Have you noticed how politicians always seem to feel that they have to have an answer to everything, a definite perspective and point of view? Yet don’t you just know for sure that they really don’t have the answers, in fact are so far away from it that they should not be commenting at all.

When I was an undergraduate student at university I remember that we all became very good at spotting the lecturers and tutors who would bullshit their way through answering a question. By the time I taught my first university class, during my third year, I had decided that I would never do that. So when I was asked a question to which I did not have a proper answer, my response was ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find out and tell you next class’. And I always did follow through with that. All the good academics I knew behaved like that.

Why don’t politicians take a lesson from good academics? There could be a lot of reasons but some that come to mind are:

• Personality – politicians want to control, and so find it hard to admit that they do not have an answer, and it is the best or only one possible
• Press – the media would have a field day with a politician who said they didn’t know
• Us – we like to think that someone has the answers and we just want to be lead, so the leaders MUST have answers

We should be insisting on honesty and integrity from our politicians, as well as complete openness.