# Transcript

## Iain Stewart, Matthew Parris, Bianca Todd and Ivor Gaber: ‘What is politics and why is it important?’

Iain Stewart
Hello, I’m Iain Stewart. I’m the Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes South and I’ve been in office since the general election of 2010.
What does politics mean to me? It’s the interaction of lots of different issues that affect how we live. Those are local issues, national issues, international issues. Most issues interact with each other in some way, and when you’re making a decision you have to think through the consequences of each decision. It’s like playing a multi-dimensional game of chess. You have to think what would happen three, four, five moves down the road. Whatever decision you make has implications elsewhere at lots of different levels. And the job of a politician is to try and understand the complexity of the situation and think through the consequences of making a decision. And that might actually lead you to make a different decision from the one that you might have initially thought. And that’s why I find politics fascinating, because it’s the interaction of so many people and arguments, and spaces.
Politics is the safe way of resolving disputes. At every level of society, and globally, people compete for resources, for wealth, for lots of different things, and if you didn’t have politics to resolve these issues, you would have an armed conflict in some way. Now that still sometimes happens with politics, but it would happen a lot more if we didn’t have a civilised parliament or other forum through which to discuss and decide on all these issues.
Matthew Parris
I’m Matthew Parris, Times columnist and former Conservative MP.
As a journalist, politics is about stories, very much about human stories. About battles, about struggles between political parties, about ambition, about the rise of personalities and the fall of personalities, about revenge and backstabbing and all the things that newspapers love. I have to write about that and, to be honest, I enjoy writing about it. But the older I get, the clearer it becomes to me that politics, in the end, should be about administration: the administration of a country. People love to talk about change. I came into politics to bring change. Change is all very well, and sometimes things need to be changed, but a country also simply needs to be governed. Government is mostly about administration: sound administration, efficient administration. It’s about raising taxes, it’s about spending the money wisely, and these aspects of what I think politics really is tend to be rather lost in all the excitement about the warfare of politics.
Politics is what governs us, what governs a country. All human society, in the end, comes down to organisation. Every society must be organised: there must be leadership, there must be roles for people, people must be paid for what they do. Politics is about the organisation of society. Hopefully the good organisation of society. Bad politics brings you the bad organisation of society. But in organising society, what politics has to do is represent different and sometimes competing interests within society, so politics is also about balancing and adjudicating competing interests, hopefully in a fair way.
Bianca Todd
My name’s Bianca Todd and I am the principal speaker of Left Unity [at the time of interview], a new political party of the left brought about by a group of people who felt that there was a shift in politics and a gap for the left brought about by Labour’s move to the right. And I’m also involved with Community Courtyard, which is an organisation set up in memory of my granddad, Ron Todd.
My granddad was the General Secretary of the TGWU, which amalgamated with Amicus and became Unite the Union. So I come from a family where actually the principles of the trade union movement, such as social justice, equality and fairness, were right at our everyday living. They were the values which actually struck the heart of the family and what we had to live our lives by. I wasn’t a trade union member until very recently. However, I’ve been a trade union supporter all of my life.
Politics is everything. I don’t think there is an aspect of our lives that isn’t political. So it’s decisions that we make in our everyday living and what we’re allowed to do. So, for me, politics is about everything I do, and how I’m able to do it. An example might be of how much a pint costs, where I’m allowed to drink; it might be what school my child can go to and what’s in the curriculum. More than that, it might be about who my neighbours are and what benefits they may or may not receive.
Politics is important to me and a big part of my life because of the injustice that I can see occurring in my community, in my family, in, in the UK, and so, for that reason, politics has played a really big part recently, because I feel an urge to do something about the area that I live in.
I didn’t realise until recently how politics had affected me. However, what I now know is that it affects me very significantly. I can relate to the fact that if you want to make an appointment at your doctor’s, years ago you’d get an appointment quite quickly and there was a different process to now. I understand now, in terms of accessing NHS resources, things have changed. So the politics has actually become more important to me because I want my children and my grandchildren, and the great grandchildren who I haven’t met, to have the same level of living that I think we all deserve. So I now realise that politics is the vehicle to demand that.
Ivor Gaber
My name is Ivor Gaber. I am currently professor of journalism at the University of Sussex. I teach politics and political journalism and I teach political subjects, so I am a political scientist.
Many years ago Aneurin Bevan, who was a leading Labour politician, said that politics is the distribution of scarce resources. In other words, politics is how societies make decisions about how it’s going to both spend its money and its resources and distribute them. It’s about trying to work out what is fair.
The classic model of democracy was ancient Greece where people would gather round, men, actually, would gather round – no women, no slaves – and discuss how to run the society. It was pretty simple. In modern democracies, we need politics because we can’t all sit round the village square, the town square, the city square, discussing how to allocate resources, how much to spend on roads, how much to spend on hospitals, how much to spend on education. So we have to develop a political system to make those decisions. In the UK and most other countries of the world, we have what’s called representative democracy. We elect people to make those decisions on our behalf and if we don’t like the decisions that they’ve made, the next time they come up for election we don’t vote for them. So politics is about organising mass society.