When senior Tories claimed that Britain was broken, there was no shortage of sensible commentary ridiculing them. But there was a much deeper problem. While many know that Britain is not broken, what is broken is the mechanism used to communicate that Britain isn’t broken – politics.
Considering the dangers of a broken politics, in the recently published, Open Left report The Politics of Perpetual Renewal, we highlight several challenges for the centre-left in the years to come.
Our research acknowledges that politics may be broken, but not beyond repair. When building its next coalition of support, the centre-left will need to consider the changing demographics of Britain and the somewhat polarised public attitudes.
In 2010, the increasingly complex electorate renders ‘core vs swing’/’left vs right’ vote strategies essentially meaningless. Instead, we identify other axes through which the electorate can be more adequately understood. These include optimism vs pessimism, uncertainty vs security in attitudes towards global economic change, whether voters feel that their family gets a fair deal compared to others or not, and a growing social liberalism bouncing off against a still significant social conservatism.
Only in appreciating these changes can centre-left politics move beyond simply establishing the next majority for the next election and focus on a politics of permanent engagement to underpin a broader and more enduring majority over the next generation.
This moves beyond simply advancing and embedding a centre-left agenda in British politics. In this present crisis of our politics, permanent engagement is the only antidote to disaffection.
There are many lessons to learn, but most obviously coalition building has often been easier in the US. Movements and flexibility are more accommodated in a party structure which essentially collapses and rebuilds itself every four years. Furthermore, the rigidity of a two-party system essentially binds the hands of both parties into avoiding factionalism, finding common ground within the party. If the Republican party sat in the European parliament, it would be probably be five different parties.
Other catalysts for movement-based politics include an embedded social media culture and a politics more comfortable engaging with civic institutions such as churches, local unions, and neighbourhood groups.
However, there are also rich traditions within the Labour movement which puts the centre-left in a strong position to renew this more active form of engagement. So often we forget that the founders of our party were first members of a movement before they were members of a party: a movement of cooperatives, mutuals, Christians, Fabians, social democrats, socialists, and trade unions, not to mention liberal reformers.
After a long decade in government, the centre-left is once again teeming with ideas and possibilities which are endless. One characteristic that should unite us should be optimism.
It is understandable why the broken Britain argument resonates with so many. There is little institutional counterbalance to a sensationalist media. By recalling our traditions and remoulding them into a new politics that counterbalance can be built.
Part of the problem of re-engaging is that you are from a project called ‘Open Left’ and you highlight the challenges of the ‘centre-left’, while at the same time noting that ‘left vs right’ is meaningless to a more comlpex electorate.
You misunderstand leftrightism as simply an axis when it needs to be fully appreciated as a problematic.
The most important progressive reproblematization of politics is focussed on consumerism and its materialist values. ‘Left and ‘right’ are both competing versions of consumerism, as was pointed out as long ago as the late 1970s by Vaclav Havel.
The ‘left’ cannot be the future of progressive politics. The future of progressive politics can only be found in a new problematization that has nothing to do with leftrightism and will not arise from self-identifying leftrightists.
Direct Party and Representative Voting and Britain’s broken politics
When millions of votes don’t make a difference, when the choice seems like no real choice, why are people going to bother to vote? The problem is at the very heart of our electoral system. Wasted votes, safe seats, corrupt, lazy, ineffective politicians, a perception of powerlessness – just the recipe to breed apathy. That many people don’t vote is a consequence of our broken politics, not the cause.
The cause of the failure is in part because the electoral system asks us to do two things with one vote.
1 Vote for the best party to form the Government of the country – a national issue.
2 Vote for the best person to represent the constituency and to speak for its people, and that is a local and even personal matter.
Faced with this dilemma, people tend to vote on question 1 – the party.
Unfortunately, because of the way the FPTP system works, many millions of these votes make no difference to the result – they are wasted.
If you are asked to vote for the best party to form the Government, every vote should count, regardless of where or in which constituency you live.
Another consequence is that question 2 – the individual – is generally sacrificed. As a result, we have safe seats and party-appointed MPs.
Furthermore, because the choice of MP is not based on the merit of the individual, you can end up with all sorts of bad apples, from the lazy, to the ineffective, to the corrupt.
A further consequence of our voting system is that it is not possible to draw much by way of conclusions from the way people vote. A great deal of effort goes into analysis of voting results, all of which is undermined because of the limitations of the system. In addition, the system also influences how people use their vote, but because the forces may be pulling in opposite directions conclusions are often overly simplistic or even pure wishful thinking.
Let’s get rid of safe seats and wasted votes by separating these two questions. One trip to the polling booth, but one vote for the party to form the Government where every vote counts, and a separate vote to choose the best individual to represent the constituency when merit rather than the party label is the key to becoming an MP.
Clearly we need a fresh look at the voting system.
To engage the community in the vote for an MP, an election constituency should be small. Large multimember constituencies or party list systems may be more or less successful as techniques for arriving at Government by PR, but ignore communities.
Such techniques may also not be necessary.
How each party in the Commons votes is determined by its MPs, but the total voting power of the party must be proportional to the total number of votes cast for it, not their total number of MPs. All that is necessary to achieve this is to share out the total voting power of each party amongst its MPs.
Such a reform would require very little change to the public voting process, and the associated structure of constituencies. It retains the simplicity both in concept and in execution of the existing system. These factors should make it straightforward to implement, and may be attractive to Members of Parliament when considering the implications for any change of system.
Unless we have a voting system that allows us to vote both for the party we want to form the Government, but also for the individual we want to represent the Constituency, it cannot be considered a fair system, and it will not engage the electorate.
This is just an outline of proposals for Direct Party and Representative Voting which would lead both to a significant change to the way Parliament conducts itself, and to renewed engagement by voters with the democratic process. If your vote doesn’t count, how can you feel engaged with the political process? If you have a real say both in what happens nationally as well as locally, discussion of policy starts to be meaningful.