Tories, Yellow Tories and Blue Labour. Our Democracy Stinks.
Leftie cockney firebrand, former Mayor of London and professional newt-botherer Ken Livingstone decided to entitle his part-autobiography, part-political tract ‘If Voting Changed Anything They’d Abolish It’. Whilst the former Red Ken (these days probably more of a rosé) still no doubt has his fair share of detractors, he pretty much hit the nail right on the head with this one. Never before in British history has such thin slivers divided the political parties in terms of their ideological stance. We have Tories, Yellow Tories, and now Blue Labour to choose from at our next trip to the ballot box. Our democracy stinks.
A member of the House of Lords called Baron Maurice Glasman – thus not exactly a man with his finger on the pulse of working class Britain – recently coined the term ‘Blue Labour’. He suggested that the party embrace a more socially conservative and economically liberal agenda, and specifically establish a dialogue with sympathisers of the far-right English Defence League in order "to build a party that brokers a common good, that involves those people who support the EDL within our party." Whether this involves Labour’s current geek-in-chief Ed Miliband shaving his head, adopting racist hollering during PMQs and downing pints of Stella in Luton council estate pubs remains to be seen.
For many, of course, the problem with Labour, ever since it was New rather than Blue, was that it was already too ‘blue’ - too pro-market - to be believable when it went looking for support among its traditional voters. The re-branding and re-marketing of Labour under Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair had already shifted the party away from its roots as it went chasing after a middle class, centrist vote that shifts ever more to the right. Does anyone really believe that, had Labour got re-elected, they would be behaving that differently than the Blue and Yellow Tories? It seems doubtful.
Meanwhile, over the past year Nick Clegg has of course sold the Liberal Democrats down the river by siding up to Dangerous Dave Cameron and his Tory cohorts in the present coalition, hence the ‘Yellow Tory’ moniker that, in the eyes of most, is still firmly affixed to the now-beleaguered party as they consistently flatline in the opinion polls. Any distinction that the Lib Dems held in terms of their manifesto policies has swiftly disappeared now that they too have been seduced by power, abandoning all ideological distinctiveness in the hope of impressing some imaginary median voter sipping a glass of Sauvignon Blanc in their back garden in Hemel Hempstead.
Yesterday the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Church of England, questioned not only the legitimacy of the present coalition’s draconian policies but also the health of democracy itself on these shores. Dr Williams's article in the New Statesman said the government was facing "bafflement and indignation" over its health and education plans: "With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no-one voted. At the very least, there is an understandable anxiety about what democracy means in such a context."
Britain today is only notionally a democracy. We have elections every five years or so and that's about it, give or take the very occasional referendum in which the result is usually pre-ordained, as witnessed by the recent AV debacle. Recent history has seen an unprecedented decline in voter turnouts - in 2001, only 59% of the British public turned out to vote, the lowest turnout since 1918. As a result, the legitimacy of our governments' mandates is looking increasingly questionable. We are facing a situation whereby the processes of democracy, including general elections, become empty rituals. In most of the important policy areas, public opinion is either not represented in the political mainstream or else treated as an utter irrelevance. Regarding all of the vital issues of today, there exists virtually no difference between the three major political parties.
A true democracy requires an informed public, because people can only make meaningful decisions if they know about the issues. An informed public requires a free press, since most people do not have the time to conduct personal research investigations into all the issues themselves. A democracy requires a free press to objectively and honestly disseminate information to the public. In this area, too, Britain's democracy is sorely lacking. The track record of the British corporate media is exactly what you'd expect from organisations owned by corporations and dependent on corporate money for revenue - i.e. one of remarkably consistent subservience to the establishment.
It is clear that democracy in Britain is in severe crisis. But this can, in theory, be ameliorated. A free press is entirely achievable, and it is possible to have a true democracy, or at least something very much approximating it. It would, however, take a monumental effort to push through the democratic reforms necessary to truly allow the British people to govern themselves. Powerful establishment forces - to whom, of course, the very idea of true democracy is an anathema - would have to be fought every step of the way. It would require mass, sustained public action. But that, of course, is what true democracy is all about.