We need to argue better so that we all know what we mean
Political debate is certainly more polarised than for years but too often debate is replaced by blind assertion, conflation of issues or angry denunciation of the status quo
Do you know what “legal tender” means? To those who do, excellent, you can doze off for the rest of the paragraph and you are, either out of professional obligation or personal interest, an Informed Citizen. However, like so much of the heavily textured weave of statute and common law which is our legal system, it is often misunderstood and subject to urban myths or outright misrepresentation. I raise the example of legal tender because I was entangled in a Twitter thread about it this week and the debate took on an extraordinary life and energy of its own, despite the fact that the actual meaning of the phrase is set out clearly and with authority by the Bank of England on the hardly-hidden-from-public-view internet.
I’ll settle any confusion before we move on. A lot of people—as I found out!—think that they have a deft grip on the definition, that it is legally issues forms of money (coins and banknotes) which are used in payment, and that its status as “legal tender” places vendors under some kind of obligation, in extremis, to accept it even if they would rather not. Some have absorbed more subtle falsehoods and misapprehensions, such as that Scottish banknotes are, or are not, or are believed not to be but are, legal tender, while the comedy series The Office fed the beast by introducing the notion that postage stamps are legal tender. This is a subset of a larger debate fuelled by people who become excited and filled with false authority when words like “realm”, “coinage”, “obligation” and, always always always, “technically”.
The correct definition is actually not very difficult although it is complicated. First, it is very much circumstantial. The phrase “legal tender” only has any meaning in connection with the settlement of debts, and it represents a rule that a debtor cannot be sued for non-payment if he or she has given the amount owed to the court in specific forms of currency: in England and Wales, legal tender is notes issued by the Bank of England and coins produced by the Royal Mint; while in Scotland and Northern Ireland, only coins issued by the Royal Mint are legal tender. The definition does not extend to banknotes issued by the three Scottish retail banks, Royal Bank of Scotland, Bank of Scotland and Clydesdale Bank, nor to the three issuers in Northern Ireland, Bank of Ireland, Ulster Bank and Danske Bank (the last inherited its right to issue notes from the Northern Bank which it had acquired in 2004). These banknotes are in fact promissory notes, legal instruments by which the issuer agrees to pay a fixed sum to the payee.
Usually none of this matters, because these are provisions for cases which are rarely encountered. As I say, it’s not especially difficult to understand, though it is complicated and sometimes counter-intuitive (Bank of England notes are only legal tender in England and Wales, for example, whereas Scottish and Northern Irish banknotes are not legal tender anywhere). But one of the worst traits of the British character sometimes bubbles to the surface, especially on social media, which is the instinctive and doggedly determined barrack-room lawyer, people who have read or been told something wrong and thereafter cling to it with increasingly defiant certainty.
All this crossed my field of vision on Monday, when the indefatigable and unsavoury Piers Corbyn, older brother of catastrophic Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, staged a publicity stunt at an Aldi store in Greenwich. It is one of the retail chain’s STOP&GO stores which operate entirely through a bespoke app for smartphones and do not have conventional check-out facilities. Corbyn, a physics graduate who was a weather forecaster for a time, believes that the diminishing use of cash, which accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, is part of a worldwide conspiracy to control populations and monitor people’s activities more closely. Corbyn is a full-spectrum crank who cleaves to a number of conspiracy theories, and has ended up, as conspiracy theorists so often seem to, uncomfortably close to really unpleasant anti-Semites, apart from anything else.
In his ponderous, self-satisfied way, Corbyn went through with the stunt: he took a punnet of strawberries worth £1.90 to the inquiries desk (remember the store has no tills), produced the appropriate sum on coins and, announcing “I’m going to buy some strawberries, and I'm offering exactly the right amount of money”, asked that they be accepted as payment. Inevitably and understandably, the staff at Aldi refused, as it is a cash-free store. Corbyn tried to insist, encouraged staff to call the police, and insisted he had “paid by legal tender”. He had misunderstood the term and imagined some obligation on the store or right on his part; however, the facts of the law are that a vendor can accept or refuse any kind of payment they like, from refusing cash (“legal tender” in Corbyn’s fevered mind) to accepting tokens or any other item if that is what they wish to do.
That should have been the end of the matter. An elderly eccentric with crankish, prickly and inaccurate views had misunderstood the law and tried to force a showdown which, he presumably thought, would highlight the “real” rights of citizens and the murky nature of the law. He was proven wrong. A very minor matter, hardly worth opening newspaper for. And, as I browsed Twitter that morning, I saw great cries of (mistaken) indignation in support of Corbyn’s position.
I confess I sometimes seek to correct and inform when in truth I would be better passing by, in virtual terms. In accuracies bother me, however, and it can often be that these breed and multiply. But a pro-Corbyn thread had been started on Twitter by a Welsh journalist Stan Voice of Wales which stated that Corbyn had been legally in the right. I commented briefly to point out that there was no obligation on stores to accept cash, but this only provoked people; one (I presume) Irish user, Mícheál Ó Gallchobhair, weighed in to say that “The store refused to accept legal tender that’s their problem not his”. I explained that that was not the meaning of “legal tender”. But the misapprehension remained and was repeated, even by those who had been told that “legal tender” did not mean what they thought. The argument continued well into the next day.
I explain all of this because it is a perfect example of the fact that people cannot or will nor debate. They will fix themselves to a belief, true to false, hold on for dear life and engage only to shout at those who disagree with them. I had provided evidence from the Bank of England that vendors were not obliged to accept any kind of payment, let alone some kooky notion of “legal tender”, but people kept the argument on the boil. One user challenged me, demanding (with incredulity) “Show me the sentence in law book”. I explained I could hardly show him an absence of a low or duty. Someone else said that Corbyn had paid in exact change “with a legal form of currency”.
No-one likes being wrong. But it was still striking how few, if any, Twitter users admitted they’d been under a misapprehension which meant their interpretation of the situation was incorrect; some elided their original argument into an argument that vendors should be obliged to accept cash; while an alarming number simply ignored the clear evidence that they had got the meaning of “legal tender” wrong, and continued to argue as if this were some abstruse principle or negotiable view, rather than the clear law of the land. Inconvenient facts could, by inference, be ignored or treated as if they were ambiguous and subject to debate.
I stayed on the battlefield too long but eventually my frustration overcame my instinctive urge to correct and I abandoned it. In itself, the episode is not especially important: Corbyn is on the fringe’s fringe and widely recognised as a crank, and I doubt whether Aldi UK’s senior leadership were gazing out of their windows in Atherstone in Warwickshire, cursing Corbyn’s public profile or telling arguments. But it highlighted for me the messy, indistinct, emotionally charged and fact-indifferent way in which we conduct too many of our arguments and debates.
Last month I wrote an essay about Sir Keir Starmer’s policy to increase the focus on oracy in teaching: the ability to express yourself and your ideas clearly, fluently and persuasively in speech. I share Starmer’s view that this is an ability which is important across a wider spread of skills, and that it helps and is helped by your mental processes in a virtuous circle. I’m not sure whether it is more important to say that fluency and persuasiveness are enormously empowering, or that their absence is a kind of disenfranchisement; but politics is not—should never be—something which is above people, out of their reach and impervious to their influence. Of course the finer details of policy-making and implementation in particular may be complex and dependent on technical knowledge, but, save in a deathless technocracy where the arguments are nothing more than the most efficient management of an irredeemable machine, the heart of politics is the expression and exchange of ideas.
It’s almost not worth saying any more that our political scene is polarised like never before. (Actually, let me qualify that: the polarisation is severe, but we have been bitterly divided before. I grew up in the 1980s, hardly a time of consensus and harmony; and there were savage and highly personalised divisions over Northern Ireland, immigration and race relations, nationalisation, appeasement, the abdication of Edward VIII, Indian self-governance, relations with the Soviet Union, the General Strike, female suffrage, home rule for Ireland, the powers of the House of Lords, free trade vs protectionism and the conduct of the war in South Africa, merely to look back to 1900.
The circumstances are different now, it is true. We live in an information age which can consume as much content as we are able to produce and still open its maw hungrily for more. Social media has updated the old adage: platforms are like arseholes, everybody has one. And the radical democratisation of information has a dark side. In our determination to strip away unearned privilege we forget that privilege can be earned too, and that, however against the zeitgeist it may be, not all opinions are equal. To be flippant but parabolical for a moment, I would not expect Gabby Logan to pay much attention to my views on the Premier League (if I could even generate any), but, conversely, I don’t think it is unreasonable to expect that if the conversation turned, as no conversation in the real world ever does, to reform of the House of Lords, then Ms Logan might concede that I had a better claim to the pundit’s seat.
While conceding that there is a nasty taste in the mouth about the tenor of political discourse, I should say—and I’m aware that not everyone agrees with this—that I have no issue with a political culture is adversarial. Earnest institutional reformers wring their hands endlessly at the shape of our chambers of parliament, and look longingly at European-style hemicycles which, in the prevailing theology, encourage co-operation, compromise, consensus. Remember that our politicians face each other, two blocs separated by a physical gap, because when the chamber was rebuilt after the great fire of 1834 it mimicked the layout of the Royal Chapel of St Stephen in the old palace where the Commons had met since 1547, pews facing inward to the body of the church. This arrangement was renewed after the Commons chamber was destroyed by bombing in 1941, Churchill being particularly insistent that there should be no new layout.
I have no objection to adversarial politics. I reject furiously the common notion that cosy consensus will smooth off any rough edges and allow men and women of good faith and good sense to find a solution to any problem. That is the centrist fallacy, the mistaken belief that ideology is affected and unnecessarily divisive, distracting from the search for the one and only rational answer. It’s hard to explain how profound a misunderstanding of public policy I think that is. The 1980s may have had bitter and unhappy clashes at times, but there was little doubt that a battle was being waged between two very different ideologies, two views of the world and two incompatible approaches to the ordering of society.
It would not have been possible to have sat down with Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot in 1983, for example, and by slow and methodical discussion—always with that cherished goodwill and reasonableness—arrive at a single prescription for Britain’s future to which both would agree. Without thinking I could point to membership of the EEC, possession of nuclear weapons, nationalisation vs privatisation, the consequences of government borrowing and the role and powers of trades unions, five issues on which the two, and their parties, could never have agreed. It had to be fought out, and was fought out vigorously as it should have been. These were, and are, fundamental questions.
We are polarised, then, the bitterness of which is to be regretted, but we live in a society in which we choose between competing ideologies, an adversarial pursuit with which I am, to steal from Peter Mandelson, intensely relaxed. But if we accept those two contextual facts, then inevitably our politics will be dominated by arguments and argumentation, debate and analysis, and if we are to survive that then we have to know how to do it. This is where I am disheartened.
We all approach disagreement and debate differently. A theory still persists that our brains operate according to the traits controlled by each hemisphere: the left hemisphere is logical, methodical, analytical, factual, verbal, linear and sequential; by contrast, the right hemisphere allows us to access qualities like creativity, imagination, artistic sensibility, intuition and emotion. Each of us, in this supposition, will tend towards one or other side, and they are almost wholly separate, connected only by the corpus callosum, a flat bundle of commissural fibres. It follows, therefore, that people will argue differently, some appealing to emotion and capable of unpredictable, intuitive and potently sizeable leaps, while others will approach a problem with marmorial-cool logic, slow, grinding and remorseless argumentation and the heaping up of facts until a conclusion can no longer be ignored. This cleaves appealingly to great political rivalries, not always across the party divide: Blair and Brown, Thatcher and Kinnock, Wilson and Heath, Macmillan and Gaitskell, Churchill and Attlee.
It is, however, wholly mythical. The two hemispheres collaborate closely, communicating through the corpus callosum, and there are tasks which the brain deconstructs into very fine detail, each being achieved by a different part of the brain but the organ as a whole pulling together the outcomes from both to reach a solution or conclusion which is essentially a co-operative outcome. In something as fundamental as speech, the left hemisphere will pick out the sounds to form words and then recognising the syntax of the phrase, but the right hemisphere will analyse the emotional features of language, identifying the importance of intonation and stress. These data, from each side of the brain, will combine to produce a thought or solution.
If we cannot settle into easy models of logical vs emotional, and if we have to take some responsibility for our manner of argumentation, it also has to be recognised that arguing, debating, requires certain skills which are perfectly possible to learn and develop. You can learn how to analyse information, marshal it and shape it into a proposition, and you can then come to understand how to place it against another proposition, comparing and assessing the two. Further, like anything else, these facilities will become better and quicker through repetition. Without going the full Malcolm Gladwell, you need to practice, both to become familiar with the talents you require but also to develop experience of anticipating what your opponents might say.
People do not always act like this, and the longer I live, the more I experience the world, the more I realise that people are impatient and sometimes averse to logic. We never like to admit that we are wrong, so we often invest too much of ourselves in defending an answer which, it may transpire, is wrong or inadequate. We will not give up until we are forced to face the conclusion that not only have we erred but that we have grabbed out misconception to us with excessive force. It is, in a way, an intellectual analogue of the sunk-cost fallacy about which any engineer or project manager will happily tell you. To admit error and have to take several steps backwards feels humiliating and wasteful. But if we cannot do it, we can never truly enter into the arena of public debate.
Another common failing which I’ve noticed is being unable, perhaps because of the degree of emotional attachment to being right, to distinguish between the world as it is and the warm embrace of the world as we want it to be. In my contretemps on Monday, many participants (combatants?) were so sure of the idea of “legal tender'“ and what it meant, that they first repeated their misconception as if asserting these unimpeachable facts would draw an argument to a victorious close When that redoubt was breached, some fell back on crying that it was all very well for me but even if I been technically correct about the issue of “legal tender”, there should be a duty to preserve ancient liberties and conform to a reimagined reality.
To look back at the Twitter argument (sorry, “X”, not “Twitter”), one participant was very much embracing a denialist line.
Cash is legal tender in this country, he paid, he committed no crime. Absolute muppets running the shop calling the Police wasting their time.
As I had explained, this was factually inaccurate, and therefore without weight. Another person tried angrily to bridge the gap between proven fact and an alternative idealised world.
Idiot if true. But legal tender is legal tender! And he has paid for them. Just not how they would like us to. So F them! There should be a movement all over the country doing this. Because I do not think fully understand what they are trying to do to us.. You are being primed.
Again, “idiot” or not, it was true. What should be true would be a completely different argument with new boundaries and considerations. One more person just ignored the difficulty of the world not being as they wished and went straight for reimagination.
More people need to start using cash to pay for things. Or politicians, shops etc will soon be telling us where, when and how much we can spend when only card payments available. Banks, shops make more money if cards are used. Cash also helps you keep on top of your finances.
Perhaps I find this more frustrating than I should. But if you are having to reiterate again and again a simple factual mistake on which a huge superstructure of argumentation has been built, and you are faced with some who are still unwilling to accept reality but another group which is simply dodging that debate and building its own castles in the air, it becomes a game of intellectual Whac-A-Mole which simply leaves you grinding your teeth.
I’m absolutely not holding myself up as a paragon here. But I will assert that I can be logical and methodical, relatively successful in carving up arguments into distinct parts and trying to set out a chain of questions and answers which could with a following wind resolve some disagreements and help everyone involved to understand more clearly where we all are.
Far too often we are willing to forgo the difficult business of arguing and instead seek the comfort of people who feel the same way we do, only having the energy to shout our entrenched view across the divide at our opponents. Sometimes it can feel hugely pleasurable, and gives a real sense of satisfaction. But it’s not enough. Unless we’re willing to arrange ourselves on the basis of who shouts the loudest, we’re going to need to talk.
Not everything is soluble, as I said before. Sometimes, maybe often, we can smooth and refine and polish our belief and your opponent can do the same, but the road will come to an end, at which point you accept the irreconcilable gap. In politics, it’s at this point that we seek the views of the electorate. But we have a huge obligation to each other not to agree but at least to make sure everyone is clear where we disagree. So let’s all try to do better, be more patient and more methodical, understand each other, not necessarily as a step towards reconciliation but as a way to illuminate the parameters of the debate. There are no shortcuts. Nor, however, do I think there are any alternatives. We have got to get this right.