Politicians make mistakes. This is inevitable because society is complex and knowledge is limited. But there are different types of error. Being bad at your job is one type, but another is simply not understanding what your job actually is. By some definitions of political activity, leading politicians have for some time been guilty of the latter.

Consider two of these definitions. Here's Michael Oakeshott (pdf):

Governing is a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood not as plans for imposing substantive activities but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration.

And here's Bernard Crick:

Politics are the public actions of free men...Politics, then, can be simply defined as the activity by which differing interests within a given unit of rule are conciliated...A political system is that type of government where politics proves successful in ensuring reasonable stability and order.

By these definitions, some of MPs' recent activities are not politics. Sir Keir Starmer's call for Kneecap not to perform at Glastonbury is not politics by Oakeshott's definition, because it is not the provision of a general rule. Yes, there is (and should be) a general rule against incitement to violence, but whether Kneecap have broken this is a matter for the courts, not for MPs. When asked the question, Starmer should have replied: "it's none of my business; I'm not the taste police."

Nor is it proper politics for MPs to say who should use which toilets at work. Having a piss is not a "public action". In a free society it is not for MPs to decide on who uses toilets but for the managers of those sites (assuming they have nothing better to do). And if staff or customers don't like their decisions they should negotiate with those bosses or go elsewhere. MPs should butt out.

I'd say the same about their calls to ban mobile phones in schools. Classrooms are not truly public spaces - try going into one without proper authority. Decisions on what should happen in them should be left to teachers. In thinking otherwise, MPs go beyond the boundaries of politics - and, I'd add, their own competence.

Stepping beyond their remit, however, is only part of MPs not understanding their job. There's a worse part - that they are not doing some things that, by many conventional definitions, should be political activity.

In domestic policy I'd put these loosely into three categories.

One is the solution (well, more like amelioration) of collective action problems - the problem of what happens when an individual's pursuit of their self-interest conflicts with others' interests. Addressing these problems allows individuals "to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration."

The Tory/LibDem government of 2010-15 was egregiously bad at doing this. For example, Cameron's encouraging people to buy petrol before a tanker drivers' strike failed to see that if everyone did this then there would indeed be fuel shortages. And "encouraging" the unemployed and disabled into work failed to see that if everyone tried to do so at a time of a slack labour market the result would merely be falling wages and frustration. Worst of all, in pursuing austerity they failed to see the paradox of thrift - that if enough people try to increase their savings, the upshot is merely lower aggregate incomes and hence less ability to save.

And this is not to mention the abject failure of the provision of some collective services, such as dentistry or insurance for social care.

In this context, there's one area where the current government is also at fault. The public sphere is blighted by a tragedy of the commons: the domination of money and the decline in norms against lying mean that the marketplace of ideas is broken - the fact that Dan Hannan is a legislator for life despite issuing perhaps the most moronic prediction in political history is just one datapoint of evidence for this - and rational debate and policy-making thus much harder than it should be.

Good politicians should be asking how they could repair this by limiting the power of the wealthy to buy politicians, by democratizing the media, or by promoting deliberative democracy (pdf). Which they are clearly failing to do.

A second category of where politicians aren't doing their job lies in the recognition and management of tradeoffs. MPs are not telling voters that tougher controls on immigration would mean worse public services or higher taxes. Nor are they saying that increased military spending means less spending elsewhere, on either private consumption or public services. Nor that faster economic growth comes at a price: it requires both attacks on vested interests (nimbys, financiers, incumbent companies, Brexiteers and so on) and the insecurity associated with creative destruction.

And thirdly, the role of politicians should be to mobilize some interests and demands whilst demobilizing others. Brexiteers were great at this, moving a fringe issue to the centre of politics: before 2015 less than 10% of voters thought relations with the EU were one of the most important issues. So successful were they that they even created new identities: few of us thought of ourselves as Leavers or Remainers before 2016. Most politicians however - and especially this government - don't even try to repeat this. Instead, they take public opinion as a given, oblivious to questions of how it is formed or changed, and don't even try to change the agenda.

Politicians, then, are not doing what seems to be their proper job in two senses; they're doing things that aren't politics in expressing opinions that are irrelevant; and they are neglecting the proper political tasks of ameliorating collective action problems, managing trade-offs and shaping public opinion.

Why is this?

One possibility lies in the fact that societies often have exemplars, ideals of what a person should be: the heroic warrior, the devout Christian, the romantic, or the detached rationalist, and so on. One of today's exemplars is the newspaper columnist, Loose Women presenter or the terminally online, who inflict upon us their ill-informed opinions about everything, and MPs feel the need to conform to this exemplar. What this fails to see is that the right response to very many questions is either "none of my business" or "I don't know". There should be a distinction between an MP and a general-purpose rentagob.

There is, however, another possible reason why MPs neglect the proper job of politicians. It's quite simply that such neglect works well for those in power. Ignoring how the public realm has been debased by the tragedy of the commons enables a few billionaires to dominate the discourse, especially given most politicians' lack of interest in changing public opinion or in setting the agenda. Similarly, ignoring tradeoffs avoids an awkward possibility - that some of the costs of improving economic growth or public services might have to fall upon capitalists. POSIWID.

Perhaps, therefore, those high-minded definitions of politics are wrong. Bourgeois politics is not about high-falutin ideals but simply about preserving capitalist power. On this definition, MPs are doing their jobs well.