Lawyers are no good at politics

Tom Jones has an excellent CAPX piece on the political damage done by professional wordsmiths such as lawyers who enter politics, those who confuse words with deeds. 

Lawyers are good at politics – but not if you want growth

• In 1945, about 25% of MPs had a working-class background; by 2019, it was just 7%
• Those who are adept at the use of words risk believing that talking is just as good as action
• Westminster is full of lawyers, which may be why it can’t get anything done

In a lecture titled ‘Politics as Vocation’, the philosopher Max Weber noted that: ‘To an outstanding degree, politics today is in fact conducted in public by means of the spoken or written word.’ It was true when he said it, in 1918; it is even more true now.

Much of Weber’s speech, given to Munich University, concerned ‘the significance of the lawyer in Occidental politics since the rise of parties’. This, he argued, was not random. Since the governance of politics through parties essentially translates to governance driven by interest groups – and the skill of a trained lawyer lies in effectively advocating for the interests of their clients – it follows that lawyers should ascend to dominate. To this list, he added journalists and ‘party officials’, a figure that, to him ‘belongs only to the development of the last decades and, in part, only to recent years’.

A familiar angle but the whole piece is well worth reading, because we do have a problem with professional wordsmiths who treat words as a substitute for actions. I worked with some of them and I bet it’s a common experience.

Growth cannot be delivered by words, but by deeds. Our politicians should not be waking up and asking themselves what they are going to say today, but asking themselves what they are going to do today. And what are Labour doing to deliver growth?

We have cripplingly expensive energy, and under Ed Miliband’s Net Zero plans it will become even more expensive. Solving the housing crisis is essential to unlocking potential across Britain, but Labour have lowered housing targets in some of the Labour-voting areas where the housing crisis is most acute. Labour rebels have tabled an amendment in favour of a four-day week. Taxes have already been raised to historic levels, and Reeves has declined to rule out further tax hikes in the spring. This Government has treated business and employment as a way to raise revenue, not deliver growth; incentives matter, and only when the incentives change will the outcomes change.