3 - Politics: head and heart

Summary

Introduction

The Welsh actor Michael Sheen is not only well known for his film and television drama roles but also his stirring rhetoric on and off screen. Before a motivational speech for the Wales men's football team in 2022 was widely shared, Sheen had gone viral before: with a speech about Aneurin Bevan and the NHS, on St David's Day, prior to the 2015 general election. On Bevan, Sheen told a watching crowd that the politician who had founded the NHS “didn't care what the polls were saying” (Sheen 2015). Instead, “this was a man who had no fear in standing up for what he believed in”. To contemporary politicians, who Sheen described as “scared of saying what they feel for fear of alienating a part of the electorate … too careful to speak from their hearts”, the actor warned (ibid.): “There is never an excuse to not speak up for what you think is right. You must stand up for what you believe. But first of all – by God, believe in something.” In his speech, Sheen posited a form of political judgement and style that will be recognizable, both from other advocates and from critics: you must speak from principle, even with fear of an electoral cost. With Bevan as his subject, Sheen's speech also invoked Labour's radical, working-class identity and its postwar glory years: a time, in this retelling, of politicians unafraid to paint in primary colours. This meeting point for different meanings – moral, ethical, emotional and historical – gives rise to the different kinds of politics that are the focus of this chapter.

Those in and around the Labour Party have heard many politicians empathize about a problematic policy, or acknowledge the unfairness of something, yet prevaricate on the way forward. Critics of New Labour have remarked upon “its perceived triangulation and spinning” (Jones 2020: 52), the substitution of ambiguity for core values or worse a wholesale embrace of neoliberal politics. The certainty with which the latter interpretation is often expressed is not supported by the evidence (Wickham-Jones 2021), yet towards the end of New Labour's time in office, in lieu of a clear expression of belief was a mixture of viewpoints, derived from opinion polling and repeated back at the electorate.