Flickr/ Jonas. Some rights reserved.
The prevailing view of politicians is that they are, at best incompetent and at worst, outright liars. It’s easy to see why. When looking at socio-political events and decisions they can often seem so head-spinningly contradictory that many of us have given up trying to understand their logic. Why do politicians find it so hard to be consistent? Why do they seem to take courses of action that often seem unfathomable? If we take their political motivations at face value why do politicians seem to make choices that fly in the face of them?
To take a recent example – why did Harriet Harman instruct Labour MPs not to vote against the Tories welfare reforms after pledging to fight the Tories? Why, after all agreeing what a mistake intervention in Iraq was, did the UK government repeat the mistake eight years later in Libya? Why is being part of the democratic process on the national level extolled by politicians, but democracy in the workplace must be crushed? Why do politicians complain about the lack of political engagement, then condemn half a million people joining the Labour Party?
