A Pax on Both Your Houses

The lamentable spectacle of British Democracy is over for another four years or so. The tired monotonous rhetoric, the narrowness of available choice, the absurdly unrepresentative system, the predictable lines of media ‘analysis': these, and the ‘hardworking ordinary people’ obsessively invoked by the politicians can now be returned to their boxes, and the politicians - little more than managers - can continue as normal.

What I caught of election night only confirmed my sense of parody eclipsing parody. Especially bizarre, Paxman, who’s Name has now colonised and usurped his Self, so that he is now little more than a puppet operated by his own reputation (i.e., a Rottweiler interrogator feared by the slippery politician). He is, for example, now tyrannised by the trick that made him famous – endlessly repeating the same question with tired exasperation.

Paxman is of course the mirror image of the politics he supposedly interrogates, the proverbial victory of style over substance, the fixation with point scoring and polemical excitation. The hypertrophy of the adversarial style -the tricks and gestures of the Paxman ‘grilling’ - is exactly proportional to the dwindling of substantive content. His questions to Blair and Howard on immigration were cut from a pre-woven media cloth and simply lent extra colour by Paxman’s stylised rudeness and appalled incredulity. The fireworks may awaken the increasingly jaded viewer from his slumbers but invariably fail to unpick a single assumption.

Increasingly, Paxman’s questions are of the ‘have you stopped beating your wife’ kind. He robotically attempts to force an admission which he knows to be impossible. Attempts to question the question are gleefully seized on as evidence of evasion (the ‘evasive politician’ being of course another enjoyable little spectacular trope). In fact, the impossibility of answering the question is his very reason for asking it. He wishes to produce not a considered response, but precisely (what we can call) a ‘Paxman effect’ – the politician squirming on the hook of the question, refusing to answer it, Pax insisting on it. His questions are devices for the production of such specular moments, which are what ‘the public’ expects from a Paxman interview.

A recent example of this last was the nonsensical and patronisingly racist Q put to newly elected G. Galloway*:

‘Are you proud of having got rid of one of the very few black women in parliament?’

The sheer stupidity of the question hardly needs explaining, except to those so blinded by their hostility to the oleaginous Galloway that they can only – overlooking the implicit offensive tokenism - cite the interview as evidence for the prosecution*. Naturally, the BBC chose to upload the interview to their website - a little bearbaiting show for the disenfranchised.

Beyond Lilliput, beyond the obsession with portraying debate as confrontation or division, beyond squabbling over the ownership of keywords ('hardworking ordinary people'), beyond all such polemical excitations, circumscribed as they are within the limits ultimately set by contemporary capitalism, the question we need to be asking is: 'Under what conditions can the concept of democracy be fully actualised'? This is, contra Pax, the only impossible question worth askng and repeating.

*For non-British readers, Galloway superceded Oona King as MP for the London constituency Bethnal Green and Bow.

*Oona King has indeed objected to the assumptions behind Paxman's question.