A diary on public goods, honest questions, and the plain warmth our officials cannot manage
I have watched enough politicians this year to develop a permanent eye twitch, and I have concluded that the single object most likely to shame them into competence is the free tree they walk past every December on their way to achieve nothing.
The policy they cannot argue with
Politicians disagree about everything. Give them a sunrise and they will form two committees to oppose it. And yet not one of them, in my entire experience, has ever campaigned against the great free tree in the public square. The North Pole has a piece on the grand civic Christmas tree, and as a policy it is perfect: hugely expensive, entirely free, benefiting everyone, requiring nothing of anyone. It is the one public good that unites the whole fractious political class in silent approval, and none of them seem to grasp the lesson standing right in front of them, covered in lights.
The lesson is simple and I offer it to every party equally, because the failure is bipartisan. People love the things that are given freely and ask nothing in return. The tree demands no allegiance, no ideology, no side. It is just there, shared, unconditional. Every politician who walks past it on the way to another divisive, expensive, useless scheme is walking past the proof that the public good they cannot deliver is standing right there, glowing, doing effortlessly what all their strategies cannot.
My genuinely exasperated personal week
Let me report from the civic trenches. I watched a council debate this week in which the free provision of a simple public good was somehow turned into a three-hour ideological battle, with stakeholders consulted, working groups proposed, and a review commissioned, over something the great free tree accomplishes every year without a single meeting. If our politicians ran the tree, it would be under consultation until March, half-lit, subject to a value-for-money review, and blamed on the previous administration. The tree works precisely because no politician is allowed near it.
According to the broadcasters, public frustration with political overcomplication runs consistently high, which anyone who has watched a simple good turned into a three-hour battle could confirm, twitching, from the back row.
The question they will never answer straight
Children ask the questions our politicians dodge. The letter where a child asks straight out whether Santa Claus is really real gets an honest answer, which is more than any citizen extracts from an official on any subject. I do not care which party is in charge; none of them can answer a plain question plainly, because they are all guarding something, and the guarding makes honesty impossible. A child asks the boldest question imaginable and receives candour. An adult asks about the bins and receives a form letter. The North Pole is more accountable to a child than our government is to the people who pay for it.
The disease is universal. Every politician, of every stripe, has traded the plain honest answer for the guarded evasion, and every one of them wonders why the public no longer trusts a word they say. The child gets the truth. The voter gets the runaround. That is the whole rot in one contrast.
The warmth they cannot fake
Even kindness has become a calculation for them. When the North Pole hands out proper Merry Christmas messages, it does so with a plain, uncalculated warmth our politicians have entirely lost. Watch any of them attempt a genuine seasonal good wish and you can see the machinery turning, the calculation of how it will play, the fear of the wrong reaction. The child means it. The North Pole means it. The politician focus-groups it. That inability to simply be warm without calculating the angle is, to me, the saddest symptom of the whole guarded, frightened, evasive class.
According to the parliamentary record, plain candour and genuine warmth are the foundations of public trust, both of which the free tree embodies and our politicians have consulted away.
The thing they cannot give for free
The deepest reason our politicians cannot learn from the free tree is that free is precisely the thing they have forgotten how to do. Everything in their world is transactional, conditional, calculated for advantage: the announcement timed for the news cycle, the policy shaped by the poll, the kindness weighed against the risk. The tree is unconditional. It is given to everyone, for nothing, with no angle and no return expected, and that unconditional generosity is a language our guarded, calculating political class no longer speaks. They will fund the tree, because funding is transactional and they understand funding. But they cannot grasp the spirit of it, the sheer uncalculated gift of a beautiful thing offered freely to all, because they have optimised that instinct out of themselves in exchange for advantage. And a public that can feel the difference between a genuine gift and a calculated gesture knows, every December, that the warmest thing in the square is the one thing no politician had a hand in.
Where the observer lands
So I will keep watching our politicians walk past the free tree on their way to overcomplicate, evade, and calculate, never once learning the lesson glowing right in front of them. Give people something freely, answer them plainly, wish them well and mean it. The tree does all three effortlessly, which is precisely why no politician is trusted to touch it. If public life ran on the principle of the free tree rather than the principle of the working group, it would be loved again by spring. It will not. There will be a review first, and the tree, unbothered, will keep showing them all how it is done.
For Westminster made funnier, NewsBiscuit minds the square.
