People Power E-Book

Richard Askwith

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 136

Beschreibung

British parliamentary democracy is in a state of advanced decay. The symptoms are familiar: party machines with no goal beyond their own survival; donors and lobbyists whose interests trump the nation's; a disillusioned electorate; and an over-mighty executive whose patronage has become the main driving force of politics. These rots have mixed to breed a caste of career politician more concerned with serving patrons than constituents. We've known this for years, but what can we do about it beyond not bothering to vote? However, in the past decade, a new generation's digital revolution has gradually given a voice to the hitherto unheard masses. Its contribution to political discourse, once limited to the occasional 'X' on a ballot paper, has been rude, vigorous, anarchic – and spectacularly influential. The tide has turned. The result? A slump in support for the big parties, the rejection of mainstream candidates in the Labour leadership contest; the roar of pent-up rage against the Brussels-friendly elite that led to the Brexit vote of June 2016; and then, five months later, the seemingly crazed elevation of Donald Trump to become the most powerful man in the world.

Leseprobe

PROVOCATIONS

PEOPLE POWER

REMAKING PARLIAMENT FOR THE POPULIST AGE

RICHARD ASKWITH

SERIES EDITOR: YASMIN ALIBHAI-BROWN

In memory of Edward Askwith

(1914–2006)

Contents

Title PageDedication1Something rotten2Sea change3The intangible edifice4The great levelling5The people speak6The many and the few7The People’s Chamber8Rough crossings9The safety chamber10Sticking points11Borrowed timeAcknowledgementsCopyright

Chapter 1

Something rotten

YOU SENSE THE decay before you enter. Patches of pale tarpaulin flap from the roof. The stained limestone walls are exhausted: eaten away by traffic fumes and time. The big black anti-terror bulks are the last truly solid thing you see.

Inside, it overpowers you. Damp clings to the ceiling at the north end of Westminster Hall. Parts of St Stephen’s Hall appear to have come away in visitors’ hands. Those are just first impressions.

The further you wander, the more decrepit the Palace of Westminster seems, from the stained carpet leading up to the Commons public gallery to the attendants’ threadbare fancy dress. Traces of Blitz damage remain at the entrance to the Commons chamber, seventy-seven years on. Even the MPs look worn out, going through the motions of ill-attended debates as listlessly as zoo animals. It is hard to believe that these pasty, fretful, well-tailored creatures, weighed down with tradition and responsibility, belong to the same species as the multi-coloured, trainer-shod, head-phoned, restlessly modern crowds outside.

Beyond public view, it’s worse. MPs’ offices are shabby and badly ventilated; the toilets are a running joke. But the real decay lies deeper still, among hundreds of miles of tangled cables and dodgy pipes. It lies in the dank, rodent-friendly basements, or up among the rusting gutters, crumbling gargoyles and leaking windows; and, not least, in the deadly asbestos that lurks unseen in ducts and floors. If it weren’t for the discreet, round-the-clock fire patrols, it wouldn’t even be legal for use.

If it once occurs to you to think of the Houses of Parliament as a catastrophically over-ripe Stilton, it’s hard to dispel the image. Decomposition has seeped into everything. One strong blast of wind, you feel, could reduce the whole thing to a puff of noxious dust.

In fact, the Palace could once again be made fit for purpose. The cost of doing so has been estimated at up to £6 billion, although that might be almost halved if MPs agreed to move out completely for six years. As I write, they have yet to decide – although by the time you read this they may finally have done so. So far, however, they have shown a marked reluctance to leave.

Perhaps they are attached to the symbolism.

Chapter 2

Sea change

THE METAPHOR BARELY needs spelling out. British parliamentary democracy is itself in a state of malodorous and increasingly alarming over-ripeness. The stench that makes headlines comes from sexual and financial abuses, all the more pungent for having festered for years in shadows. The long-term hazard is a political decay whose symptoms include: party machines with no goal beyond their own survival; donors and lobbyists whose interests trump the nation’s; a disillusioned electorate; and an over-mighty executive (rarely elected by more than a third of eligible voters) whose patronage has become the main driving force of parliamentary politics. These rots have mixed to breed a caste of career politician, more concerned with serving patrons than constituents – and, as a result, increasingly incapable of even feigning sincerity when interacting with the public. There are decent MPs too: selfless public servants who deserve our gratitude. But decay dominates. Government and opposition alike keep their principles close to their chests, and all but their hard-core party loyalists mistrust them for it.

We’ve known all this for years. We’ve known, too, with the apathy of adulthood, that there’s nothing we can do about it – beyond refusing to vote. Yet in that, at least, we were wrong.

In the past decade, a new generation’s digital revolution has gradually given a voice to the hitherto unheard masses. In far-flung tyrannies, old and young have used new technologies to clamour for freedom, with humbling courage and terrifying consequences. In the elderly democracies of the West, empowerment by social media has taken a subtler form. Its long-term effects may be no less far-reaching. Seizing on communication channels that their supposed elders and betters still struggle to master, the ‘nobodies’ who make up most of any Western electorate have gate-crashed their nations’ big discussions. Their contribution to political discourse, once limited to the occasional ‘X’ on a ballot paper, has been rude, vigorous, anarchic – and, recently, spectacularly influential.

We had a taste of it in 2014, when a fire-storm of social media nationalism blew the Scottish independence referendum out of the parliamentary Establishment’s control. By the eve of the vote, shell-shocked leaders of the main parties were reduced to standing shoulder to sagging shoulder, desperately promising the unruly populace whatever it wanted.

That tide turned. Those that followed were not for turning. Their effects included: the slump in support for the big parties in the 2015 general election; the rejection of mainstream candidates in subsequent Labour leadership contests; the roar of pent-up rage against the Brussels-friendly elite that led to the Brexit vote of June 2016; and, not least, the seemingly crazed elevation of Donald Trump – braggart, groper, buffoon, barefaced liar and serial screwer of the little people – to become, seven months later, the most powerful man in the world.

By the time Jeremy Corbyn’s radically populist version of the Labour Party had surged to an unexpectedly respectable 55-seat defeat in the 2017 general election, we had begun to expect electoral cataclysms. (I can easily imagine Corbyn, Leader of the Opposition as I write this, being Prime Minister by the time you read it.) For many of us, though, those first great batterings of the status quo were particularly shocking – and bewildering. The world seemed to be changing too quickly for the eye to follow. We snatched at explanations, barely pausing to examine them. Discomfited commentators pointed to socio-economic causes to which we – that is, they – had paid insufficient attention. It became fashionable to talk of the ‘left-behinds’, or of a gulf between locally rooted ‘somewheres’ and cosmopolitan ‘anywheres’. There was talk, too, of a new post-rationalism, an ‘age of anger’, even a post-literate age. And then there was the death of liberalism.

It was hard to quarrel with reports of the latter, which by late 2016 were appearing almost daily. The Liberal Democrats had been all but wiped out in the 2015 general election, although it felt at the time more like a judgement on the party’s handling of power than a rejection of its unobjectionable core beliefs in freedom, fairness, internationalism and tolerance. Thirteen months later, liberal sympathisers were disproportionately represented among the defeated 48 per cent who voted ‘Remain’ in the Brexit referendum.

In between, for some of us, there was another landmark. In March 2016, the last print edition was published of The Independent – my employer, on and off, for twenty years, but also a major media voice for Britain’s free-thinking liberal centre. There were obvious reasons, not least a wider meltdown of the newspaper industry. No one suggested at the time that the values the paper had tried to stand for were a factor in its demise. How could they have been? No thinking person could object – could they? – to such uncontroversial journalistic ideals as impartiality, intellectual rigour and freedom from proprietorial interference; or to such political ones as a commitment to democratic liberties, concern for the future of the planet and a broad, humane belief that all lives matter.

But that was then. Much later, I sensed a link. In little more than a year, three pillars of my world had collapsed. Maybe it did mean something. My adult life – including thirty-five years as a reasonably successful journalist – had been lived in the context of a national near-consensus about values: the kind of ‘unobjectionable’ and ‘uncontroversial’ values listed above. What if a new political tide had swept that context away?

Like many educated liberals, I tend to hyperbolise my private dramas. Yet by late 2016 talk of such a sea change could be heard far beyond my social bubble.

I may not have been precisely the kind of person the Brexit-hungry Daily Mail had in mind when, in the months following the referendum, it took to denouncing those who did not share its enthusiasm as ‘Remoaners’ and, more damningly, as members of an ‘out-of-touch, metropolitan, liberal elite’. As a down-on-his-luck writer living in rural Northamptonshire, I felt rather less elite than the Daily Mail’s editor Paul Dacre and his lavishly remunerated London henchmen. Yet I could appreciate the power of this new verbal weapon, and felt threatened by it: the label ‘liberal elite’ could be used to discredit anyone to whom it was applied.

In reality, the idea that the British elite is liberal is preposterous. In four decades of voting in line with my liberal beliefs I have been rewarded with five measly years in which a party I backed played a (minor) role in government. Power and wealth have been concentrated in the hands of the privileged, the privately educated, the big party machines, the already-rich, the bosses – you can call them what you will, within reason. But liberal? That’s absurd.

Such facts made little difference, especially after Donald Trump had blown apart what remained of the status quo in November 2016. ‘The liberal consensus that has held sway for decades has failed to maintain the consent of many people,’ declared Theresa May. Right-wing columnists gloated: take that, rootless liberals. The people, we were told, had resoundingly rejected our unpatriotic values. I and my kind had lost our influence in Parliament; our special relationships with the movers and shakers of Brussels and Washington were unravelling; our privileged place in the media was slipping from us. In many eyes, we were not even respectable. It was hard to disagree: we could be silenced with a two-word label.

A new elite rushed to fill the vacuum. Actually, it was the old elite, reshuffled, with a few formerly marginal right-wingers, empowered by fat-cat funding and a dubiously gained referendum victory, now holding key levers of power. They were still privileged, rich and, in most cases, privately educated. But they claimed to be different, and their claims were enough to unleash a wave of triumphalism from enemies of ‘liberalism’ far beyond the Establishment. ‘Brexit & Trump show liberal leftie luvvy elites in their metropolitan bubble are utterly clueless about real life in the real world,’ said one relatively polite Twitter user, crisply summing up the new consensus. Another was crisper still: ‘This is our world now.’

This may or may not be true. It is perfectly possible that, in fact, the political upheavals of recent years have not amounted to an ideological watershed, merely a wrinkle. The landscape is still shifting. In the long run it may turn out to be not the liberals but the swaggering champions of isolationism and nationalism who find themselves out in the cold. More probably, a new ideological divide will emerge. We cannot know. But we can say confidently that, either way, a profound change has taken place.

Brexit, Trump and their supporters triumphed in 2016 with campaigns that rewrote the rules of electioneering. Strident, fast-moving, mercilessly personal and startlingly casual with the truth, they left opponents shocked and lunging at shadows. The stunning victories that resulted make it hard to see how this intemperate genie, released by social media, can be returned to its bottle. We cannot predict the political battlegrounds of the future, but we have a good idea of the manner in which the battles will be fought.

In this new politics – ‘post-truth’ politics, as we have quickly learned to call it – success comes not from winning arguments but from winning quarrels. Being objectively right is a consolation prize. The winners are those with the balls to dominate the playground-cum-jungle of unregulated mass debate. Passionate intensity beats self-doubt every time. Those who play dirtiest often seem to do best – and castigating opponents is a far more effective strategy than putting forward a coherent programme of your own.

The big beasts of the genre project authenticity by seeming not to care what people think of them – yet work ruthlessly to discredit those who contradict them. In the Scottish independence campaign, opponents of the populist insurgency were denounced as traitors. For Brexit, they were the poodles of Brussels. In the US election, they were the Washington elite. The faults of those who called them such names were irrelevant. What mattered were the identities of those on the receiving end: generally, old-style politicians, based in affluent capitals, with a stake in the status quo. They had only to be identified as such for their words to become inaudible.

Later, the old-style politicians cried foul. They were still barely audible; worse, they were implausible. When David Cameron complained that ‘populism… cost me my job’ and Tony Blair announced the creation of a policy unit to combat ‘an explosion of populist movements across Europe’, it was not immediately clear what, precisely, they were opposed to. Did they feel that ordinary voters were being given too much say in how they were governed? If so, they wisely refrained from saying so explicitly. Yet if that was not the problem, what was?

Perhaps they objected to the democratic process being hijacked by chancers who told lies to win votes – but that, too, could hardly be said publicly. It would have been laughable. If you think ‘post-truth’ politics began with Farage and Trump, read Peter Oborne’s 2005 book The Rise of Political Lying, which chronicles in jaw-dropping detail the most flagrant examples of political dishonesty in the UK from 1979 onwards: deception after deliberate deception, perpetrated by a political class of whom Blair and Cameron are the living embodiments. You’ll remember the tags, if not the complexities of the disingenuities they denote: the Belgrano, the Westland affair, arms-to-Iraq, cash-for-questions, the Hinduja passport affair, Cheriegate, Jeffrey Archer, Jonathan Aitken… And that’s before we get to more recent show-stopping whoppers, on such subjects as weapons of mass destruction, the Lisbon Treaty and tuition fees.

Blair blamed the media. ‘Total frankness, relayed in the shorthand of the mass media, becomes simply a weapon in the hands of opponents,’ he argued in 1987. As a result, he claimed: ‘The truth becomes almost impossible to communicate.’ Perhaps he was right. That didn’t make the public happier about having lies communicated to them instead.

By 2014 there can barely have been a voter in Britain – beyond the elite – who didn’t to some extent share a sense that the corridors of power are full of clever, educated, well-remunerated people who know everything except the difference between right and wrong. For many, disillusion was by then laced with bitterness at the biggest perceived lie of all: the claim that, following the financial crash of 2008–09, we were ‘all in it together’. And that set the scene for the current crisis. Social media released great waves of popular anger (amplified by algorithms) to crash upon the political Establishment; and those clever, educated people found themselves too discredited to resist.

That’s the trouble with decay. You ignore it. The small cracks widen. Then a storm comes, and things fall apart.

Chapter 3

The intangible edifice

MY FATHER RARELY talked about what he went through in the Second World War. When he did, he didn’t say much. The only clue in our home to the fact that this quiet, un-belligerent man had once been a soldier lay in the inside covers of the orange-and-white Penguin books – Orwell, Huxley, Shaw, Graves – that had gone to war with him in his knapsack, each stamped with his name, rank and service number.