This is the era of democratisation: from the rush of iPhone applications to mass campaigns on everything from global poverty to over-fishing. It feels as if everything is being democratised – except democracy itself.
Political power is seen as something that is exercised over people rather than by them. The notion of self-government feels dead to many. People feel disempowered, unable to achieve change through mainstream politics. If someone cares about an issue, would they typically see joining a political party as the way to make progress?
Politics becomes individualised and simplified. If the government doesn’t do exactly what a particular person wants then it isn’t listening or it’s out of touch. Alienated from the political process, people come to see politics as something they consume (or not), in the same way that they may pick between supermarkets. It’s almost as if people think that if they stop voting, politics might just go away – like if they all stopped shopping at Tesco.
Personality politics fills the vacuum. David Cameron’s car driving his paperwork behind his bike. Nick Clegg not knowing the level of the state pension. My own brush with Photoshop technology. All interesting personality stories. But magnified beyond real significance because politics is so closed and controlled that voters look for revealing details to work out what politicians are really like and really believe.
The media is the symptom of this plight, not its cause. Too much of modern politics starts from what politicians imagine voters already think, based on focus group research. This is then used to create dividing lines to box other parties in to being against positions that those focus groups reveal to be popular with the public.
Political parties try to turn elections into referendums on the questions that suit their dividing lines best: Is Britain broken? Investment versus cuts? Time for a change versus no time for a novice? This simplifies problems and polarises choices in ways that undermine our capacity to engage people through politics in discussing and resolving them.
Yet voters see straight through us. They know we are saying what we think will appeal to them, so they stop listening. People look up to politicians who tell a complicated truth – such as pre-2008 John McCain and Barack Obama in full flow. The public lose trust in politicians when they lack trust in the public.
The window on the political process used to be parties. But today, parties expect too much from citizens and offer too little in return. The traditional party model has been overtaken by centralised media campaign machines, which are now, in turn, being overtaken by new forms of collaborative power that no longer look to political elites for direction.
Do we want to go on like this? Do we want politics to be a conveyor belt of personality stories, sanitised messages and angry, alienated voters? At Open Left, the project I’m leading at Demos, we’ll be looking at how we can meet Abraham Lincoln’s test of a democracy: that is ‘for the people, by the people, of the people’. Here are what I believe should be the first steps in democratising democracy.
First, embracing a more open politics. We need a much wider range of people becoming MPs. It’s almost impossible to get selected as a candidate of one of the main parties unless you’re a political lifer. As an ex-special adviser and councillor, I’m not against people who’ve worked in politics becoming MPs, but we should be a smaller share of the total.
Parties need to find ways of opening themselves up to people who care about change and share their values but haven’t spent the last decade preparing to get selected. Progress’s campaign for selection primaries, with registered supporters entitled to vote and tough limits on spending, is part of the answer.
We also need more ‘ways in’ for late entrants. British politics is better for the appointment of Mervyn Davies, Stephen Carter, Mark Malloch-Brown and indeed Baron Mandelson. We should make such appointees accountable to the Commons so that this becomes an accepted way of attracting people with recent real life experience into politics.
We need to become more open about disagreement, too. I doubt the doctrine of collective responsibility will fully survive the era of freedom of information. But in any case, politicians need to find ways of closing the gap between what they say and what they truly believe, as this is essential if the public are to be engaged in the choices and trade-offs of politics.
Second, deepening our representative democracy. We need to complete reform of the House of Lords. Peers should be elected and given the task of amending legislation. The government could overturn amendments on a two-thirds majority. And we also need to reform our voting system for Westminster elections. We can’t continue with a situation where so many people’s votes effectively don’t count and which encourages political parties to focus disproportionate attention on ‘swing voters’.
Third, broadening our democratic society to make people powerful and enable people to achieve more together than we do alone. This means spreading power so that people, acting both indiviudally and collectively, can bring about change and achieve their goals. That is too subtle and complex a task for the central state alone; it requires democratic power to be dispersed (and enlarged). So, we should strengthen local democracy, give people power to choose who delivers the public services they use, and enable them to solve common problems by coming together through associations of civil society.
But in transforming politics we need to avoid an American political disease, by stemming the rising influence of big money in British politics. We can debate what a cap on annual donations from individuals should be, but it should be in the hundreds of pounds – certainly not the £50,000 that Cameron wants, which would still mean parties chasing donations from wealthy individuals.
We could also provide 100% tax relief on the smallest donations, quickly tapering out to encourage parties to seek small amounts of money from the many rather than larger amounts from the few. Parties would once again require hundreds of thousands of supporters rather than hundreds of thousand-pound donors.
The block grants that trade unions contribute towards our party represent a collective donation on behalf of millions of working people, but that contribution has to be more directly made. The proposals of the Hayden Phillips review, blocked by David Cameron, would see Labour lose our large union donations, but the party’s vital financial and political link with the movement would be maintained through affiliation and individual donations. This would keep big money out of politics while keeping the party rooted in the lives of working people.
However, there will still be a gap in supporting a deep and vibrant democracy that engages society. Democracy needs money from a democratic source or it will become dominated by those who have money themselves.
So we should bite the bullet of state funding for political parties. I realise this is a difficult argument right now – but it could be won if combined with a reduction in the total amount of public money spent on politics. Deprived of big donations, the parties would be required to rebuild from the ground up, as vehicles for bringing people together to bring about change.
This is an uncomfortable but urgent debate. The lesson of the expenses scandal is that if you leave a closed, even occasionally corrupt, system unreformed, you will eventually end up with a catastrophe for politics.
Democratic reform matters. If people have power they will use it to make the changes in society we need. Because those changes would be more legitimate, it would be harder for vested interests to resist them – or indeed for future governments to overturn them.
Transforming politics will be frightening for the incumbents. But an open, representative, empowering democracy will be good for those who believe in the unique power of politics to change things for the better.
James Purnell has quite literally bitten the bullet here.
If the endemic issue of apathy is to be resolved politics needs to be representative: ‘for the people, by the people, of the people’.
Political parties need to wake up. And I truly believe that voting reform, such as, the proposal in the Jenkins Report of AV+ should be adopted. But, furthermore reform should go the next step and introduce a ‘none of the above’ box on voting forms, then I believe political parties would truly understand the scale of the problem they face.
Political ‘lifers’, in turn need to make space, society does not need political ‘fat cats’ dominating politics returning to the original point. ‘politics for the people, BY THE PEOPLE, of the people’.
Finally, what is missing in this article is civic education. For civil society to be vibrant more efforts should be made to standardise the importance and role of civic education in the education system. I for one did not truly learn about the importance of my role as a citizen in politics until I optionally chose to study politics at university and whilst efforts have been to increase citizenship education in schools, aspects of the syllabus, such as education about voting and the political system are not universal.
To kill a weed you need to dig out the roots, the strategy so far has simply been to chop off what is visible.
I agree with Dominic . Before we extend democracy people need to be equipped to make the right choices. Otherwise they will simply fall prey to the the hidden persuaders, the rabble-rousers and the mad mullahs. And the situation might then be even worse than before.
One problem is that the traditional parties are based on the left right divide as it existed 40-50 years or more years ago when there was a large “working class” and a smaller “middle class”. Voters aged 50 and above can still relate to these parties but are a declining species. 50 years ago people were bound together in communities and felt defined though their type of work. Communities have broken up with many people being unable to identify people from the same street. The economy has changed drastically over this period and younger people does not easily relate to distinctions now class is more nebulous, being no longer defined by your job.
The parties have been preserved by the FPTP system and have not moved on at all and much of their dogma is identical to what it was 50 years ago. The FPTP system makes it virtually impossible for small new parties to form and grow in proportion to voter percentages. With PR many new parties would have formed over the last 50 years representing the various fractional interests of the public.
The three main parties would still survive but represent similar small percentages of voters rather than surviving as large parties well past their sell-by date. Today government would be a coalition on many small parties with voting on issues determined by public interest as represented by the votes of small parties. This would be a dynamic process e.g. if and when the proportion of immigrants following a religion or way of life attained a reasonable percentage they would form their own party which effectively represented their fractional interests.
This would mean on each issue that the views of the public would be represented though their interests represented by small parties rather than being forced to follow the doctrine of one or other of the three main parties. This is far more likely to be seen as fair by a massive majority of the public who do not want to be confined by party dogma.
I do not believe this has any appeal to the three main parties despite their sobs and tears about democracy . They want is democracy defined as the opportunity and ram their pre-determined policies down the public’s throat regardless of any protests from the public once they are the ruling party. This is in keeping with their 21st century idea of democracy where any public view is always ignored.
The big lie is that politics represents the interest of the people rather than companies. The very fact that companies are continually falling over themselves to give money to politicians shows only too well whose interests are being followed. The rich have done extremely well over the last decade from globalisation where the poor are either poorer or no better off. Globalisation is the second big lie being sold to the public as though it is there to help them rather than help the rich. Where is the evidence that globalisation has helped the poor rather than marginalised them even more?
Any democracy that represents the people’s interests would not automatically give the rich what they want. Therefore it will never have the support of politicians. In other words any idea of democracy as representing the people is a non-starter.
One problem is that the traditional parties are based on the left right divide as it existed 40-50 years or more years ago when there was a large “working class” and a smaller “middle class”. Voters aged 50 and above can still relate to these parties but are a declining species. 50 years ago people were bound together in communities and felt defined though their type of work. Communities have broken up with many people being unable to identify people from the same street. The economy has changed drastically over this period and younger people do not easily relate to distinctions now class is more nebulous, being no longer defined by your job.
The parties have been preserved by the FPTP system and have not moved on at all and much of their dogma is identical to what it was 50 years ago. The FPTP system makes it virtually impossible for small new parties to form and grow in proportion to voter percentages. With PR many new parties would have formed over the last 50 years representing the various fractional interests of the public.
The three main parties would still survive but represent similar small percentages of voters rather than surviving as large parties well past their sell-by date. Today government would be a coalition of many small parties with voting on issues determined by public interest represented by the votes of small parties. This would be a dynamic process e.g. if and when the proportion of immigrants following a religion or way of life attained a reasonable percentage they would form their own party which effectively represented their fractional interests.
This would mean on each issue that the views of the public would be represented rather than being forced to follow the doctrine of one or other of the three main parties. This is far more likely to be seen as fair by a massive majority of the public who do not want to be confined by party dogma.
I do not believe this has any appeal to the three main parties despite their sobs and tears about democracy. They want democracy defined as the opportunity to ram their pre-determined policies down the public’s throat regardless of any protests once they are the ruling party. This is in keeping with their 21st century idea of democracy where any public view is always ignored.
The big lie is that politics represents the interest of the people rather than companies. The very fact that companies are continually falling over themselves to give money to politicians shows only too well whose interests are being followed. The rich have done extremely well over the last decade from globalisation whereas the poor are either poorer or no better off. Globalisation is the second big lie being sold to the public as though it is there to help them rather than help the rich. Where is the evidence that globalisation has helped the poor rather than marginalised them even more?
Any democracy that represents the people’s interests would not automatically give the rich what they want. Therefore it will never have the support of politicians. In other words any idea of democracy as representing the people is a non-starter.