A Free Left Blog

To ‘depoliticise’ something means to take the politics out of it. It is a strange and paradoxical term when you think about it, because to take politics out of something is a political act, and to be non-political is political. After all, power doesn’t disappear when a group of people decide they don’t want it or remove it from others through ‘depoliticising’. It goes elsewhere. In practice, depoliticisation means taking a sort of politics out of something, a type of politics – probably a kind that advocates of the process don’t much like – democratic politics for example. The term has received something of an airing recently in British public debate, and one guess for by whom ... ... That’s right (or wrong): the ‘Big Six’ energy companies. Step forward Mr Tony Cocker, chief executive of Eon UK : “ It would be really helpful to depoliticise this debate [on energy] ,” Mr Cocker told MPs on 29 th October. You bet it would ... all those pesky politicians, c...

This article was originally published on Shifting Grounds on 19th February 2013. Since then I have been interested to see in Sir George Cox's review of short-termism in business, commissioned by the Labour Party, the proposal that infrastructure be removed from democratic political control (see page 11). That is precisely the sort of thing I mean by "A Stealthy Form of Authoritarianism":  perhaps not so stealthy though... “I think we really are the victims of a discursive shift, since the late 1970′s, toward economics”, the late historian Tony Judt said in a recent book. “Intellectuals don’t ask if something is right or wrong, but whether a policy is efficient or inefficient. They don’t ask if a measure is good or bad, but whether or not it improves productivity…Until you’ve generated resources, goes the refrain, there’s no point in having a conversation about distributing them. This, it seems to me, comes close to a sort of soft blackmail.” Judt talked ...