Hooray for ya-boo politics

A popular explanation for the public's lack of interest in politics is that ‘ordinary people’ are turned off by the kind of adversarial, ya-boo politics on display at yesterday’s PMQs.

Roy Hattersley argued as much on last night’s Newsnight, saying something along the lines that ordinary folk outside the Westminster village don’t connect with Punch and Judy politics, caring more about which party can deliver the best schools and hospitals than which leader scored the most points at PMQs.

In today’s Independent, Adrian Hamilton spots a weakness in the argument that ‘if only politicians would concentrate on policies and what affected the ordinary individual…people would return to the fray.’

‘Would that it were true,’ he says. ‘The loss of interest has come not at a time of extreme factionalism but with the lack of politics associated with Labour's huge majorities in the Commons. Without the air of a real, down-and-dirty struggle for power, politics has seemed boring and irrelevant.’

Hamilton likens politics to sport: once people sense a real contest they suddenly take interest. ‘When everyone thought that Gordon Brown had it in the bag, the voters lost interest in the opposition,’ he says. ‘What turned it around was…the sense that the Tories were back in the race, with ideas, with a common touch but above all with the hunger to win.’

The idea that Commons debates should become less ya-boo and more polite and consensual, risks turning them into dull, procedural affairs, akin to a debate in the Welsh Assembly or European Parliament. Now that really would switch voters off.