So I guess many of you
have seen this doing the rounds - it's a 13-year-old letter from George Osborne
calling tuition fees “a tax on learning” and promising that when the Tories
next get in they will scrap them. It was his Nick Clegg moment a few years
before Nick Clegg's actual Nick Clegg moment, and many people are now calling
the Chancellor a 'hypocrite' on the basis that he is now presiding over tuition
fees while in government.
Are they right to call him
a hypocrite? Perhaps, but perhaps not. The first thing that needs to be said is
that quite a few people need to look in the dictionary to find out what the
word actually means. Take the filmmaker Michael Moore as a good example.
Cast your mind
back to 2004. In his all-round pretty disingenuous film Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore thought he
would appear clever if he confronted various members of Congress and demanded
they enlist their own children to fight in Iraq
Both Moore and
Galloway were confused about what hypocrisy is. Hypocrisy means publically
being for/against x but then privately not-doing/doing x - it's one rule for
themselves but another for everyone else. If I say eating meat is morally
repugnant, but have a sneaky bacon sandwich on Saturday afternoons I am being
hypocritical.
A politician
that votes to send our armed forces to intervene in a conflict but wouldn't
want his son fighting out there is not a hypocrite. Using Michael Moore's
logic, a politician is hypocritical if he supports the NHS but doesn't send his
son to be a doctor, or if he supports taxi driving but doesn’t get his son to drive
a cab. Those situations don't even look a little bit like hypocrisy.
Sometimes,
though, things do look like a little bit like hypocrisy, even though they
aren't. Suppose a head of State was opposed to LSD, cocaine and heroin, but
there was an electoral pressure to get all three legalised. Would it be
hypocritical for our head of State to strive to get LSD legalised even though
he was opposed to it?
Not
necessarily. While he would prefer all three to remain illegal, he may sense
that severe lobbying could bring about the legalisation of all three drugs,
whereas a compromise of legalising LSD would be a more realistic goal for him.
Instead of being hypocritical, it's more a use of ingenuity, and opting for a
lesser of the evils.
So what of George
Osborne then, is he being a hypocrite over tuition fees? The truth is, we're
not sure - possibly only he and those that are close to him actually know. It
could be that he used to be against tuition fees and then wised up once he
thought about the arithmetic a bit more, and came to understand what balancing
a budget is actually like in government. He may have simply had an epiphany
about the prudence of price signals related to degrees, and that there is no
such thing as a free lunch.
Or it could be
that he is sullied with that quandary known as being a politician, whereby when
you're itching to be in government you find yourself saying all sorts of sly
and guileful things in order to get elected. George Osborne is simply going
through the same kind of criticism we've seen levelled at Tony Blair, Nick
Clegg and David Cameron in recent times - making promises they later went on to
break in government. Doubtless, had they been elected instead, the same would
be said of William Hague, Charles Kennedy, Michael Howard and Ed Miliband.
The upshot is, there is a
real discontinuity between what politicians can promise out of power and what
they actually have to deliver in power under the economic constraints of being
the party controlling the purse strings. If you haven't learned the lessons by
now, I'll summarise with succinctness. Take what elected politicians say with a
large pinch of salt, but take what unelected, aspiring politicians say with a
whole shaker full of salt.
