‘Kayfabe’ is a term that crops up increasingly often in stuff I read. It’s carnival slang for a confidence trick played on the public. Like those air rifles that have a bent barrel, so you can never hit the ducks, or the trick with three upturned cups and a hidden ball.
When I was a kid, I used to see pro wrestling matches on ITV, which used to be shown in a segment of ‘World of Sport’ on Saturday afternoons. Those of a certain age will have fond memories of Dickie Davies as the genial studio anchor.
Anyway, the bouts featured larger than life characters such as Jackie Pallo and Mick McManus. As a kid, I took it at face value, but I don’t think I was very old before it dawned on me that it actually was nothing to do with sport and was just another type of entertainment. I’m not sure that I reasoned this way at the time, but there was no coverage of betting, as there was of horse racing, which was another staple of the show.
I understand that the successor is WWE, but that’s not important. What’s important is that nobody really cares that it’s make believe. Eric Weinstein explains (here) how and why proper competitive wrestling evolved from a sport into show business.
It’s commonly said that “politics is show business for ugly people.” Clearly, it’s not the only branch of show business that admits those touched with the ugly stick:
(from the Hindustan Times). But more importantly, the evolution of wrestling has parallels, I think, with the evolution of politics. As politicians end up a living out of the business of representing voters, the danger of having a serious ideological battle ratchets up. Nobody wants to join a party that will be forever out of power. The end result is that interparty warfare becomes the narcissism of small differences. The Labour Party promises to abide by spending limits dreamt up by the Conservatives, and both parties promise never to reverse Brexit, even when most voters wish they would. And, of course, no matter how violently an opposition party opposed an Act passed by a previous government, they never repeal it once they get into power. Labour in 1997 had plenty of opportunity to reverse “Right to Buy”, which they had opposed, but never did so.
A friend of mine related a story about a very expensive civil court case in which he had been the losing party. His barrister had argued his case, the opposing barrister the other case. What shocked him was that in the evening after the judge had given his verdict, the two barristers were seen having a fine old time while dining together at a very expensive eatery. OK, we don’t expect lawyers to have ideological differences.
The story about the lawyers came to mind when I listened to the first episode of “Political Currency” in which George Osborne and Ed Balls discuss politics, in an attempt to emulate the success of “The Rest is Politics” with two former political opponents, Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell. I have given up listening to the latter, but Osborne and Balls were surprisingly good at discussing the mechanics of politics. What did shock me, though, was the complete absence of any ideological divide.
Maybe I am too old to understand the modern world, but I’m sure that when Tony Benn and Margaret Thatcher were in their pomp, they were open about the fact that they were members of parties that represented class interests. Powell might have denied this, but surely Benn would have been proud to say that his job was to represent the working class in parliament (as would Corbyn). Thatcher might have avoided saying it out loud, but the sentiment was badly concealed.
Anyway, now we have Kayfabe politics, where Starmer and Sunak pretend to represent a genuine choice, but in reality just … don’t. I think this is why there is quite so much focus on ‘competence’ now and the endless lip service to the idea that the Chancellor somehow ‘steers’ the UK economy, rather than simply sets a budget and adjusts fiscal policy modestly to achieve some macro targets. It used to be just Mao Tsetung who thought of himself as ‘The Great Helmsman’.
It sounds as though I have utter contempt for individual politicians. This is a misunderstanding. I believe that politicians, like all other economic actors, respond to incentives and have a duty to protect their own family first. No individual has the power to change the system, and the coordination problem to go back to 1945 is simply too great. We are not as far down this line as the USA, but we are heading in the same direction, and it seems inevitable that future general elections will offer less and less real ideological choice, which is sad for nostalgic old farts like me, but also sad because the economy will become increasingly hidebound and static as the shape of the economy becomes more shaped by lobbying power and less by creative destruction. Exhibit A: a £500mn subsidy to Tata to ‘save’ a few thousand jobs.