Buy this book

Amol Rajan
posted 15 February 2007

Never judge a book by its cover. Except this one. Chris Riddell, illustrator for the Observer, depicts an enormous two-fingered 'V' sign emerging like a flowering bulb from the House of Commons, which is buckling under the force, amid smoke and noise. The two fingers are triumphant, high in the sky; Westminster, in all its metaphorical glory, is almost vanquished. The illustration is unremarkable, but it could not capture the pessimism and immaturity of Bali Rai's book more pertinently.

There is a popular and largely unchallenged consensus in the UK regarding political apathy and young people. The prevailing view is that these two are inseparable, and it seems to follow by something like an ethical logic that we must get young people interested in politics again. Precisely this motivation lies behind Politics: Cutting through the Crap.

If we accept the premise, the question arises: 'how to get young people thinking about politics?' This book is an answer to that question and a bad one at that, because it takes the view, never once interrogated, that the only way to make young people take notice of political activity is to assume that they hate politics and politicians - which instantly associates all politics with defeatism and despondency. Apart from showcasing a fundamental failure to grasp what politics is, or indeed what politics can be, such bitterness is hardly any way to excite young people with the possibility that they can shape their own future. 'Cutting through the crap' is not a very rousing call to action.

At least Rai is honest. 'This is NOT a textbook', he says in his first paragraph. 'This is not a balanced or fair guide to politics in the UK. It's a short, simply written, biased guide that reflects my own views as well as telling you how things work - and it really will!'. It really will not, in fact - but the sense that this is an urgent task, that time is pressing, is carried throughout the writing, and this at least conveys the sense that the subject matter is of gross importance.

The presentation of the book as a 'guide' is disingenuous, and seems to be a retrospective justification of the lack of focus in what follows. Split into two parts, the first half of the book ('Let me explain…') covers some basic political ideas and political facts, including biographies of the major political parties, a family tree of political ideologies, and reference to the relationship between the media and politics ('The Media and Politricks'), the last of these inevitably containing a rant about Rupert Murdoch. The second half is naked polemic, labelled 'Things we'd like to know about'. It should really be called ''Thing's I'd like you to know my opinion about'. It covers 'The Iraq War', 'The War on Terror', 'Global Warming', 'Education', 'Racism', and 'Asylum and Immigration'. Of course the book never purports to objectivity - remember: Rai proudly tells us it is 'biased' at the outset - but the ostensible movement from definitions and introductory explanations to undiluted vitriol is a false one, because actually part two is just an unclothed version of the first, with no change in tone or style.

The catch-all 'guide', then, is an attempt to indicate the breadth of subject matter that Rai will cover, whilst hinting at the subjectivity of the supposed facts to come. This despite the fact that, at barely 160 pages of a large font, and carrying dozens of illustrations, the book is very, very short. So we have a vast array of issues covered, all fashionably 'contemporary', but none given anything more than a cursory glance. This may explain why perhaps half of the pages in the book have footnotes, either with sarcastic commentary on points made in the main body of the text or, much more often, websites and suggestions for further reading. The sense these footnotes carry is not only that Rai is aware of the brevity of his explanations but also that he is desperate for external authority: 'if you don't believe me, check out these websites and you'll see I'm right!' - as when we read 'Try Chapter 16 of Who Runs This Place? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century by Anthony Sampson. Brilliant!' (p105) or 'For more information see the wonderful www.blink.org.uk site' (p150).

Doubtless Rai would defend his footnotes as a necessary and useful source of information for his reader, as well as a means of encouraging deeper thought. But they suffer from precisely that calculated immaturity which ravishes the rest of the work, and which is most immediately perceptible in the tone that Rai writes with. Above all, this book sounds too much like the ravings of a moody teenager. 'Yes, I've left things out, but who cares?', on the opening page, is a bad start, and it sets the tone for what follows. There is many a sarcastic 'yeah, right' or 'but, hey, it's a great idea'; plenty of facile commentary like 'Sir Menzies (pronounced 'Ming' for some stupid reason) Campbell' or 'trust me - it doesn't get any more exciting'; dismissal of companies with 'Tesco and Asda - GRRRRRRRRR'; and a celebration of the author's contempt for adulthood: 'it's not an adult thing to do, but I couldn't give a monkey's'. Indeed, the desire to extricate himself from all the negativity and guilt he associates with adulthood leaves Rai groping uncomfortably to get down with the kids' lingo, as when he recounts his own teenage anger: 'What was it that made me want to cuss every time I saw a Conservative MP on telly?'

One wonders. Occasionally, this pursuit of kidspeak as a common point of connection with his readership leads to a coarseness in Rai's vocabulary that adds nothing to the writing other than a hint of vulgar desperation. For example, quite apart from juvenile footnotes to Thatcher - 'She carried her handbag everywhere. It probably held her supply of blood, the vampire witch' - there is a strange indulgence of Rai's own political inertia: 'I've probably never seen mine [MP], but then he is probably in the dark somewhere, sucking the blood from a dead person'. The vampire theme is clearly a favourite. Elsewhere, kidspeak becomes still coarser, in descriptions of the BNP as 'gay-bashing racist wankers', or the passing of a Bill between the Houses of Parliament as 'like a kangaroo on speed'. There's the old sexing-up technique too, of course - on government whips, 'I love the name because it sounds a bit kinky and I don't get out much'.

Can you remember what it was like to be a teenager? Strangely, I can, and vividly too. Mostly, it was a time of spots and sports, of acne and aspiration - each thrust against each other in uneasy cohabitation. The former symbolised frustration and the excesses of youth; the latter one's potential to overcome limits placed in one's path. From this tension sprung an urge to engage in public life, to be a public person, to be political. Authority always was an object of suspicion, and the birth pangs of my own worldview remain sourced in a feeling that power was not, and is not, distributed justly throughout the world.

I give this brief autobiographical note because I think it illuminates what is lacking in Bali Rai's book. It is a work that depicts political life as acne, not aspiration. It takes as its premise the unsophisticated assumption that the only way to engage young people in political thinking is to adopt their view that politics and politicians are full of crap. Never once is political activity shown to be exciting or laden with potential; never once does Rai say young people should get into politics because it could help to make them more free. Instead he adopts a strange kidspeak in order to project his own views on a vast array of voguish issues onto a younger generation, to stick two fingers up at 'the bastards' in Westminster. His impulse to scold those in power rather than acquire power for himself endorses political passivity over activity, and the lasting impression is one of moody immaturity. He removes any doubt over his own motivations when, a third of the way through the book, he says 'When I was asked to do this guide, being able to have a go at politicians and their parties was my biggest motivation'. I hope some of his younger readers will write back to him, and tell him to grow up.