No PMQs and stop showing off: New Year’s resolutions for political junkies
With elections coming left and right, John Oxley suggests how to make it through the year as a political junkie, while maintaining your sanity.
2024 will be a huge year for politics. Around the world there will be more than 70 major elections, kicking off with Bangladesh on Sunday and culminating in Palau in November. Foremost in people’s minds, however, will be the twin treat of a British General Election and a US Presidential contest – the first time the two have coincided since 1992.
With such a momentous year in the offering, it’s tempting to binge. Really though, this should be a year to moderate your political consumption and adopt the good habits that will steer you through the year without going around the bend. For even the most functioning political junkie, it’s time for some New Year’s Resolutions.
The first should be to limit your poll consumption. Opinion polls are a valuable tool but should only be taken in moderation. Weekly bounces matter little in the grand scheme of things and can weave a deceptive narrative. Fluctuations are the result of methodology or a freak outlier respondent. Zoom out a little, and you realise that the narrative can only be informed by macro, not micro-movements. A year ago, poll watchers were starting to talk about the Sunak fightback as Tory numbers ticked up in the spring, now it’s clear that was illusory.
While an occasional look at the polls can be forgiven, you should go cold turkey on Prime Minister’s Questions. The weekly ding-dong between party leaders is noisy and dramatic but has little real bearing on anything outside the chamber. Every week comes with half an hour of misleading stats and overly rehearsed jokes, which no one outside Westminster cares about. Giving it a miss will cost you nothing and make you more normal – and besides, there are plenty of people paid to watch it and tell you what happened. The same holds true for Presidential debates across the pond. No one needs a night of staying up until 4am to watch Biden and Trump take ineffective swipes at each other. You can always check out a highlights reel the next morning.
At the same time, you should kick the habit of historical comparisons. It’s tempting to ask whether the next election will be a 1906, a 1992, or some other long-forgotten result. It’s a self-indulgent way to flex your electoral knowledge, but it’s ultimately futile. 2024 will be its own beast. There are too few elections to pull out real patterns, each a subject of changing demography, policy and party decisions. Start looking to the future when you think about outcomes, not the past. You can still feel a smug sense of superiority as you dismiss others’ comparisons, too.
Finally, and perhaps counterintuitively, the best thing you can do with your political obsessions is to get involved. It’s easy to despair from the sidelines of politics, but the General Election year offers an unparalleled opportunity to turn that into action. It might be a little late to get selected as a candidate, but whether it’s pounding the pavement for your party or campaigning for a particular policy, politics is always short of good ideas and their advocates, so replace doom-scrolling with doing something.
There’s no better year for a political detox than 2024. With elections left and right, it will be a maelstrom of news, opinions and takes. There’s no need to withdraw from the world entirely, but with a few tweaks, you can have a far, far healthier approach to the news. Streamline your consumption, cut out the noise and glide peacefully through a year of endless discourse and takes – and maybe even take some steps towards getting change done, rather than just mainlining Twitter. Still, if like most resolutions you fall off the wagon, I’ll see you in May for some Lithuanian election hot takes.