – and quite evidently attractive – combination.
Two textbooks examples of this have recently been provided, from both Right and Left.
At the weekend, the centre-left Labour MP Chuka Umunna gave a speech in which he warned his own party about its decline into incivility. Specifically, Umunna warned that Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was driving moderate Labour MPs like him out of the party. In the course of the speech, Umunna asked Corbyn to “call off the dogs”. It’s a commonly enough heard phrase, and one which might be said to be apt in the age of the grass-roots ‘Momentum’ movement.
You would expect the Labour party leadership to treat such a call from one of its own MPs with some degree of seriousness. At the very least, it might have attempted to make some fact-based excuses for Momentum and the behaviour of its members. But it chose not to. Instead, it chose to misinterpret Umunna’s remarks and then claim offence.
The Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, was the one put forward to counter Umunna’s claims. How did he choose to reply? He condemned the comments as “grossly offensive”. And he went on to make the important point: “Our party members are not dogs.”
This is a beautiful example of the genre. Nobody ever claimed that the Labour party’s membership consisted in small or large part of dogs. But McDonnell’s deliberate misinterpretation meant he could claim that Umunna had – for shame – insulted the grassroots members of his own party. As a result, McDonnell successfully avoided answering any serious questions around why his party is carrying out a purge of moderate MPs.
This is not an approach only favoured by the political Left. The Right wants a piece of this cynical tactic as well.
Over the same weekend, the former Foreign Minister and perennial leader-in-waiting Boris Johnson fired another salvo at the Prime Minister and her handling of the Brexit negotiations. In a piece for the Mail on Sunday, Johnson wrote that Theresa May’s current plan for Brexit approximates her having “wrapped a suicide vest” around the British constitution and then “handed the detonator” to Brussels. Whether one agrees with it or not, it is certainly a vivid and memorable image.
Of course there are some people – even in his own party – who do not like Boris Johnson, do not want him to become leader of the Conservative party, and who will do everything they can to prevent him getting the top job. There are well-founded criticisms that can be made of him. But how unsurprising that his opponents decided to go down the the fake criticism route (the mishearing and offence claiming approach).
The normally sensible and sane Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee has long been anti-Boris. Just as McDonnell has long been anti-Chuka. And so the “suicide vest” comment came as manna for him. His response:
https://twitter.com/TomTugendhat/status/1038535110482698240
It is quite possible that Tugendhat genuinely finds Johnson’s choice of metaphor utterly unforgivable. It is possible that he, and anyone else who has ever experienced a suicide bombing, should be the guardians of that metaphor – choosing when it may be tactfully employed and by whom.
But it is more likely that Tugendhat – as someone who has been anti-Brexit and anti-Boris for a long time – simply saw his opportunity and took it: claiming that Boris had used suicide bomber in the same literal sense that Umunna had used “dogs”. He decided to take offence on behalf of all victims of suicide bombings, just as McDonnell claimed to be offended on behalf of non-canine members of the Labour party.
But this utterly transparent technique isn’t nearly as smart as the politicians like to think it is. And every time it is used, it increases ever so slightly, yet again, that feeling of generalised contempt that much of the public feels for the political class as a whole.
There’s an easy way to halt this unhappy trend. The fastest way to stop this rash of insincerity and cry-bullyness is simply be to call it out. For members of the public to say, we don’t believe you misunderstood the phrase; we don’t believe you’re genuinely offended; now behave like adults. And please, for a change, treat the electorate like adults too.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeCFPB is Eliz Warren’s intrusion on the exec branch. Her little sandbox, helping her ideology, and painfully few regular folks.
Trumps move to shutter CFPB is anti- Warren. She is all about elite, top down control. Not a populist cell in her body.
No fan of Warren, but if one of Trump’s ‘Little Guys’ begins to find his credit card company starts ripping him off on the interest rate and he’s no protection do you think any connection made to CFPB? Maybe not, but maybe so. It’s all a fun game until…
There is a bill in the Senate, sponsored by Sanders and Hawley, with Trump’s reported support, that will cap CC interest at 10% for all affected voters for the next 5 years.
The agency is prima facie unconstitutional. There is no oversight, no checks or balances. It is the worst of a very sad lot of government cronyism run amok.
It doesn’t take many unintended consequences from the collapsing of such Agencies to change the impression. No doubt one couldn’t contend every decision made by such an Agency universally supported, but if you detonate the lot you are rolling the dice.
Whether sufficient Federal cost reductions materialise to quickly get the Reconciliation Bill through the House remains unclear. Trump wants to spend alot more on Immigration controls and collect alot less, including the Billionaire tax cuts. Extending debt to do this anathema to good number of key House Republicans. That’s partly why the announcements on cuts are well out ahead of the actual confirmation of savings. He doesn’t need to have turned off many to lose his House majority.
But you can already discern the 2026 campaign response – ‘he increased your debt, protected his Cronies Billions and reduced your protections’. Trump needs a surge in living standards or it’s a potential gift.
There comes a point when you have to make hard choices. Sometimes a building is in such poor condition that it’s better to just demolish it and start over. Sometimes that means a lot more work and it may mean it takes a lot longer to get the new structure built, but we shouldn’t avoid doing the right thing because it’s more difficult or more time consuming. The bureaucracy as it currently exists has too much independence and not enough accountability to elected officials. It’s been captured by special interests, billionaires, and corporations, and it needs to be reformed. The bureaucrats who have been acting independently of the government have to be purged and replaced with those who have a proper respect for the Constitution and for democratic rule, and yes, I’m aware that Trump doesn’t have sufficient respect for the Constitution either, but he will be gone in four years and these bureaucrats can be there for decades. Ultimately, if we’re going to put these organizations beyond the authority of the elected President to fire whoever he wants for whatever reason, we should recognize that there is a need for bipartisanship. There should be oversight committees that are required to have equal representation from both parties, or maybe each state can send their own auditor/inspector. We have to get to a point of democratic accountability, and the entrenched interests are likely to be fighting, kicking, and screaming the entire way there. It’s a battle that needs to be fought. Trump wasn’t and still wouldn’t be my first choice to do it, but it needs to be done.
I’m not sure that we should assume any government agency automatically does what it is supposed to do or what it was intended to do without proof that’s what it was actually doing. I have seen many criticisms of how Trump shut down this agency but I have yet to see any of these critics offer anything the organization has tangibly done for any American particularly. If people have been helped by the CFPB, surely somebody ought to be able to find some of them to testify to that effect. Otherwise this just looks like some other government bureaucracy doing God only knows what behind the scenes and without any serious oversight and getting paid by the taxpayers to do it.
After seeing the results of Obama’s health care law, I’m skeptical that anything created by his administration was created without direct input from the organizations it was meant to regulate. That was the MO his health care law established. Put regulations in place that protects the profits of these companies and locks them in at an ‘acceptable’ level in exchange for giving them cover from the vagaries of competitive markets and deflecting the wrath of angry voters. The ACA was basically written by and for insurance companies, ensuring their perpetual existence and perpetual profits indefinitely. It didn’t work though. It has only recently become apparent how much it didn’t work when people cheered for a man who murdered an insurance executive. If these CFPB defenders can produce even one person the agency has helped, maybe I’ll care whether it gets shut down. Until then, I’m defaulting to it’s useless bureaucracy that wastes taxpayer money.
Why do Republicans always oversimplify the ACA? Just because the Affordable Care Act (ACA) relies heavily on private insurance companies doesn’t mean it was written by them. It was modeled after a conservative-backed plan, including Romneycare in Massachusetts, and aimed to expand coverage while maintaining a private insurance system.
Both sides benefitted.
Insurance companies:
The individual mandate forced more (mostly healthy) people into the market, balancing out high-cost enrollees.Government subsidies made plans more affordable, ensuring insurers got paid.Medicaid expansion brought millions of new customers to insurers managing Medicaid plans.Consumers:
Preexisting condition protections meant insurers couldn’t cherry-pick only healthy customers.Medical loss ratio rules required insurers to spend at least 80-85% of premiums on actual care, limiting profit margins.Essential health benefits mandated coverage of services insurers previously avoided.
While insurers adapted and profited, they also lobbied against certain ACA provisions, like the public option. The ACA was a compromise between universal coverage advocates and maintaining a private insurance framework.
Second, I always know when healthy people are weighing in on policies. You won’t have to go far to find stories of the CFPB saving people. My insurance dropped a chemo drug I needed to survive and left me with a 22k bill. Without the CFPB, I wouldn’t have got that money back. I am not sure what rock you are living under, but guess what is the number one reason people declare bankruptcy – medical debt.
Now, the new medical debt rule that would have kept medical debt from hurting people’s credit reports is gone. And we all know that’s why Republicans want it gone – because they don’t care about the sick. Too bad you will be there one day too, and karma is a real b***h.
Thank you for responding. This is just the sort of thing I was looking for actually. I asked for an example of someone the CFPB helped and here you are. This I respect. The people criticizing Trump should be trumpeting your story from the rooftops and sounding the alarm that he isn’t the man of the people he claims to be. That’s surely a sign of the times, that I am believing a random stranger on the Internet before the politicians, government, and most of the media. I never have believed Trump is a true populist or really wants to advocate for the people. I do maintain he is a disruptive influence and accomplishes the purpose of destabilizing the political establishment and their corporate backers so maybe it will create an opening for a real populist to come along and finish the job. He’s better than another corporate shill like Kamala Harris, not that I voted for either of them mind you. Neither meets the required standards for using up 15-20 minutes of my day.
You can’t convince me the ACA wasn’t a sellout though, because I believe that the insurance companies should not exist period. They neither provide healthcare, nor do they consume it. They are parasites, plain and simple. It is classic rent seeking for revenue streams to fund financial speculation, pure greed that has nothing to do with health care. That is why they exist, to fund Wall Street speculation. That’s all insurance companies by the way, not just medical insurance. Ever wonder why there are laws that require people to buy car insurance? It actually is a racket. Insurance companies are little more than rent collection agencies for Wall Street trading funds. Whatever the solution is, they should get no part of it. That’s what I won’t forgive Obama for. He is smart enough to know all this, and he should have had the courage to bring it all out into the light and take his case directly to the people. For all that he gets wrong, Trump at least has the courage to go directly to the people. For that alone, people will overlook quite a lot. Obama should have been the one to do that. He was elected on a platform of hope and change. He failed to deliver. I voted for the man, and I have not voted since, not for Trump or anyone else. Obama allowed the corrupt system of insurance companies and employer provided healthcare to continue to exist in exchange for them making it marginally less awful and unfair. He sold out, plain and simple. We, the people, have the right to demand better than this. If I ever see it, I might vote again. Had Sanders won the primary in 2016 or 2020, I might have voted for him. I would support single payer healthcare or Medicare for all. While I don’t believe it would improve the healthcare system as a whole based on the evidence we have from similar systems in places like the UK, it would finally and forever cut the insurance parasites out of the process.
Further, you’re wrong. I actually was one of the people who couldn’t get insurance because of a pre-existing condition. Believe it or not, it is possible for a person to believe and reason that the optimal solution for society is not simply the one that advances his or her personal fortunes or interests. I would prefer a competitive marketplace where doctors and hospitals charge fees and patients can compare prices and choose the best option, and then those who can’t afford healthcare below a certain income level get vouchers, something similar to education vouchers. This would encourage and encourage providers to compete on the basis of quality and price for customer dollars, and the entire industry would be more efficient, lean, and responsive. The current system is frankly the worst of both worlds. We have all the bureaucracy, red tape, delays and problems of a national health care system, and we still have people going bankrupt. Further, if I ever get cancer, I will most likely choose not to treat it at all, as I don’t have the financial resources to pay and I refuse to burden my family with medical debt. I think I’d rather make the best of the time I have rather than try to extend my life and be bled dry by a parasitic system that preys on the sick and the poor for the sake of funding Wall Street’s endless quest to get rich without actually producing anything or doing anything productive.
Parasites. Not true. Profits are tiny compared with other businesses. Their existence allows the government to play fairy godmother by leaving the judgements about cost and necessity to them, unlike Canada and the UK where the state run systems do the tough parts. If you think a state run system will be better, look into Canada and the UK for waiting times. Close to home, check out the Veteran’s Administration, the Indian Health Service, or the estimated billions in fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. Be careful about what you wish for.
The definition of a parasite is an organism that derives sustenance from the activities of another organism, called the host. In order to be a parasite, the organism must take resources and nourishment from the host and thus cause harm without providing any meaningful benefit. They fit the definition, as they do not provide health care nor any other service related to health care to patients, yet their profit comes entirely out of a series of transactions that could and would exist without them. According to the definition, insurance companies are parasitic to the healthcare system because A.) they do not provide health care nor improve it any identifiable way and B.) depend upon the healthcare industry for their own sustenance, and C.) cause harm by distorting free market competition in a way that’s essentially no different than governments setting prices. I don’t see how that can be any clearer. How much money they make relative to other industries is irrelevant. Whether they make ten million dollars or ten, that’s money that should go to the people who actually provide the service or the people who pay for it. I could live for years with a tapeworm and still be mostly fine but I’d still want it gone if I found out I had one. I honestly don’t think much would change if we went to single payer healthcare. I think it would be mostly the same as it is now since Medicare, Medicaid, and the insurance conglomerates already effectively set the prices. For all intents and purposes, we already have a national healthcare system. It will still be better than the UK/Canada because the government isn’t running the hospitals. What would be better than either would be to eliminate employer healthcare coverage and medical insurance and let the marketplace function through the mechanism of competition between healthcare providers on quality and cost and allow the government to provide vouchers for the poorest to get access to healthcare that providers can then redeem from the government without all the overhead, bureaucracy, and financialization.
Obama disappointed alot, but you fall into the trap of assuming he had such a strong position in Congress at the time he could be much more radical than he eventually was. He was also initially consumed with the Financial crash. He basically managed to extend cover to millions more by with some legal coercion to take out insurance. And that way extend the risk pool which made it viable. But the market for insurance was insufficient to stop costs continuing to rocket.
So I agree the US system a disaster. The World’s richest and most developed Nation but with millions still without proper healthcare cover and millions screwed on the smallprint. It’s partly because of vested interests, but it’s also partly because social solidarity much weaker culturally in the US (with maybe some of that a racial legacy too) meaning Galbraith’s ‘private affluence, public squalor’ more true today than when he wrote it.
Well, I was younger and more naive then. Perhaps I overestimated Obama or misjudged him. Whatever the reason, Obama was not the change agent he advertised himself to be, but he could have been if he had really wanted to and had some courage and determination I believe Obama could have gone directly to the people with his message and confronted the institutional powers that be and the people would have had his back. I think he could have been a transformational, visionary leader and done a better job than Trump, but maybe he never was what he advertised himself to be. Maybe he was just another corporate shill pretending to be on the side of the people. Maybe he lacked courage. Maybe he was even threatened. Who knows, but for whatever reason, he didn’t take his case directly to the people and offer to fight the establishment. Trump did, and here we are. A reality television personality has brought the political establishment to its knees. Trump understands real power comes not from money, but from loyalty, devotion, and a shared sense of purpose. For all their money, for all their institutional control, for all their domination of the media and the bureaucracy, the donor class could not buy Kamala Harris the presidency. Their failure is worth something even if the winner does nothing. Trump has shown what can be done. Even now, he uses the popular will to overrule the establishment. Does anyone seriously believe Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, or RFK Jr. would have been confirmed if the voting were done secretly? Of course they wouldn’t, but it’s a public vote, as it should be, and the Senators would have had to declare their opposition to the popularly elected President, which very few did, because they feared the wrath of voters, and when politicians fear the voters, they are more apt to listen to the voters and consider public opinion, and that’s something that has been missing in this country for far too long. Where government fears the people, there is liberty. That’s the thing that’s good about the Trump movement. It sent a message. It reminded the oligarchs that this is America, and the people expect the politicians to obey, not the other way round. The real power comes from the people. For all he gets wrong, Trump at least understands that. Even if he fails, and that’s a strong possibility, the message will remain, and the door will be standing wide open for the next revolutionary outsider who can capture the public’s mood.
Nonsense. This type of board is a wealth redistribution scheme initially proposed by Harvard’s “First Native American Law Professor” Elizabeth Warren.
It’s role is to essentially to hand out financial reparations and grant debt waivers with very little accountability or discernment. It is Socialism plain and simple.
Furthermore, Trump’s 2017 tax cuts immediately increased the disposable income of of every working person I know. It did not increase the disposable income of people not working.
Populism and Socialism are not synonymous concepts. Its becoming clear how the Kulaks felt during the collectivization scheme in the Soviet Union.
You could make an argument that Trump is just following his promise of draining the swamp. Hidden government expenditure and hidden debt are part of the swamp – favouring those who have jobs ‘managing’ the visibility of such items.
It’s not an assault on consumer protections. If the CFPB is anything like our financial regulators, the FOS and FCA, it is simply more bureacracy that generates costs for financial service providers – costs that are, of course, paid for by consumers – without actually providing any real protection. London Capital and Finance anyone?
Independent investigation into the FCA’s supervision of London Capital & Finance – GOV.UK
The only effective consumer protection is caveat emptor.