You’ve done a fucking good job – or have you?

While politicians may think that they deserve their praises sung, the Glasgow Guardian explores the dangers of putting politicians on a pedestal.

Imagine this: you are fairly wealthy, and have just moved into a house that is in dire need of renovation. So, you hire a builder at great expense to remodel your collapsing garage into a swanky new living room. During the construction process, you bring the builder and his team cups of tea, engage them with chit-chat, and pay all their invoices on time. The resultant living room is up to standard and inspections pass without a hitch. At no point during this process do you say the words “what a good job you’ve done”. And I bet, you’re not imagining anyone complaining. If, as Education Secretary Gillian Keegan seems to be suggesting when caught on a hot mic, we should be telling politicians when they’ve done a “fucking good job”, then we will end up living in a deeply contradictory world.

I use this builder example to illustrate the conflicting goals of work under capitalism; the sense that labour means contributing to the community, versus a manifestation of that community contribution in the form of money. In theory, capitalism works because your money is community made real. You contribute and then you receive. But because we are alienated from our labour and, well, the market is just not that simple, the community feeling of your labour and the individual value of your money are presented as if they were in conflict. In reality all jobs consist of a contribution to society, or we would not be able to have the economic system that we do. 

Like anyone, a politician works, and then they receive. Their work undoubtedly involves contribution to society in a far more obvious way than lots of other jobs, but they are still just doing a job. As a consequence, the question of whether we should be telling politicians “good job” or thanking them is not even one of how “good” they are doing. Plenty of politicians are not exactly pillars of commitment; Nadine Dorries and her ongoing summer holiday to anywhere except for Westminster are proof of that. But even if the average politician was a saint, I still wouldn’t praise them. Praise, for me, implies some sort of vertical relationship. Politicians who want praise are those who need external reasons, like populist support, to feel they can do their job, and thus are only one dodgy interview from Dorries-land. 

Being a politician day-to-day is the task of any given politician, and as the public our task is only to criticise when things go wrong and take our votes elsewhere if things have gone so wrong as to test our faith. Demands from praise are demands for populism and cults of personality – I agree with many of Jeremy Corbyn’s stated principles and the goals of his Labour manifesto, but I don’t go out of my way to praise him more than I would a builder or a binman, because I don’t think he is any more deserving of a cult of personality than a builder or binman. Equally, Daily Mail-style hit-pieces on Corbyn are attacks on a personality that is ultimately irrelevant. Politicians are human, are carrying out their tasks and therefore deserve our respect, but this means that we shouldn’t abuse or feel obliged to praise them.

The fact is, excelling at being a binman provides arguably a similar level of community contribution to an average low-ranking opposition politician, and yet the general public are not asked by binmen at large to shout their praise into the street. Being a politician really is just a job.

It is true that politicians make weightier decisions and have tougher schedules than lots of other jobs. But the idea that job difficulty, and therefore job value, is cause for an asymmetry in the way we treat the workers of those jobs, can only end badly. Because someone has to decide what job value means, and those who decide would not do so with good interests. I am happy to operate on the principle that if you would not chase a binman down the street to shout that they had done really well today, then politicians don’t need any of your special treatment.