If you feel that politics has all got a bit insane lately, you are not alone. But don’t worry, there’s a political fix on the horizon, a magic spell that will make all the tensions and trade-offs vanish in a puff of smoke. All we need is a bit of old-fashioned common sense.
That was the gist of Kemi Badenoch’s speech earlier this week. The Tory leader was addressing the issues raised by the horrific murder of Henry Nowak and the shockingly inadequate police response which has sparked civil unrest across the country. Much has been written about the tragedy itself, as well as the shameless exploitation of the family’s grief by political actors with their own agendas and misinformation to weaponise. There are complex questions to discuss about police training and guidance, from the assumptions emergency responders make from 999 calls to the way suspects are treated in high-stress situations. But that wasn’t the real problem, according to Badenoch. No, the real problem was that “common sense has gone out of the window” – and it could be solved by simply bringing it back.
They say good artists copy but great artists steal. Badenoch, who cited “common sense” seven times in her speech, was following a well-worn path forged by predecessors in her party. Not so long ago the Conservatives had an entire parliamentary faction dedicated to the cause, the hard-right Common Sense Group, spearheaded by Tory grandee John Hayes who once told me he rejected liberalism because humans are “sinners”, that he maintained his belief in the divine right of kings, and that he always carried with him a small ornamental hedgehog.
As well as taking aim at all things “woke”, the CSG was unapologetically pro-Brexit – a cause which drew heavily on the notion of “common sense” when rallying voters to back Leave in 2016. As Michael Gove put it a decade ago, “this country has had enough of experts”. The common sense of the everyday man and woman, the type of common sense Badenoch believes will sort out British policing, was enough to deduce that Brexit would of course be an overwhelming success, whatever the warnings about the hit to our economy. And just look how that turned out.
But the undisputed champion of the notion must be Esther McVey, who was made unofficial minister for common sense by Rishi Sunak at the end of 2023. There is much we can learn about what these two little words mean from her speech on the subject, delivered nine days before Sunak called a general election he was doomed to lose catastrophically. The causes she was tasked with as minister are illuminating: pushing back on “gender ideology”, reversing net zero, cancelling HS2, blitzing illegal immigration with the ill-fated Rwanda plan, tackling benefits as a “lifestyle choice” and crusading against civil servants wearing rainbow lanyards.
Depending on your personal politics, you might agree with some of those priorities. Or you might notice that they seem remarkably aligned with the reactionary talking points repeated ad infinitum in right-wing media spaces like GB News or the X algorithms curated by Elon Musk. What they are manifestly not – either now or in May 2024 – are the top “everyday concerns of ordinary people”. Those would be the cost of living crisis and the state of the NHS. Rainbow lanyards are pretty low down on the list.
And even where the issues do align with voter sentiment, it’s not at all clear that the policy proposals pushed by McVey and her ideological allies fit the definition of “common sense”. The legal and ethical minefield that was the Rwanda plan, for example, cost taxpayers £700m and removed a total of four people, all of whom were volunteers.
But no matter! The genius of the common sense device is that politicians don’t need to spell out exactly what it is they’re planning to do, let alone make the case for it – because everyone likes to think they are sensible, so the common sense answer must, by definition, be one they agree with. It’s a beautiful fudge, suggesting a degree of ease and consensus that is often utterly lacking from the political debate in question.
The ancient philosophers might have a thing or two to say about this. The common sense view of what common sense actually is is itself up for debate. It dates back to Aristotle (namechecked in McVey’s speech, much good that it does him), who viewed it as a type of innate basic instinct, the sixth sense that unites our five other senses and enables us to accurately perceive the world around us. That differs from the Romans’ notion of “communis sensus”, which is about the widely-held views of the community – more universal opinions than common sense.
Neither of these concepts maps neatly onto today’s political quagmire. The positions politicians so often like to paint as “common sense” – whether on immigration, gender identity, the environment or policing – are far from universally held. Often, in fact, they’re quite contentious. Waving the common sense wand is a shortcut, a way to dismiss the inconvenient opposition without actually confronting the arguments.
As for the basic instinct definition of common sense, it is comforting to think we might possess some innate power that enables us to circumvent difficult questions where there are obvious trade-offs or missing information, and simply feel our way to the right answer. But if we could, if it were really that easy, we wouldn’t need politicians at all.
Scratch below the service of common sense solutions, and you’ll often find a whole load of factors, nuances and unintended consequences that don’t fit the narrative. Badenoch has said it is common sense for police to use stop and search powers more frequently on young black men in order to reduce knife crime, because black men are more likely to be carrying knives. That might sound sensible, but it doesn’t take in to account the risk of damaging trust between ethnic minority communities and police forces, which can lead to less cooperation and have an adverse impact on reducing crime. The “common sense” approach to how police should handle disruptive protests seems to vary wildly depending whether the protests in question are pro-Palestine or anti-immigration.
As for the case which sparked Badenoch’s speech in the first place, it bears repeating: while it is right to scrutinise potential discrepancies in law and police guidance, attitudes to “identity politics” had no bearing on Henry Nowak’s murder; officers on the scene could not have saved his life even if they had understood the situation they arrived at more quickly, and their confusion owes more to being lied to on a 999 call and having two witnesses offer a false version of events than the race or religion of any of the people involved. The “common sense” narrative on what this tragic case is about is not just distorted – it is factually inaccurate. Politicians and demonstrators alike are responding to how they feel about the case, rather than what actually happened. Aristotle would have thoughts.
Needless to say, next time the common sense brigade try to sell a solution to a political quandary that is so blindingly obvious only those who have no sense at all would ever challenge it, beware. Common sense politics isn’t about finding workable paths forward and making the case to win over their opponents. It’s lazy polemicism for people who don’t want to think too hard – and hope you won’t either.
[Further reading: John Healey’s resignation heralds the end for Keir Starmer]
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