Rants

No Experience Required

I’ve been mulling over how we got into the current shitshow this country finds itself in, and it got me thinking: a political career (more specifically, Member of Parliament) appears to be the only one where lack of qualifications, experience, or talent is no restriction of being paid over £80k per annum.

There seems to be literally no subject that our politicians cannot spout about while knowing literally nothing about the subject: be it Reese-Mogg on phone chargers, Liz Truss on trade deals, Nadine Dorries on the internet, Dominic Raab on the channel tunnel, Priti Patel not knowing the difference between terrorism and counter-terrorism, or that fuckwit Johnson on literally anything; this is barely scratching the surface of the idiocy. They’re collectively denser than a boxing day turd.

Of course there’s much evidence that here in the UK, so long as you’re a “character” and can come out with some over-simplified promises you don’t have to keep, people will vote for you. If you talk a bit posh, all the better. We all love bowing down to a posho.

This isn’t to say that all MPs are thick, talentless morons, it’s just that they seem to outnumber the capable, sane ones by a large margin.

If you want a demonstration of how bad this is, listen to, or read the debates; pick a subject you know about, and see how much sense is spoken, and how much of it is conjecture, inaccurate, or just plain lies.

TV interviews are soundbites full of triggers to appeal to the demographic that relentlessly vote these idiots in. Populist crap about keeping out immigrants, controlling crime, and rewarding hard workers, when in fact they do nothing of the sort. Throw in a bit of jingoistic support for armed forces veterans and you’re there (when actually, government support for veterans is minimal and they rely on charities to take up the slack, essentially abandoning them).

A recent TV interview with Jonathan Gullis and the head of the RMT Mick Lynch just showed the class of recent intake: hopelessly out of his depth and left repeatedly saying “no apology for the veterans” like it’s a magic phrase while the union leader remains calm, and pulls him apart. You can see more of this in this clip where he repeatedly remains calm, states the facts, and makes culture war reporters and Conservative MPs look like fools.

Now, I’m sure that Mick has shortcomings: in fact I know he does: he supported Brexit, for a start, but I think the key here is that he’s confident: he has the support of his members, he knows the subject area he’s talking about, he doesn’t start waffling about stuff he knows nothing about, and isn’t interested in providing a show- and the result is that the interviewers looking to provoke reaction, and the politicians with nothing useful or even truthful to say have nowhere to go and all of a sudden, the leader of a trade union looks like a genius in comparison to our elected servants.

Why can we not have political leaders like this? Seemingly quiet, competent, knowledgable? At what point did the politicians exhibit such a strong Dunning-Kreuger effect?

As someone said on Twitter:

I make no secret of my political leanings: I’m left of centre and I believe that public services should be public, businesses need regulation, people should pay tax, and trade unions are a requirement. I’m predictably targeting the Conservatives here, mostly, but while there’s less of this with the other parties, they’re just not challenging this hard enough: there’s the odd outbreak of challenge from the likes of Ed Milliband (thank the Lord we voted for stability with the Conservatives, rather than chaos with him eh?) but generally, this government of literal fuckwits go along unchallenged and can happily pontificate on how we all have to cut back and the food banks are just fine, while some of literally complain that the over 80k they are paid just isn’t enough. (and let’s not forget, that 80k/year- which puts you in the top 5% of “earners”, comes with an impressive expenses package too.)

As a Twitter follower said, when asked what job he’d like to try out:

MP, talk shite for an hour, jeer someone else talking shite, then off for a massive subsidised dinner followed by loads of cheap booze.

The question is, how do we fix this? How do we make it so that our government (and the opposition) is no longer dominated by people that you wouldn’t allow to run a bath unsupervised, never mind a country? If we accept that leaders should be a bit more Mick Lynch and a lot less Boris Johnson, should it be a requirement that people have to have a real job before entering a political career?

Problem is, some of the ones I’ve mentioned did have actual jobs. Wikipedia will show you that some of these people had jobs outside of politics for several years.

Still, I guess we’ve all known people that are incompetent but succeed anyway.

[edit]
The 2019 intake of MPs seem particularly bad. Take this example, where Mark Jenkinson blames Labour for something happening right now, after a mere 12 years of Conservative control.

One final word from the RMT that illustrates this perfectly: it’s a long Twitter thread, but again, it sets out the problems in plain speech- the issue of putting people in a position of power and control who quite simply lack the experience, skills, honesty or intelligence to fully understand what they’re doing.