George Lee's dilemma was he had little to say
George Lee’s problem was not the lack of a platform or a role – it was the absence of a political philosophy. By Vincent Browne.
Video: The engaging exchange between Vincent and George Lee on Monday's 'Tonight' programme
In 1963, when George Lee was still a baby, a fabulous film burst on the adolescent consciousness of my contemporaries and myself, Federico Fellini’s 8½.
Fellini was a celebrity film director at the time, having had a huge success with La Dolce Vita in 1960.
The film 8½ was an exploration of his own art and life and (for him) his devastating experience of an aesthetic mental block and in the course of that film the actor Marcello Mastroianni, who played the role of Fellini, says plaintively: “I have nothing to say”. But the film is still quite brilliant in conveying the sense of desolation.
And in a way that is the desolation of George Lee. This brilliant economist, broadcaster and communicator, emerging from the heat of the political kitchen with nothing to say. And nothing to say while in the political kitchen either.
For the George Lee phenomenon was a mirage. George represented the disillusionment with politics, the craving for a new voice, the anxiousness about integrity in political life and a comfort. A comfort that someone who was so widely regarded as authoritative and objective could speak about the crisis in ways that threatened nobody or no interests, aside from the usual suspects: the Government, the bankers, the developers.
George was so appealing in part because he was/is apolitical. Curiously, he seems to have no politics. No views on how society should be structured. How the resources, wealth and income of society should be distributed. No views on power relations within society, between those on the inside track and those outside that inside track, between the wealthy and the poor, between the bosses and the servants, between men and women.
Or if he has such views he has remained silent on them, as he has been silent on almost everything since joining politics, aside from wanting to “fix” the economy “now”, aside from being mad as hell about what has been going on . . . without saying precisely what he has been mad as hell about. Good stuff for summer schools, but vacuous.
On November 24th last, he spoke in the Dáil for about three and a half minutes (his allotted time) on the industrial disruptions announced by the public service unions in response to the threatened public pay cuts.
He could have said something in that debate about how unjust it was that the focus on the fiscal adjustment was on cutting the pay and welfare of people, who were relatively less well off, instead of, for instance, removing the huge tax breaks the wealthy enjoy. Or that he approved of fixing the burden on the less well off because the rich had taken a big enough hit in the previous budget (in case of confusion that is certainly not my view). Or that the unions were right to rebel against the then threatened cuts or were wrong.
Instead he said (a) we could take longer than 2014 to get the fiscal imbalance down to 3 per cent of GNP; (b) cuts in public sector numbers were not always a good thing because, for instance, we could employ more people in the ESB by selling its services abroad. But generally he conveyed his agreement with Government strategy, although he did seem on the verge of criticising Colm McCarthy’s menu of public expenditure cuts.
In other words he resorted to the same blather as every run-of-the-mill TD deploys in an effort to say something without saying anything.
In the eight months he was in the Dáil he could have produced a policy document of his own and invited the Fine Gael parliamentary party to discuss it, just as Declan Costello did almost 50 years ago with his Just Society document. But George didn’t. He could have used his celebrity public meetings to enunciate his own views on public policy and he need not have been constrained by being the nominated chairman. But he didn’t.
Declan Costello had a great deal to say; regrettably George had nothing to say.
And in a way George’s dilemma is shared by many in the Dáil but for the most part the others don’t mind at all because an unspoken consensus on politics says it for them and they don’t feel the need to be trailblazers on something or other. And that unspoken consensus goes something like this:
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with our politics. Sure there have been regulatory failures and excesses in public policy, but that was a temporary aberration, albeit one that has cost us dearly.
We can get out of this mess if we don’t get blocked by ideological hang-ups and if we take the tough decisions. Yes, the less well off may suffer most but, to be frank, they are used to suffering and eventually it is in their interests that we get back on track. We can’t dampen the spirit of enterprise, that’s essential. Let’s have the steel to do it. Of course there are disagreements on the edges of this strategy but it’s only on the edges. Anyway, there is no realistic alternative, short of communism, and we know what that led to. So brace yourself, Bridget.
Pity George wasn’t the sort to challenge all that.