Twitter’s shouting match and the battle of ideas

I’ve had a pretty bad week on Twitter. Plenty of people have had worse.

There have been thousands of words written on how it feels to be on the wrong side of tens, hundreds, or thousands of social media users sending you unpleasant messages – some simply call a tweet or an idea bad or stupid, some call you everything that’s wrong with politics/society/the world, some get abusive, and some straight-up threatening.

In truth, quickly they all start to feel the same: like components of the barrage that they are, a psychologically exhausting experience which has become a hazing rite for anyone anywhere near even the fringes of public life. Most individual messages aren’t that bad, but the cumulative effect of hundreds, day after day, is very different.

I’d write more on the misery and difficulties this creates – and how it drives people out of public life – but others have done this already, and better than I could. And I suspect for many who spend their time in such pile-ons, it serves only as a sign that what they’re doing is working.

Instead, let’s just address one genuinely severe side-effect of Twitter’s mob politics: it’s now all but impossible to talk online about ideas, or about policy.

Policies are the purpose of politics: all the rallying, the husting, the campaigning, the registering and the voting is for nothing unless it results in policy which will improve society. The rest is theatre.

Policy is also rarely clean or straightforward: it involves delicate and balanced decisions on how limited resources (not just money: manpower, institutional ability, political capital, and more) are allocated.

Let’s say hypothetically there’s a goal everyone on the left- or centre-left agrees is a good one: let’s improve the access of people born into poor families into higher education and elite professions.

Different people who sign up to that goal entirely might well disagree on how to do it. To many, it’s obvious that scrapping tuition fees would be a fantastic way to fulfil that goal, and well worth the cost.

Others – who are still entirely committed to the goal – might disagree: they might push for funding instead to boost pre-school education for low-income families (or all of them), as the attainment gap begins at this age.

They might push for a reintroduction of EMA (maybe at a higher level), as there’s a known drop-out problem at 16–18 for students from low-income families, which is a huge contributor to lower application rates from this group.

They may suggest boosting bursaries and grants to low-income students would have a bigger effect on the education gap, for less money.

Without evidence and debate we don’t know which of these approaches – or combination of them – would serve best to fulfil our goals.

But it should be a statement of the blinding obvious to think you could support any one of them – or have doubts about any of them – while still being fully signed up to the actual goal.

This is true with infrastructure, too: what are we worried about when we worry about the cost and overcrowding of trains and buses? Do we want to make sure we boost economies in towns which are struggling? Do we want to make sure people in low-paid jobs in the South East – many of whom have increasingly long journeys to work as they’re priced out of central London – can afford their commute? Do we want to make sure bad infrastructure and the overcrowding it generates doesn’t damage the City as a place for banks (and the high-paying jobs, which generate tax, they bring)?

Those questions all have different (and expensive) answers.

Using public funds to pay for a multi-year freeze in rail fares for example, sounds great. But at the moment, trains are disproportionately used by higher earners (the top 20% of earners especially). A freeze alone would not change this pattern, except at the margins: to get a big change which allowed low earners to switch would take huge cuts to rail fares, which would cost the public purse much more.

So a freeze on rail fares would essentially serve as a subsidy to richer families. Large cuts would be a less regressive policy – but could hugely boost overcrowding without huge simultaneous capacity building.

That latter plan could become a policy – but would it be better than building better bus systems, increasing the subsidy to those? Would that rail infrastructure be better built in the north of England, which gets far less investment and which might get a much better boost from it? Might the money be better spent in a different area entirely – if cost of living is the underlying problem, then perhaps stepping back and ending the benefit freeze would prove more effective than tackling rail fares in boosting living standards for families.

Good policy can change lives and save lives. Bad policy wastes money, gives freebies to people who don’t need them, and ruins people’s faith in government and its ability to deliver.

We need to be able to separate disagreement on policy from disagreement on goals, and on the society we want.

The mob mentality of Twitter delivers only the opposite: you see one tweet on one policy – often deliberately rendered out of context – that you disagree with, and the immediate assumption is the person sending it is a moron or an enemy.

The people who do this – and no, it’s not just the left, but it’s also not an isolated problem from a handful of individuals either – evidently don’t care that it upsets the people they do it to: that’s the goal.

So let’s at least address instead that ideas are better when they’re tested and when they’re discussed in good faith, by people who agree on the destination and are trying to work out the best way to get there.

Good ideas – good, detailed, costed ideas – could change millions of lives. Our lack of faith in one another, our culture of assuming disagreement on policy means someone’s your opponent, and our bitter public mood will make the real work of politics and public debate harder.

And it’s rarely the elite, or the commentariat, that pay the price for that.