The Slog offers six reasons why British politics has deteriorated into a dangerous standoff – and six vital reforms to ensure it is replaced by good governance in the interests of the majority.
I was very amused this morning to learn of an allegation that the Sex Pistols were financed by Moscow as a potential catalyst in the acceleration of Western bourgeois decline. Clearly, dementia was well established in the Politburo of the USSR by then: as an idea, bunging Sid Vicious enough money to top himself wasn’t exactly up there with the Germans sending Lenin to Russia in a sealed train. On the other hand, if true (which I very much doubt) it could perhaps be said to mark the beginning of Western Man’s sclerotic inability to argue logically, follow rational policies, or tolerate those fairly sure that the liars just may have been involved in a mental trolley accident.
As I’ve posted many times before, somehow we have retreated into warlike tribes who can throw spears, but can’t see any common good.
What has happened to healthy debate?
Based on five failures in a row, I argue that bombing Jihadists achieves nothing. And for this crime, I am deemed a non-violent extremist.
Because I show the evidence against Jim Davidson, Rolf Harris, Cliff Richard and Paul Gambaccini was at best risible, I am a sicko kiddy-fiddler.
Because I point out that a better plan, six pledges, and Harriet’s van represent misleading, unimaginative and irrelevant electioneering, I am a Tory (pronounced Tow-ree).
My reward for merely listing why Camerlot’s manifesto has almost completely fallen apart in terms of credibility during the course of the election is to be harassed by CCHQ trolls dismissing me as ‘Highgate SWP’ tendency.
We no longer argue and debate, we talk tabloid at each other. When faced with alternatives, we insist there are none.
There have been (depending on whether you’re dealing from the top or bottom of the pack) 17 QE injections since 2009. All but one have failed, and the only exception is so because it’s only just begun the process of teaching everyone yet again that it’s an economically pointless exercise designed to keep the banking systems upright and the unrepayable debt kicked a little further down the road.
There are endless examples of serious and structural inequality in Britain, but the Labour Party has focused – via the media at least – in the latter stages on Women’s Rights, LGBT, the banning of homophobia and laws to restrict any criticisms of Islamics in Britain. I doubt very much if Ed Miliband has consulted either the minority sexual orientation or Muslim communities in our midst about these ideas, but recommending more LGBT rights in a Mosque is the quickest way to get yourself beheaded.
Those last two paragraphs may seem to offer random examples, but they don’t. They show, respectively, how criminally tied both Tory and Labour Parties are to the interests of the very people whom many Britons think get too much attention already.
Ignore the reasonable majority at your peril
That is the central nonsense in this election campaign, and I refuse to apologise for banging on about it: if day in, day out the media can put up the same tedious poll data showing the same dead heat without any analysis of why, then I can surely ask how we got into this Italian-style standoff. If each and every morning the Labour camp can explain with sloppy analysis why a minimum wage is always a good thing, and the Tories talk about jobs in terms of numbers rather than hours, quality or wage levels, then surely the job of folks like me is to keep on asking the electorate to wake TF up.
If two pigeons do little more than squawk at each other (and the media headline remains ‘Squawking builds as Britain’s Day of Decision approaches’) the answer is not to try and fit owls into the pigeon hole. The owls deserve an audience, because they’ve been around a bit, and are objective. Owls do not pounce upon Fiat 500s with a view to carrying them off. But this morning, Nigel Mirage told us all that Ukip would stop too much Scottish interference in the next Parliament. I say 4 seats at most can’t compete with an SNP clean-sweep of all Scottish seats. I am therefore the owl, and Nige is the pigeon.
So why are we at dead heat?
Lots of reasons. There are always lots of reasons and factors relating to every issue, but soundbite-trained pols insist there is only one. The soundbite was invented for the contemporary zero-attention span assumed by all digital media and tabloid editors. It is the one tool that the sane analyst never has in his or her box of wrenches available to lift eyelids and keep heads still.
I think these cris de langues make life easy for the distracted, pushing them comfortably back into the main part of the herd.
But at the same time, because the soundbitten assertions often come from those with a Bubble Background – in turn coached by amoral ex-media types like Alistair Campbell – the sounds thus emitted make no sense to a great many others. So those people look around for an alternative soundbite.
If they’re Scottish and resent Westminster, this time they have the SNP. If they’re English and older male middle England, this time they have Ukip. As the Bubblicious elites have ignored Scottish rights and UK immigration levels more than any other issues over the decades, Sturgeon and Farage have attracted followers by the million.
But there are still millions of those Anglo-Welsh voters trapped in welfare and truly mind-numbing jobs – with few prospects of anything in the future – to whom none of the soundbites thus far mean diddly-squat. The vast majority of these won’t vote.
A mathematically paralysed Britain
We are at a dead-heat in 2015 because these are the pendulum years of change from one way of thinking about the world to another. This is, if you like, an interregnum. And to see how this works. You only have to do the maths:
1. After a thirty-year fight for recognition, the Scots have finally broken through with numbers and seats en masse within a culture largely united by dislike of London indifference. That has taken formerly assumed Labour (but also Tory) votes away from the Big Boys.
2. After over twenty years of elite unwillingness to accept the illegal, bureaucratically stifled and corruptly fascist nature of the EU bigwigs, Farage has finally nicked a couple of Tory nonentities and got a bandwagon rolling. It won’t deliver seats because Ukip’s on the ground focus is non-existent….but it is going to steal Tory (and also Labour) votes formerly taken for granted.
3. Although muddled and mendacious on the subject of national policy, the LibDems still have the best loyalty-based local vote get-out system of any of the Parties. They will lose seats (they may even mislay their leader in Sheffield Hallam) but they will still take votes that before the early 1970s went to Left or Right – and have around 25-28 seats.
4. The biggest franchise of the lot – bigger than either BigBoy Party – remains the abstainers, the indifferent, the lazy, and the utterly confused and tired. Since the 1950s, committed main-Party activism has fallen from figures in the millions to around an average of 40,000. This non-voting bloc was always, in the end, going to make clear majorities impossible…once factors 1-3 above took hold.
5. Because the main Party support from voters’ pockets has disappeared over the last 60 years, both of the Old Players have been forced to court the money of others: media moguls, retailers, City institutions, billionaire private donors and so forth. The result has been a tendency to feature and highlight activist and/or monied solutions to Britain’s endemic problems. As neither of these represent the ordinary Baby-boomers’ concerns and complaints, the abstention factor simply gets bigger.
6. Finally – but by no means least – media-savvy potential young and first-time voters find the wooden performance, constant trimming, nonstop pocket-filling and endless lying of contemporary politicians to be beneath contempt. The ‘jobs’ they’re offered (and take) are mainly badly paid and unfulfilling. With each new tranche of 18 year olds coming through, voting novices latch onto a hope – a hope that quickly shows how their hope was misplaced. In 2010 it was Nick Clegg, today it’s Nigel Farage. You only get one chance with this group: after that, they pass easily into depoliticised apathy. (And as far as MI6 and GCHQ are concerned, that’s probably the idea).
All that explains the main reasons why we have a dead-heat; and such governance-paralysing election results will not change until something fundamental about the process changes. I use the word ‘governance’ there advisedly, because politics does not exist as some kind of mass onanism in which bubble-dwellers can indulge: Occupy can yell “Smash Tory scum” until they’re blue (or more likely, red) in the face. That doesn’t provide commercially earned export money with which to grit the roads and educate our kids. Those of us who soldiered on through the riotous Hard Left years in Lambeth remember only too well that the Moscow-admirers delivered zero real service and, ultimately, bankruptcy.
Moving from Dead-heat to consensus
For all that the neoliberal-dominated Conservative Party insists that ‘free markets’ are the way forward, it knows perfectly well that out there in the increasingly twisted world of globalist deceit, what we really have is multinational monopolism. The US is driven by ensuring it has privileged access to energy – and no competitors in terms of fiat money transmission. Newscorp uses foul means more than fair to throttle any and all competition. In this, the ghastly Murdoch is supported by Jeremy Hunt (who used the British Council monopoly and his Virginia Bottomley familial relationship to become rich via his Hotcourses company) and London Mayor Boris Johnson (who helped chum Tim Yeo gain a near monopoly of taxi sales in the capital with the use of bent C02 statistics).
The British electoral system and political process are from the exact same mould: closed shops in which monied interests and minority lobbyists work alongside a ludicrously undemocratic voting system to ensure a monopoly of power for Ed Moribund and David Cameldung.
We will not get genuine change in what’s left of Britain until British politic processes are deregulated.
This means the need for an influential movement (not a Party) to campaign for the following:
1. A blanket ban on all private and corporate donations to political Parties, all of which must be funded by a body removed from all influences, but using State funds beyond which no Party must go in order to balance its finances.
2. A list-based proportional representation system which awards seats to every Party attracting votes above an agreed level.
3. The harsh criminalisation of any monied lobbying of any political Parties, government departments or Ministers of the Crown.
The last of those three key measures has a broader significance that goes way beyond political functionality. It is about the Rule of Law in our country, and an Equality before that Law without exceptions. One crucially important reason among many why 40-45% of Brits will not vote this week is their utter distrust of the British Justice system, and the Grayling fish running the department concerned.
Many of us are sick of seeing blatantly guilty media corporates and bankers go unpunished…or the tiny minority convicted sent to cushy prisons and then released having served a fraction of the sentence originally handed down. People who feel alienated from that system would also surely vote for the following:
4. The immediate depoliticisation of a civil police force obsessed with arresting imaginary sex beasts and homophobes while failing dismally to even understand (let alone catch) cyber criminals.
5. An immediate reduction in the media ownership powers of media proprietors, with specific reference to their tax residency and market share. We do not need to free the Press in Britain, we need to free our country from the spikes and commercial corruption of media owners.
6. A cap by political Party of the number (at around 5-10%) of potential MPs with a Law/legalistic professional background. The use of marginally constitutional ‘legal instruments’ in government has increased, is increasing, and needs to be drastically diminished. By definition, it is unhealthy to have the legal replacing the legislative: not only is that profession ridiculously over-represented in both Houses of Parliament, if we are to move towards the much-vaunted but thus far invisible written constitution we need, then we must have a clear separation of powers between the elected legislator and the technocrat lawyer.
Look right across the six main Parties today, and you will not find any one of them ready to sign up to even two each of these dysfunctional factors and radical reforms.
Yet another reason why I won’t be voting on Thursday.
Related at The Slog: Why vote if you’re disenfranchised anyway?
The Slog 