British society is bursting with creativity. Except at Westminster
Author: Henry Porter, the Observer |
Rory Stewart’s speech in bold below
Politicians bemoan voter apathy, but many of us feel that the political process is both rotten and unrepresentative.
Political parties are in staggering decline. Politicians are almost universally reviled and government invariably mistrusted. Fewer and fewer of us show any great enthusiasm for voting or any interest in learning about and making distinctions on policy. The most common view of voters is that the major parties are all the same and that they do not represent our aspirations or bother to find out how we live our lives. So, what’s the bleeding point in getting involved or voting? Russell Brand has become the leading thinker of a mass ideological sulk.
What is both disturbing and fascinating about the estrangement between politicians and the British people is that it is occurring at a time when society is bursting with energy and creativity. Talk to anyone who puts on an event, as I have in the last month, and they will tell of you of the amazing commitment of the people who organise it and those who come to take part. Knowledge and expertise are everywhere to be had; engagement and intelligent argument are commonplace. Outside Westminster, in thousands of meetings, pressure groups, debating forums, action committees, festival discussions, a lively free society goes about its business, utterly separated from the world of formal politics.
In a good speech at the thinktank Localis in London last week, the Conservative MP Rory Stewart made the point that Britain ticked all the boxes for a vigorous democracy. “Never have we been so educated, never been so healthy, never had so many people with so much talent.” Yet the talent for invention and co-operation has never been less expressed in politics, he said. People are either concerned with global issues, working for Amnesty International or Save the Children, for example, or they retreat into their private lives behind their front door. The space where normal politics took place, the space of the citizen, had been evacuated.
You might imagine that this culture of informal, ad hoc engagement could live comfortably alongside formal politics, but it seems that the one activity entails a conscious spurning of the other. People will do anything not to be involved with the political parties, locally or nationally, and they care less and less about their vote. The feeling is marked among women.
According to the Hansard Society audit of political engagement, less than 40% of women say they will vote if an election was called tomorrow, down from 45% last year and a peak of 59% two years ago. Men are less certain to vote than they were last year (51% to 44%) and are less sure about voting than at any point in the last decade.
If you wanted further proof of the decoupling of politics and the electorate, look no further than figures published by the Electoral Reform Society, which last week launched a timely consultation into what tomorrow’s political parties should look like. Since 1997, Tory party membership has gone from 400,000 to 134,000, Labour party membership from 405,000 to 193,000 and the Liberal Democrats have gone from 87,000 members to 49,000.
Maybe we are getting our kicks elsewhere in this vigorous quasi-politics of discussion and activism and also on Twitter and other forums. Why write to your MP when you can get something off your chest in a post or tweet? Why bother to oppose coherently when you can sit back and enjoy the biting (and now tediously predictable) satire about politics from the panellists on any of a dozen samey comedy shows? Why listen to thoughtful MPs when you can watch the antics of Boris or Nigel?
The politicians deserve all this contempt, right? The broken promises, the meaningless pantomimes, like last week’s PMQs, and the same dreary, middle-aged faces, relieved only by one Tory buffoon in the chamber wearing a false moustache: they’ve got it coming to them, surely.
I am not so certain. Writing for Conservative Home, Andrew Gimson suggested that a quarter of the new Tory women MPs could stand down at the next election. One reason was that “women MPs get a particular kind of unpleasantness directed at them via social media by bullying men who indulge with vicious relish in every kind of obscenity”. All MPs, but particularly women, feel that power is in the hands of a few pals and they cannot make a meaningful contribution to policy. To be sidelined at the same time as being accused of being a corrupt, power-mad parasite must be hard to bear.
But it is clear that the system is stressed, that national politics is not working, even by its own lights, and that also it does nothing to draw upon or represent the dazzling energy of our society. Last week, the Speaker announced an inquiry into how Parliament can respond to the digital age, which is probably a good idea, although it does not address why the main parties have become so dreadfully unappealing. This is a complicated issue, partly because the left-right divide is no longer the only way of looking at politics. To explain why I, like so many, will find it hard to vote at the next election, I drew myself a diagram of three blocks, representing the three main parties, and placed them either side of a central axis – Labour on the left, Lib Dems near the middle and Tories on the right. But it tells you little.
To get a fuller picture of the parties as they really are, you need to draw a horizontal axis across the three blocks. This is the authoritarian-libertarian divide and you can place MPs of different parties above and below it. Those above the line espouse liberal and democratic values, those below tend toward authoritarian policies. Suddenly you see why no single party can be trusted to look after the liberties and democratic health of the nation. For me, it is nearly impossible to choose.
Where does all this go? No change and greater disenchantment or something new? The key word in Rory Stewart’s speech was “citizen”. I happen to disagree with his statement that “the citizens are the state and the state is the citizens”, because clearly a permanent state exists in Britain today that is quite beyond the reach of parliament or the influence of public opinion – certain parts of the civil service and the intelligence agencies, for example. In the absence of real and effective representation, that state has become entrenched and far too powerful.
But his phrase is a worthy ideal for, if many more of us were to occupy the space of the citizen and to grasp that politics is not some utility that is simply failing its customers but is actually our responsibility, we would effect a radical change on the parties and the quality of representation in parliament. And maybe we could do something about the sexism, too.