I was very kindly invited to YouGovStone's Evening Standard Influentials Debate on the London Housing Crisis. Debating and its role in the creation of a Public Space is much in my mind - and on my page, as here. So, for now, here are a few thoughts about the form rather than the content.
The 200 person auditorium divides roughly into 4 categories:
- a panel of politicians, journalists and "doers" (one architect, one builder)
- a silent majority
- a chair
- "seeded" questioners who had pre-sent questions to the organisers (I was one)
- political activists who were masquerading as ordinary citizens but were in the audience with a point to make
The chair called on a "seed" to kick things off; the panel opined, and the chair offered the floor some space. Into which, of course, leapt the activists. The Trot from Berlin, the NIMBY-ist from a leafy sub-urb, etc. They needed to squeeze into our consciousness by whatever means they could and did so with ferocious determination and lengthy prepared speeches. Anyone who has moderated an on-line forum knows these sorts - ask any Troll hunter what it would be like meeting a troll face to face.
Our chair, Jonathan Freedland (average article length, 1179 words - do click the link, this is a wonderful website that the Media Standards Trust has created) disciplined the activists with a firm hand. We - the silent majority - were all relieved. Our precious evening would not be monopolised by wordy incoherence ...
... except .... the two politicians on the panel were charming and impressive. But Steve Norris and Yvette Cooper succeeded in speaking almost no substance with such melifluous delivery that it took real resolve to notice that our time was being wasted. Jonathan, I fear, captivated by their hypnotic powers, forgot to intervene and tell them to move on.
There is a lesson in this for the determined activists: if you get the delivery style right, you'll probably get into power. The fundamentla difference between the successful politician and the ranter appears to be the superficial quesiton of presentation.
But the lesson for the public space is clear too: the hypnotists, the sales guys, are exactly the ones who rise to public prominence, but are also the ones who most successfuly invade a public space. The chairman, like the press, should be there to break the spell.
The "doer" of the panel, architect Sir Terry Farrell, was both most interesting and most credible (we were a stone's throw from his redevelopment at Charing Cross in London, which I am not very fond of). Who else, on being offered a chance to speak first, says something like: "I have opinions about many of the issues, but not about immigration. I'll pass on that question." When he did speak, we knew he thought he did so with the authority of professionalism rather than the enchantment of a Pied Piper.
