Be a Politician? No Thanks.

A question (well questions really) posed by Simon Gibbs over at the Libertarian Home website:

My question to Pavel, which I will repeat, is what other challenges prevent you, dear reader, from standing on your own behalf to fight a campaign? Is it the absence of a positive Party brand? The official paperwork? Publicity? Is it solely a lack of resources such as time and money?

Obviously I can only speak for myself, but the problem isn’t so much the lack of an effective party structure or the lack of relevant resources. It is that I have no inclination to run any sort of campaign, let alone a campaign for office. It isn’t so much that I wouldn’t win – but obviously embarking on a thankless quest almost certainly destined to end in failure won’t appeal to most. Rather, I’d be afraid of winning. Put simply, I have no interest in holding office within the political structure of Great Britain. I do not want to immerse myself within the massive bureaucratic nightmare that is the British state, and I do not want to expose myself or my loved ones to the public spotlight and our intrusive media that has no respect whatsoever for the privacy of any public figure. Above all, I don’t want to be a politician. I lack the arrogance to believe that I know best and that my opinions should be forced onto others.

Furthermore, I think we have adopted a very narrow sense of what constitutes politics in this country. We see politics as increasingly synonymous with government; local, regional or (mainly) central. We see those who stand for Parliament as the real politicians, backed up by lesser politicians in those who make up the party structures. However, I would argue that there is very little that is genuinely political about MPs who become lobby fodder in the House of Commons or those party functionaries and unthinking supporters who spout a party line about issues rather than engaging with those issues and reaching their own conclusions about them. There is more politics happening in a debate between open-minded, politically aware people in the pub than there is in a “debate” in the Commons. The tragedy is that the debate in the pub evaporates into the ether just as soon as the final beers are supped whereas the drones making laws in the legislature can affect each and every one of use.

Of course, this leaves us in a perfect Catch 22 situation; the only way we can change the system is by engaging with it – but, by engaging with the system, we run the risk of becoming apolitical as we conform to the restrictions of that system. I don’t know the way out of that conundrum, but I do know where I stand in relation to the political system in this country; resolutely and happily on the outside.

So why don’t I run a campaign on my own? Because I don’t want to be a politician. And I suspect I am not alone in that.