Form of a Question: How we talk politics matters and context is too often neglected

How we talk politics in the public sphere matters. In political interviews, the most common space, we need to consider carefully the form of questions, because context is often neglected despite mattering deeply.

Owen Jones stirred up a few hornets nests in the last week, by calling into question both the ingrained privilege and biases of those who work in the British media. Despite some angry response, the statistics align with his point.

It is important to question our assumptions. To look at the facts from a number of angles. It is the job of any good journalist. And that, sometimes, means journalists looking at themselves and those they work with.

Especially when it comes the politics in it's rawest form, we need to think and act carefully. The media doesn't just shine a ray of light on the lay of the land, it gives structure to the whole weather system and decides what parts of it we are even able to see.

For most viewers, the crucible in which most Westminster politics is consumed is in the form of the political interview. From Andrew Neil, Laura Kuenssberg and Andrew Marr at the BBC, to Robert Peston at ITV or Krishnan Guru-Murthy at Channel 4, it is a high profile format.

It's also a highly problematic format. I'm not looking here to tear down any practitioners of the political interview 'genre'. But there are questions that should be raised about it's dynamics and how the process unfolds.

The way interviewers approach these set-pieces raise a lot of questions - all of which need careful thoughts. They are gatekeepers to platforms, some with colossal reach. As such they have extraordinary political power, and that must always be held to account.

But here I want to focus on a very particular issue. At present, the common form of questioning in a standard political interview does two things - that might be thought of as mistakes - that seem to render the interviews futile.

From the outside, these interviews follow a particular course - as follows.

Mistake 1: The interviewer asks a question that is phrased in a way that casts them as a proxy for their interviewee's opponents. That means the interviewer adopts the opponent's subjective context as the framing device for the question - as in, what they, subjectively, construe as good and bad.

The result of this is that the interviewee avoids giving a straight answer. They instead attempt to reframe the question to their own - in essence, polemically opposed - context, simply because their own context is an intrinsic part of why they believe what the stand for is 'good'.

Mistake 2: The interviewer treats this attempt to reframe, on the part of the interviewee, as a refusal to give a straight answer and treats them as hostile. They demand that their interviewee give a simple answer within the invalid framing, despite it being fundamentally ill-fitting and distortionary to any answer that might be given.

The result is that the interviewee is rendered incapable of answering the question, as even if they wanted to give a straight answer - or often any answer at all - the framing of the question directly prevents them from doing so.

Any answer given by an interviewee, in this environment that rips it from its native context, is robbed of it's meaning and serves only the opponent's narrative.

Consider an example.

The Tories traditionally think that tax & spend is 'Bad'. So if Labour tax & spend, then Labour are framed as 'Bad' - in this case with the meanings of wasteful, redistributing in a socially negative way that rewards bad habits, etcetera.

However, Labour traditionally think that tax & spend is 'Good'. Yet to confirm their commitment within the framing of the Conservatives is incorrect - in this different context, the meaning is different. Context changes meaning.

That means that, in this scenario, a Labour spokesperson is rendered unable to answer such a question - without first being able to address, and contest, the context within which the answer will be understood.

In this hostile environment, unable to answer, they must either conform to the narrative, or fight it - leading to the perception of evasiveness under questioning or deception, both of which will be criticised.

These points matter.

One direct consequence of this form of questioning is that it creates the perception of politicians who won't answer questions, by directly preventing them from being able to.

In a world in which snippets of interviews are seen more than whole recordings, it also gives people an incorrect impression of deeply-biased mainstream journalists parroting the polarised positions of political parties.

This process, additionally, affords an absurd amount of power to those who 'create the political weather' - who lead the public conversations on values. To a media cycle built around creating and then reporting on, and thus reinforcing, public opinion.

There are no easy answers to this. What is the root of this? Is there perhaps a misunderstanding about what it means to be 'balanced'? Or is it as simple as time constraints?

Either way, context is being left out of the dominant form of political discussions. And that is a mistake. Possibly a tragic one. In politics, every idea, every policy, has a context that gives it meaning.

In fact the fight over the context is often far more important than the day to day fight over any given policy. It is the big war, fought behind the scenes - but it should be up front, in the spotlight.

Clemenceau showed that you can achieve radical change in politics away from the establishment's institutional power

Portrait of Georges Clemenceau by Édouard Manet. Photograph: By Renaud Camus (license) (cropped)

The UK Labour Party's old guard establishment of former leaders and ministers has shown a crushing fear of the task of opposing the Tories when out office - out in the civic space where debate, protest and journalism set the political agenda. Yet history shows that it not only can be done, but that it is necessary to making radical change possible.

Clemenceau and the Dreyfus Affair

Georges Clemenceau, a leading figure amongst the French Radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, consistently found himself caught between more extreme forces. The man who would go on to be 'The Tiger' of France as Prime Minister during the Great War, was caught between a reactionary government and the revolutionary commune in 1871 and then later made a scapegoat, in 1893, for the Panama corruption scandal.

Ousted at the elections that followed the scandal and frozen out, Clemenceau poured his energies into journalism. After a time championing the radical causes close to his heart, he became wrapped up in a slow burning campaign, one that took several years to catch light, in support of Albert Dreyfus' innocence.

The Dreyfus Affair, involved the scandalous selling of military secrets being pinned on Dreyfus, a Jewish captain, at a time of rising anti-Semitism. Several years after a miscarriage of justice saw Dreyfus imprisoned, Clemenceau was presented with evidence by Arthur Ranc, a Dreyfusard journalist, which was seconded by the Senator Auguste Scheurer-Kestner.

Clemenceau used his position as editor of L'Aurore to demand a retrial. When that trial too proved a farce, he was approached by the famous author Emile Zola. Clemenceau published an incendiary letter by Zola - headed as 'J'accuse...!' by Clemenceau himself - as the front page of L'Aurore. It named names and called out corruption amongst the political class in a letter addressed directly to the President.

In one dramatic stroke - which saw the newspaper's readership increase from 30,000 to 300,000 - the outcast Radical had thrown himself in amongst, not only, the supporters of Dreyfus, but also amongst the opponents of anti-Semitic nationalism.

From 1897 to 1899, Clemenceau campaigned alongside others, including Bernard Lazare who had been working to prove Dreyfus innocent since the matter began in 1894, in what has been described as "one of the greatest achievements of French journalism" (Daniel Halevy, in Hampden Jackson, 1946):

"...a close-knit discussion carried on over two years, sustained each morning by an article sparkling with wit, vigour and rationality..."

That journalist-led civic discussion eventually achieved a Presidential pardon for Dreyfus (although Clemenceau thought that still to be an injustice); a sea change in parliament with government and ministers toppling and the Radicals becoming the biggest party, bringing substantial reforms like the separation of church and state, the secularisation of education and the abolition of censorship; and the return of Clemenceau himself to parliament as a Senator.

Labour's fear of impotence

In the present, Labour has been warning loudly of the danger of the impotence from which the party will suffer without the institutional mechanisms of the establishment at their beck and call. From Tony Blair to Gordon Brown (Blair, 2015; Mason & Halliday, 2015), the party members have been urged not to vote the Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn, according to some of the party's own MPs, is a purveyor of "crazy left-wing policies" who will leave the party out on the British political fringe and will face internal rebellions from the moment he is elected (Wilkinson, 2015). Yet that attitude from the Labour Parliamentary Party can hardly be considered a safer course. It mimics the very same, deeply unpopular, attitude towards its own membership, as the Eurozone held towards Greece. Embracing the status quo as a party of establishment bureaucracy also did little for PASOK, the main social democrat party in Greece, which collapsed at the election in January (Chakrabortty, 2015).

It also ignores Labour's essential problem - it has never changed 'the political fundamentals in its favour' (Kirby, 2015). Labour has always preferred, instead, to use them in its own service. In doing so, the Labour has forgotten about social power in order to play the best they can according to the rules of the political game (Tietze, 2015) - and so cling to an institutional power that comes with serious restraints, from various sources of pressure, and offers ever diminishing returns.

"Although the history of the Left has produced an extraordinary theoretical legacy, which continues to be the nucleus of almost all radical thinking, it has nonetheless left a trail of extraordinary failures in practice.

I understand the dialectical relation between theory and practice, of course, but we have to admit that in real historical terms this dialectic is terribly uneven, to the degree in fact that it may render questionable a great many of these theoretical achievements, which, if we are going to be rigorously leftist about it, cannot really stand entirely on their own." (Gourgouris, 2015)

When pressed, Labour's establishment figures may point to the danger of leaving the Tories with majority power. Yet their power has depended upon an effective control of the civic debate, framing and directing the discussion in a civic space that Labour has seemingly abandoned (d'Ancona, 2015).

Recovering radicalism

This boils down to an essential point: the importance of the social debate makes the direct pursuit of institutional power almost an irrelevance (Gourgouris, 2013).

In order to govern radically, a group first has to engage the public in the civic space, where is fostered the power to govern and change society regardless of hierarchies and institutions (Gourgouris, 2013). Clemenceau and the Dreyfusards were an early modern example of the power there is in the civic space. For radicals, this means encouraging localised self-organisation, opening up a space for teaching and learning, and fighting against alienation.

Labour has already made one big step in that direction when it chose to, effectively, crowdsource a leadership candidate (Perkins, 2015). But this example of radical democracy in action is only a beginning. In order to be a vital part of the Left, Labour has to accept that it is only a part.

Radicalism requires space for protest and critical dissent, for differences of opinion, for discussion, debate and disagreement (Gourgouris, 2015). The radical Left needs the internal antagonism of multi-party politics, not the domination of a singular power. It needs to be an activist outside of parliament and a disruptive troublemaker within it - not unlike the belligerent Clemenceau a century ago.

It looks unlikely that Labour will be able to muster enough enthusiasm amongst progressives to get over the majority electoral line while it continues to preach the values of the establishment. However, if any of the leadership candidates, of which Corbyn looks most likely, can embrace this kind of radical shift in the party - away from centralism, statism and party leader domination - there is hope of a new, more pluralistic, Left mounting a serious challenge in 2020.