Where has the passion for party politics gone?
THERE was a time when Gordon Brown's present electoral discomfort would have been a great source of joy to me; a time when the prospect of a return of a Conservative government would have had me chilling the champagne and dusting down the photograph of Margaret Thatcher which hangs in my study.
Yet, as I look at that photograph while I'm writing this piece, the only emotion I feel is that of a profound regret, accompanied by a longing for the days when there was something in party politics to arouse genuine passion.
The problem, of course, is that the blessed Margaret did too good a job. She killed off socialism and made it impossible for the Labour Party (as it used to be in the 1970s and '80s) to get elected again. Blair and New Labour were the most tangible aspects of her legacy.
Blair, in turn, killed off Toryism, forcing Thatcher's successors to embrace the ideological and intellectual idiocies of what became known as compassionate Conservatism. And now David Cameron – who was never a Tory or a Conservative in the first place – has decided to kill off Thatcherism.
When I downloaded the Conservative and Labour manifestoes for last week's electoral combat I found it extraordinarily difficult to tell them apart. Indeed, it was like one of those fiendishly difficult "spot the difference" contests, in which the differences turn out to be so subtle as to make no real difference whatsoever. Yes, there may be three buttons on someone's cuff rather than four, but so what?
So, instead of mainstream national parties with clearly defined policies and an agenda of their own for governing the United Kingdom, we have ConLab, an almost formal merger which ensures that the same timid and uninspiring policies are pursued irrespective of whether the Prime Minister pretends to be Conservative or Labour. Radicalism and revolutionary approaches have been abandoned.
There is no room for new thinking or fundamental reappraisal. Instead, the parties tinker around the edges and pretend to be doing something different and something better – but never to the extent of removing and replacing those things which once troubled them from the opposition benches.
The knock-on consequence of substituting individual party policies with mirror image policies has involved tax-squandering on a monumental scale, the preservation and shoring up of rotten structures and the nurturing of a vast and self-serving bureaucracy.
There isn't, it seems, a problem which can't be tackled by throwing billions at it. Our education, health and welfare systems are cash-consuming ogres in which underlying realities are ignored by a process of cover-up, meaningless consultation, new target setting, policy "initiatives" and disingenuous propaganda.
Across the United Kingdom as a whole 40 per cent of pupils – after a decade at least of compulsory education and 10,000 hours in the classroom – are failing to attain the absolute minimum qualifications they will need to have any reasonable chances in life. Hundreds of thousands of us (and the figures increase every year) are forced to "go private" in order to get the health provision we need. Millions have had pension provision wiped away. Our so-called welfare system channels huge sums of money to the lazy, dishonest and irresponsible rather than to those who genuinely need it. And, at the very core of ConLab, is an army of propagandists whose only function is to convince the general public (a euphemism for the electorate) that all is well.
All isn't well, though: which may explain why turnout at elections continues to plunge. Only 35 per cent voted last Thursday, even though it was supposed to be an opportunity to let Gordon Brown know that he wasn't doing a good job. David Cameron blows his own one-note trumpet, blissfully oblivious to the fact that his "victory" of 44 per cent of the vote from a 35 per cent turnout means that about 80 per cent of the entire electorate couldn't summon up the energy or enthusiasm to endorse him. Membership of political parties has also collapsed, forcing ConLab to get their funding from the public purse, office costs (substantial proportions of which find their way into party coffers) and loans for either honours or "understandings".
Politics doesn't sell newspapers. The viewing and listening figures for hard-nosed political programmes are poor and falling. Apart from focus groups – whose only function is to road test policies for ConLab and make sure they are wet enough to appeal to the widest audience – political parties have very little face-to-face contact with the electorate. In other words, the distance between the electorate and the elected is widening all the time.
That said, the United Kingdom remains over-governed; resulting in the paradox of fewer voters being catered for by increasing numbers of representatives – many of whom are semi-anonymous nonentities.
Here's a challenge for you; write down the names of your MP, MEPs, MLAs and local councillors. Where I live in south Belfast I have a total of 16 elected representatives I could contact for help, but off the top of my head I could name only nine of them. And, to be brutally honest, even nine are far too many.
The ConLab dilemma (and in one sense it is reflected in the mandatory nature of government in Northern Ireland) has resulted in poor government accompanied by voter switch-off. I'm not sure that there is an easy answer available.
Some academics have suggested more directly elected mayors, but I suspect that that would merely encourage personality politics of the Boris vs Ken variety. Others have advocated the use of referenda to decide the "big" issues; but again, I can't imagine that ConLab would allow us to vote on EU membership, ID cards, immigration policy or reducing the numbers of elected representatives.
But there has to be something better than we have now, which is essentially policy cloning, mediocre representation, cash cows, cynicism and the anything-to-get-my-name-mentioned-in-the-media approach to politics. I like politicians and parties to have policies by which I can identify them. I like politicians who are not afraid to challenge orthodox thinking and uproot the redundant structures and methods. I do, and genuinely so, despair at what passes for politicians these days and I'm not surprised that my despair is reflected in the voting figures. The irony, of course, is that ConLab and their pale imitations in the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland institutions thrive on this despair and non-voting. It suits their purposes very nicely, thank you. Time for a revolution, perhaps!
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Wednesday 30 May 2012
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