Tuesday 9 April 2024

Using common sense depends on knowing what it is

 

To adapt the words of Oscar Wilde, to lose one parliamentary candidate due to unfortunate use of social media looks like misfortune, but to lose ten starts to look like carelessness. Unless, of course, we are talking about Reform UK Party Ltd, the mostly Farage-owned limited company standing over 600 candidates (although a currently unknowable number of those may have fallen by the wayside in the meantime) in the forthcoming election. It seems that selecting any old Tom, Dick, or Harry as a candidate and waiting for their past misdemeanours to be exposed is actually a deliberate strategy. They have, in effect, outsourced the vetting of candidates to the media, who are having something of a field day as they work their way through the list uncovering incriminating past statements.

Outsourcing candidate vetting is a novel approach to a difficult issue. The more cynical might even wonder whether Reform are quite happy to be associated in the mind of potential voters with some of the racism and misogyny being spouted by their candidates whilst also hoping to get some sort of credit for acting quickly to sack them when their words are exposed. Both selecting candidates and subsequently sacking them are definitely easier for a hierarchical company where one man has effective total control than for a democratic party where members might, wholly unreasonably, expect to have an input. Abolishing concepts such as membership and democracy is not without its advantages. For a control freak or would-be dictator at least. And for a party which has, according to the polls, zero probability of having anyone elected, maybe they really just aren’t that worried. The company’s puppet leader, Richard Tice, said that “Every party has their fair share frankly of muppets and morons”. From the horse’s mouth, as it were. But I almost agree with him; it’s just that some have a ‘fairer’ share than others.

He does make the entirely correct point that the vetting process is “valid the day you do it, but if the following Friday night someone has a glass or two too much and puts something out on social media they permanently regret, in a sense it never stops”. Well, yes. Although quite how that applies in the case of the candidate for Orpington whose offensive words date from 2019 is an unanswered question. A date 5 years ago is hardly between one day and the following Friday night. Not without a Tardis, anyway.

Candidate vetting is a difficult process, and can be sensitive. I recall one case of a Plaid candidate who was outraged to discover that party officials had looked at their (public) social media accounts, and claimed it was an invasion of their privacy. We thought that it was an extreme reaction, but it highlights the fairly common belief that social media accounts, even if visible to the world, are somehow also private to the individual and his or her online friends. Understanding the way in which social media can broadcast and amplify throwaway comments is still slow in developing in some quarters.

And even when candidates have been vetted, and nothing incriminating has been found, one can never be entirely sure that the individual won’t, as Tice put it, have a glass or two and say something silly. It’s not only a problem for Reform, although to date they’re the only group that have tried to turn a problem into a ‘feature’, as a software developer might describe it. Whether it’s just bad luck, or whether there is a particular propensity on the political ‘right’ to say silly things, it is the Tories who have, in recent months and years, suffered some of the biggest problems. Some of them seem to think that they are just voicing aloud ‘what everybody thinks’ and that makes it just common sense. That was, for instance, a major part of Lee Anderson’s defence. Indeed, returning to Toms, Dicks, and Harrys (and especially the second of those) it turns out that the MP who sent pictures of his body parts to a man through a dating app, and provided the contact details of other MPs so that they could also be targeted, is a fully paid-up member of the so-called Common Sense Group of Tory MPs. But then, ‘common sense’ as defined by Tice’s ‘muppets and morons’ is always going to look a bit strange to the rest of us. An inability to agree on a common sense definition of common sense is one of the reasons why vetting is so hard to do.

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