Politics in a market society -May 24, 2006

Who would be a political leader right now? Tony Blair is, according to the latest polls, facing a ‘crisis of faith’ among Labour supporters. Gordon Brown is anxiously figuring out how to manage a succession.

Meanwhile, Menzies Campbell’s first stretch as new Liberal Democrat leader has been paved with indifference. And ‘Dave’ Cameron faces an uphill battle with the Tory Party to modernise it onto an increasingly claustrophobic ‘centre ground’.

All of which makes the famous comment of ex-minister and veteran MP Tony Benn even more notable: “I am leaving the House of Commons to concentrate on politics”, he said upon his retirement.

Fifty years after he contested his first general election, it was Benn’s conviction that his political passions could now be better expressed by departing the corridors of Westminster.

The London mayor Ken Livingstone, Respect MP and Big Brother celebrity George Galloway, and media pundit Michael Portillo have also (in different ways) found life outside the Westminster village.

Despite the continuing insistence by political fixers that “change comes from within”, the numbers of us are actively involved in political parties in the UK continues to dwindle.

There are now just 800,000 members of ‘the big three’ and only a fraction of those are active in their constituencies. This is a stark contrast with the situation fifty years ago when the Conservative and Labour parties each claimed close to one million members.

Yet the four biggest aid agencies (Oxfam, Save the Children, Action Aid, and Christian Aid), which all have a distinctly political edge, boast some 3 million supporters.

Outside the parties themselves the story is similar. Overall, the proportion of the population turning out at the polls hasn’t been so small since women (over the age of thirty and holding property) were given the vote in 1918.

The situation is even worse in local elections. An average of 6 out of 10 stayed away on 5 May 2006. In some places it was as high as nearly 9 in 10. Nor is this phenomenon unique to the UK.

Various explanations have been offered for why, after centuries of toil to open up the political system, so few are playing an active part in it. Some suggest complacency is to blame, but this doesn’t really ring true when the lowest turnouts are often found in the neediest and most deprived areas.

Others have proposed that people simply don’t care about “political” issues any more, but there is evidence to the contrary in campaigns and protest groups up and down the country.

This is more than a small crisis for nation states. Put simply, for many people the democratic system doesn’t seem to be delivering the goods.

One much-touted solution is to use new technology to bring decision-making closer to the people it affects – new methods of voting and monitoring by e-mail, on the Internet and by text message are being piloted. You can sign up on one site to watch what your MP says.

E-democracy certainly opens up a whole new set of possibilities with regard to how consultation might be carried out at local and national level. It also means that referenda might play an increasing role in the way we are governed.

But people are still keener to text their vote on reality TV shows than in political elections, and the e-vote trend has done little to change this so far. New technologies may change the way decisions are made, but they are no solution to the lack of engagement in the system.

Until a few years ago in the UK, and in most modern democracies, it seemed that you knew where you were when it came to political ideas. But as we emerge from modernity the old ideological cords have been broken. The insistent beat of the market has eroded conventional strategies for change, pushing choice into the very decidedly unequal terrain of the hypermarket. But the questions persist.

Still, tensions remain between moral libertarians and those who believe in shaping social affairs politically. In all parties there are competing notions of justice: how far should the state seek to regulate behaviour and pick up the pieces when the free market goes wrong? This has been highlighted by the churches’ new Faithful Cities report.

The genius of New Labour was to recognise that the Party needed a new vision and set of values to hold it together after its commitment to the goal of common ownership of the means of production was discredited. But what came in its place now seems threadbare in terms of social vision.

Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats have swung backwards and forwards, trapped by the voting system. And the Greens have not persuaded enough people to part company with power-brokers who they portray as remorselessly grey.

As the demand for change increases the scope for it within the terrain as presently conceived seems to diminish. Yet as the recent local elections in England shoed once more, one of the big secrets in British politics is still the presence of independents.

Turnout at elections seems to increases where an independent or ‘local’ candidate stands. They often connect more effectively with the people they are seeking to represent than traditional party-affiliated candidates.

But the problem remains that as old ideologies struggle a suffocating new consensus has emerged which continues to act as a break on innovation and new dorms of association.

This consensus revolves around dominance of corporate market players, national interests, ‘free’ trade, tight control of the public sector, low tax promises, the nuclear option (in power and weapons), the ‘war on terror’, the tendency to trade off civil liberties, a draconian approach to immigration, and the primary place of prisons in criminal justice.

Combined with focus-group and headline-driven policies, such a powerful political strait-jacket provides a fertile breeding ground for an ugly form of nationalism (the BNP) – challenged only by vacuous debates about a mysterious essence called Britishness.

This should come as little surprise when we have an emerging politics that listens first and foremost to the concerns of people inside national borders. In the end, it is such “crises” as the perceived threat from migration that will show the emerging politics in its true colours, because politicians will be forced to respond. As they do, the inadequacies of the system become clear for all to see.

Enlightenment philosophers, such as Locke and Rousseau, developed theories of the state where authority no longer depended upon the divine, as it did in previous ages.

Their concern, following the bloodshed of the English Civil War, which was blamed largely upon religion, was to develop a political theory where authority was based on a “contract” between the politicians and the people.

But did anyone ever ask what would happen when the people no longer wanted to keep their end of the theoretical bargain? This is central to understanding the emerging politics.

Changing ideologies, values, technologies and demographics are all influential. But it is questions about political authority and the ability of the politicians to meet the needs of the people they claim to represent that are perhaps the most important of all.