Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and...oh, that other thing.

People often* to say to me; "David", they say. "David. Why don't you go into politics? You're engaged and motivated. You're tall, handsome, witty, clever, erudite, an economic genius, possessed of a firm and trustworthy handshake, skilled with words, economical with the truth, manipulative and you've got an eye for the ladies. Surely you'd be a shoo-in for the rough and tumble world of Westminster."
I tend to respond to this sort of comment with well-practised and finely honed modest self-deprecation - perhaps kissing a baby or two - whilst secretly beating down my ego in case it slips its shackles and tramples Tokyo.
The truth of the matter is, I have no interest in entering politics because ultimately I've got no interest in personal political power, and the people who do want it tend to give me the inner shivers. I'm sure you know the sort of person I mean. They claim to be interested in helping people and being a facilitator. They want to use their skills and abilities for the good of others and the best place for them to do that is in a position of power, providing leadership. Not for them you understand, but for the people who they'll be helping. Anyone who says this sort of thing usually makes me think about constructing a barricade and tooling myself up, because sure as eggs is eggs anyone who claims they can make a difference and selflessly help others like that is going to take a profound dislike to people like me saying I don't want their help and would be obliged if they'd just leave me the hell alone as soon as they've got their grubby mitts on the legislative capability to force me to accept their facilitation and help whether I want or need it or not.
In case you're wondering, I am looking sternly at raggedhalo here.

There's another reason for not getting overly involved in the political process in this country at the moment, and that's because the big political arguments of the last half century appear to have been had and won decades ago. The recent opinion poll volatility has little to do with the 'Brown Bounce' (which I originally thought was a particularly outrageous sexual deviancy) or 'Cameron Confidence'. It's because there's damn little to choose between the political stances of the major parties so the electorate are ricocheting between them like a ball between two of those mushroom things at the top of a pinball table, and the reason for that is because the big left/right ideological arguments were over and done in the mainstream ages back.
As the old saying above goes - 'healthy, wealthy and wise', and two of those three things are done and dusted. The socialised healthcare of the Bevanian revolution isn't even a question any more, although perhaps it should be. No politician in their right mind is going to take against the NHS, as it's the sacred cow of British politics. I remember neilhist many years ago telling me about a cost-benefit analysis run on the NHS which indicated that on average, the NHS extends the average lifespan of people in this country by about 3 years - but it was estimated that if the NHS was shut down and the same money was spent on public health projects such as improved diet, and etc then average lifespans could be extended by up to ten years. I wonder what those figures would be if such a study were run now? However, Bevan won his argument fair and square.
Likewise the Thatcherite market reforms have made society as a whole a very great deal wealthier, and no politician who spends less then half their time foaming and chewing the carpet is seriously proposing doing any more than tinkering with the edges of those reforms.
So we've got healthy and wealthy, and nobody with any credibility wants to change that.

The big problem is 'wise'. Policial ideologies are most often based upon economic systems, the dispersal of resources and resource distribution and for all the lip service paid to other considerations by both left and right individual psycholgoical needs play in a very distant second place to the budget. However, people, now they're largely physically healthy and have all the Playstations they can eat, seem to be expecting the political process to make them individually happy as well - which is something it simply cannot do.
Or can it?
In Ye Goode Olde Dayes, psychological health was the purview of the church, and in the main it did a bang-up job. Carl Gustav Jung once observed that in all his years of providing psychotherapy to people, he never once saw anyone with psychological problems come to a full recovery without in the process developing some form of religious faith, of whatever denomination. In an increasingly secular society this is less of an option than it once was. It all depends on how we define wisdom - the OED defines wisdom as "possessing or showing the ability to make good judgments, based on a deep understanding and experience of life"; i.e. learning from experience - and that's something that can only come from experience. Happiness is perhaps more quantifiable so we'll look at that instead. Can the political process make people happier? Well, maybe...
People sometimes point at Sweden as a great example - Sweden, despite its high incidence of depression, often tops out polls of quality of life. This is interesting because individual purchasing power is significantly lower there than in many countries and access to material goods is comparitively limited when compared to fun-to-live-in countries like, say, Singapore, Equatorial Guinuea, Qatar and Kuwait which all rank higher in terms of invidual spending power. However, what lifts the Swedes to the top of the list is reported happiness - the population seem chirpier than in most other places and are happy to say so.
This would, on the face of it to seem to be a glowing recommendation to the Swedish political model - and in a way it is, just not quite in the way you might expect. The Lancet last year published a very interesting report on quiality of life reports, and the conclusion of it was that the nations like Sweden and Ireland at the top of the list have significantly lower expectations of life than, say, the British and Americans and as a result are happier with far less. We British have quite high expectations of life and aspirations thereof and so when those expectations aren't met we're less happy with more. The overall conclusion to this is pretty clear: to make people happier, lower their expectations - a conclusion which is backed up by this report.

So there you have it. You can make people happy with politics by lowering people's expectations of what they can expect from life.



^{Well, more than once.}