X Marks the Box E-Book

Daniel Blythe

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 232

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

What is politics? And why does it matter? Self-confessed born-again voter Daniel Blythe presents a popular, forceful argument designed to shake up anyone 's apathy. Politics sets the agenda. Climate change, education, crime, housing these are political issues, but for many, party politics is still a turn-off. Daniel Blythe negotiates the political maze from the citizen' s point of view. Why should we vote? What do politicians do and why does it make a difference? Are you a Diehard, a Bloody-Noser or a Tactical? What can your MP do for you? And just why do they avoid answering direct questions? Along the way, we examine the most fun general elections and the under-rated politicians; the sauciest scandals and the bizarre sexiest MP polls; the biggest political victories, the U-turns and betrayals; the issues on the street, the part played by your choice of newspaper and what manifestos really mean; how to make your vote count, how to protest, and why you should care about by-elections. Whether you are disenchanted or a ballot-box regular, an activist or a floating voter, this is a book to amuse, inform and entertain. Irreverent, topical, sceptical and packed with useful facts and trivia, X Marks The Box takes you on a journey through apathy to activism - and everything in between.

Leseprobe

Published in the UK in 2010 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.co.uk

This electronic edition published in 2010 by Icon Books

ISBN: 978-1-84831-180-0 (ePub format)

ISBN: 978-1-84831-191-6 (Adobe ebook format)

Printed edition (ISBN: 978-1-84831-051-3)

sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA

or their agents

Printed edition distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,

Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Printed edition published in Australia in 2010

by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Printed edition distributed in Canada by

Penguin Books Canada,

90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

Toronto, Ontario M4P 2YE

Text copyright © 2010 Daniel Blythe

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any

means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Marie Doherty

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Ernest Benn (1875–1954)

About the Author

Daniel Blytheis a graduate of St John’s College, Oxford. He is the author of several other books including the novelsThe CutandThis is the Dayas well as the acclaimedEncyclopaedia of Classic 80s Pop.As well as writing, he leads creative writing workshops for adults, young people and children.

Author’s Note

I would like to acknowledge the support given to me by a generous grant from the Authors’ Foundation, without which this book could not have been completed. The Authors’ Foundation is administered by the Society of Authors and more information can be found at the Society’s website, www.societyofauthors.org.

Particular thanks go to: my agent Caroline Montgomery as ever, all the Icon editorial, publicity and sales team, and the many correspondents well-versed in the idiom of politics who were able to point me on the right path – but especially Steve Goddard, Iain Dale, Gisela Stuart, Jo-Anne Nadler, Peter Tatchell, Emma Jones and Angela Smith, who gave the most useful and considered answers to my niggling questions. Of course, any dissatisfaction with what follows should be laid entirely at my door!

Parliamentary material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO on behalf of Parliament, and all quotes that are otherwise unattributed are from personal correspondence with the author.

Contents

1: Am I Bovvered? Politics for the disenchanted

2: Push the Vote Out: Democracy in action

3: Poll Position: Election fever

4: Honourable Members: Rules, regulations and ribaldry

5: Desperate Remedies: Some disaster scenarios

6: Media and Messages: The speaking and listening politician

7: The Round-up

A Political Devil’s Dictionary

Highly Selective Bibliography

1

Am I Bovvered? Politics for the disenchanted

The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

Plato (born c. 423 BC)

We are told that more people voted in the 2005 series ofBig Brotherthan voted in the 2005 general election. Bearing in mind that old adage ‘85 per cent of statistics are made up’, we should perhaps treat this piece of information with the scepticism it deserves. Many of the voters inBig Brotherwill have been teenage girls with their fingers permanently glued to the redial key on their mobiles – and, however imperfect British democracy may be, we haven’t yet found any way of improving on the ‘putting a cross in the box with a pencil’ method. Furthermore, no matter how ‘dumbed-down’ people may accuse politics and the media of being, we have not yet sunk to the level of putting the candidates up for a Saturday night premium rate phone call challenge, with the decision between the final two remaining contenders being made by a bored Andrew Lloyd Webber or a merciless Simon Cowell.

Winston Churchill said that democracy was ‘the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’. This seems an elegant summation. You give people the chance to choose their own government – at least, to choose their own local Member of Parliament – and many of them can’t be bothered. Actually, 39 per cent of them – that’s the proportion who didn’t bother to vote in 2005. Turnout dropped dramatically in the first decade of the new millennium with the 2001 and 2005 elections providing the smallest turnouts since the Second World War.

Now, we are being told politics is interesting again, and not just because of the credit crisis. But when the likes ofBig BrotherandThe X Factorattract more young voters than the general election, something is clearly up. The British should be shamed by the electoral turnout in places like South Africa and Sierra Leone, where queues stretch round the block, and people need to bring water and small picnics to sustain them through the hours of waiting, and where voters, in between joining the queue and marking their cross, have been known to get married and divorced and give birth to children. (Not all of the above may be strictly true.)

So why are we so averse to politics? Later on in this book we’ll examine some amusing attempts to ‘sex up’ politics, but for now we need to have a think about why people are so turned off it. Is it because we don’t understand it? Is it because the polling booth is a half-mile walk away andEastEndersis on? Or, to misquote poet Adrian Mitchell, do most people ignore most politics because most politics ignores most people?

Some argue that the battle over the centre ground is just not interesting enough, with successive parties watering down their traditional policies in order to make themselves palatable to the electorate. Those who remember the 1980s will know that it was a fiery period for politics – in the Thatcher–Kinnock years, the Left and Right had hardly ever been more polarised. Now that the first decade of the twenty-first century has drawn to a close, though, those old distinctions start to look as if they are no longer applicable, with the two main parties agreeing on so much that the Liberal Democrats seem quite justified in claiming that, in many respects, they offer the radical alternative. Paradoxically, this comes at a time when the media have picked up the baton of a two-party debate again, and so the Lib Dems, with their ratings in the polls looking a little shaky under Nick Clegg, could find themselves squeezed out of the media narrative.

There is also some disengagement between what people vote for and what they get. Nobody actually voted for ‘Tony Blair’ or for ‘Margaret Thatcher’, apart from the few thousand constituents in Sedgefield and Finchley respectively. We all vote for the Member of Parliament who will represent our little corner of the country.

There are 646 constituencies, occasionally messed about with by order of the Boundary Commission, and at a general election or a by-election you go to vote for the member you want to speak up for your area, in theory. The party which gains the most Members is the largest in Parliament and is invited to form a government. Usually (although not always), the party forming the government will have an overall majority, meaning all their MPs add up to more than everybody else’s put together.

The atmosphere in the House of Commons, especially during Prime Minister’s Questions, is very much like that of the hubbub in a school assembly hall when the headmaster can’t keep control. (You are not allowed to call anybody a liar in the House of Commons, but you can get away withalmostanything else – we’ll have a look at that later on.) The 1980s satire of theSpitting Imagesketches, in which unruly MPs threw paper darts and apple cores, sometimes don’t seem a huge exaggeration. So the ordinary voter could be forgiven for watching all this and wondering just what effect his or her cross in the box had. If you voted for the person who came second, it does not matter whether they lost by one single vote or 10,000 – it seems to count for nothing.

Let’s take a look at the different types of voter and their motivation.

1. Bloody-Nosers

Some people make elections, local and national, into a way of commenting on the government’s recent performance – they use them as a vote against the government rather than for anyone in particular. That’s the oft-quoted ‘bloody nose’, such as that given to the Conservative administration of John Major, which lost ten successive by-elections in the 1990s and had a majority of 21 slowly whittled away over five years. Despite the nosebleeds, Major hung on, knowing he was going to lose and desperately hoping something would change for the better. (Harold Macmillan famously said that the greatest problem in politics was ‘Events, dear boy’, and these can work to a government’s advantage, too.) Or there’s that given to Labour in successive local elections in the first decade of the twenty-first century culminating in the absolute drubbing in 2008 which saw them relegated to third place behind the Liberal Democrats for the first time in decades. This was pretty embarrassing for them, especially as they generally go out of their way to pretend the Liberal Democrats don’t exist.

Some voters take the idea rather too literally, such as the chap who swung a punch at John Prescott during the 2001 campaign (by far the most memorable incident of a duller-than-ditchwater election).

2. Single-Issuers

Never underestimate the power of the single-issue voter. Who can forget the ‘Man in the White Suit’, former BBC reporter Martin Bell, bestriding the constituency of Tatton in 1997 and giving the media one of those narratives they love to have during election campaigns? Bell stood as an ‘anti-sleaze’ independent candidate, and wrested the seat from the incumbent Conservative, Neil Hamilton, who had been associated with alleged corruption. Bell’s victory condemned Hamilton and his terrifying wife to a career of promoting themselves in the media. And people often forget that, in the subsequent 2001 election, another single-issue candidate was elected, in the constituency of Wyre Forest – doctor-turned-politician Richard Taylor of Independent Community and Health Concern, who stood successfully on the ticket of saving the local hospital. (Successfully on the basis that he got elected, but sadly he didn’t actually manage to save the hospital. One still has to admire him for trying.)

3. Diehards

There are places in the country where it is said, almost as folklore, that they don’t count the Labour vote, they weigh it: Barnsley, for example. The same is true of the Tory vote in constituencies like Maidstone and Maidenhead. As yet, there is not really anywhere in the country which could describe itself as similarly ‘safe’ for the Liberal Democrats. (They have some seats with large majorities, but don’t ever seem to take them for granted in quite the same way, possibly because the historical precedent isn’t as strong. The same is true for everybody else, from the Greens down to the Monster Raving Loony Party.)

It’s in these ‘safe’ seats (although one could argue that, post-1997, there isn’t necessarily any such thing any more – ‘Labour Gain Hove’, anyone?) that we encounter the Diehard voter. Those whose grandfather and father voted Labour/Tory and who would never dream of voting anything else. At least, that’s what theysay.

There’s evidence of an emerging sub-species of ‘grave-turners’ – those who say: ‘My dad/granddad would turn in his gravebutI’ll be voting Labour/Tory this time round.’ They were seen in force at the 2008 Crewe and Nantwich by-election – even railwaymen, who had sworn to avenge the pillaging of their heritage and livelihood by Thatcher by spitting in the general direction of the Tories, found themselves lured back to the fold. History will judge whether this was the turning point that David Cameron’s Conservatives claimed it was. What is generally accepted, though, is that a lot of previously reliable Labour voters turned against Gordon Brown as a protest against a number of issues and non-issues: the abolition of the 10p tax rate, the rising cost of fuel, the generally worse weather under Labour since 2007 … But were they Diehards who had turned into Bloody-Nosers for one by-election, or did it represent a significant shift of the so-called ‘C2’ vote – Worcester Woman and Essex Man – towards the Tories?

4. Floating voters

Those who don’t know who to vote for. Or, more accurately, those who tell pollsters that they don’t yet know who they are going to vote for. A lot of people feel they are ‘floating voters’ and are considering abstaining because they are aggrieved that none of the parties has really made much of an effort to court their vote. This seems reasonable, but betrays a misunderstanding of the way in which the parties distribute resources. Nobody is going to try very hard to win your vote unless you are in one of the key 100 or so constituencies on which the entire outcome of the general election will hinge.

TheDaily Mail’s impenetrably surreal cartoon ‘Flook’ once had weeks and weeks of strips around the running joke of the ‘last floating voter’ during the 1983 election, culminating in Flook (a strange bear-like creature) being chased by the political monsters (including a two-headed David Steel/David Owen) on polling day itself.

5. Zealots

The party faithful – the first at the polling station that morning, who will then spend the rest of the day on the streets, trying to tease voters out. They will already have spent the previous few weeks zipping around putting leaflets through doors and canvassing opinion on doorsteps. They usually have to resist the temptation to take up the offers of cups of tea, because: a) there is always the slight suspicion at the back of their minds that it’s a delaying tactic by someone who intends to vote for the opposition, and who’s been given instructions to waylay them by means of Earl Grey and shortbread biscuits, and b) the inevitable bladder crisis will rear its head after about three such stops, and there is nothing more likely to put someone off voting for their party than seeing someone in a blue/red/yellow/green rosette (delete as applicable) caught short by the roadside.

6. Tactical voters

How do you vote tactically? In a nutshell, a tactical vote is a voteagainstsomeone rather thanforsomeone. It involves a situation where you would die before you would see the candidate from Party A getting into Parliament, but you are in a constituency where your preferred candidate, from Party B, does not have a snowflake’s chance in hell of getting in. Therefore you transfer your allegiance, in name only, to Party C, who are in second place and therefore best placed to unseat the oleaginous chancer whose face you cannot bear to look at for a moment longer. The singer and activist Billy Bragg, well known as a Labour voter, has referred in public to voting tactically for the Liberal Democrats in the past. In some cities where neighbouring constituencies have different two-horse races (e.g. Labour/Lib Dem in one and Conservative/Lib Dem in another), voters make pacts to vote tactically for one another’s parties, uniting against a common opponent.

7. The confused

Which is most of us, if we’re honest.

Politics is shifting. If you grew up in the 1980s, you knew exactly where you were. The Tory government was led by a hectoring, resolute, steel-hearted woman who wanted to privatise everything, turn the UK into a giant American airbase and crush the unions, and the Labour opposition was led by a ginger Welshman with a propensity for falling over on beaches, supporting unilateral disarmament and losing elections. There was also a slightly comical third party led by two Davids, one of whom was actually taller than the other but was made to seem smaller bySpitting Image. You had the vague idea that Shirley Williams was in there somewhere too – they seemed a decent lot but, frankly, there was more chance of Bogchester Rovers winning the cup than of their ever holding power. And there was the Ecology party, an early incarnation of the Green party, who were painted as nutcases. Nobody would ever seriously advocate ‘green’ policies as a way of winning an election, would they? On the fringes, too, were the National Front. Nobody would ever take a bunch of right-wing racists seriously enough to interview them on the radio or treat them as a serious party, surely?

Fast-forward to the twenty-first century, and where are we? A nice young man with an earring and an open-necked shirt turns up on the doorstep, smiling and telling you he’s in favour of getting more women, gay people and ethnic minorities into Parliament, engaging pupils with education, supporting the local state school, making the city a nuclear-free zone, being carbon neutral and saving the local hospital. You nod and say yes, you’ve always voted Labour so he can count on your support. At this point his face falls, he pulls back his jacket to reveal the hitherto-concealed blue rosette and tells you in a somewhat pained voice that he is the Conservative party candidate.

Everyone is now squabbling over the centre ground. If your political allegiances were forged in the white heat of a decade in which political opinion was at its most polarised since the Second World War, you do find yourself struggling with this concept, and nodding sagely whenever anyone quotes the old cliché that ‘there’s nothing to choose between the parties’.

That’s not strictly true, of course – any MP, Parliamentary candidate or party activist worth their salt could give you, off the top of their head, five ways in which their party differs from the others. At least, they should be able to. But theperception, which is what matters, is increasingly that ‘they’re all the same’. At some point in the last fifteen years, every main party has elected a youngish, sharp-suited leader with an affable veneer, the air of a middle manager and a liking for matey banter, saying ‘y’know’ and strategically dropping aitches. Show a photograph of Nick Clegg to the man or woman in the street and a sizeable proportion of them will think he’s David Cameron. (Show them a photograph of any other member of the Liberal Democrat front bench and they probably struggle to think anything at all, unless it’s Lembit Opik, who’s the only one most people can recognise because they may have seen him cavorting inHellomagazine with a Cheeky Girl.)

There is evidence that the parties are aware of the problem and that, whenever possible, the opposition does its best to put ‘clear blue water’ between them and the government, and vice versa. The water is inevitably muddied, though, by the presence of rebels on both sides – the Iraq war, tuition fees and the abolition of the 10p tax rate being just some examples in recent years of votes where the force of the Labour rebels threatened to defeat the government.

Also, there’s a fair point often made by opposition parties, which is that it isn’t reasonable to expect them to present clear, committed breakdowns of their tax plans when an election might still be years away. That sort of thing should be in a manifesto, and you can take them to task if it’s not.

8. Spoilers

One way of indicating your lack of engagement in the political process is actively to mark your paper in some way other than the traditional X, or other sign of ‘unambiguous intent’, to quote the voting regulations. This can range from writing ‘IDIOTS’ or ‘WASTE OF SPACE’ next to every candidate’s name to scrawling ‘COME THE REVOLUTION YOU’LL BE FIRST AGAINST THE WALL’ across the entire ballot slip. This might all at first sound rather childish, but a spoilt paper has to be counted. Parliamentary election rules (Schedule 1 to the Representation of the People Act 1983) stipulate that ‘public notice’ must be given of the number of rejected ballot papers. This is usually taken to mean given in writing, but such notice may also be given as part of the announcement of the results by the returning officer. There are corresponding rules for local elections. A large number of spoilt ballots in any one constituency might send out a message about the weakness or unpalatability of the selection of candidates on offer.

Of course, you may end up kicking yourself if someone wins by two votes. The seat of Winchester, in the 1997 election, was won by Mark Oaten for the Liberal Democrats with a majority of two. The defeated Conservative, Gerry Malone, successfully challenged the result on a technicality and a by-election was called – which Oaten won with a majority of 21,556. (It would be satisfying to say that Oaten had the last laugh, although his enforced resignation from the Lib Dems’ Home Office brief a few years later, after admitting shenanigans with male escorts, rather prevents one from doing so.)

9. Splitters

A particular sub-category of Spoilers (and a spoilt ballot is how it is counted) like to make their views known by marking a cross against more than one candidate having been instructed not to do so. The Glasgow East by-election in 2008 apparently had a number of spoilt papers on which people had marked both the Labour and the SSP (Scottish Socialist Party) candidate. Confusion, or divided loyalties? Things may have been confused further by the fact that the two candidates shared a surname (Margaret Curran and Frances Curran). Splitting does no actual good beyond enabling you to square things with your conscience – there’s no such thing as half a vote – so it’s up to you.

10. Abstainers

Not voting – is it the coward’s way? The only problem is that, unless people ‘actively abstain’ (by spoilt ballot), there is no way of telling the difference between a) the high-minded, who wish to keep their political fingers clean by not allowing their pencil to sully the box of any of the reprobates on offer, b) the disillusioned, who distrust not just the candidates on offer but the entire political system, c) the lazy, who are aware there is an election happening but would rather put their feet up in front ofCoronation Streetand d) the ignorant, who haven’t got a clue what’s going on and wonder if people are walking around with rosettes on for a horse show. They all count as a non-vote, all contributing towards the 39 per cent, or whatever it turns out to be, of the population who are cited as not voting. So the best way of doing it is to be a Spoiler – see above.

So there we have it. Chances are you’ll have been in one of the above categories, or you’re about to get the vote and wondering which you will fall into. So where will your vote go?

Who are they? The political parties in the UK

Labour

In government since 1997, having won a record three consecutive terms. Founded in 1900, having grown out of the trade union and socialist movements, and traditionally regarded as the party on the left of British politics – although Tony Benn and others would have a few words to say about that these days. Two long periods of opposition in the twentieth century (1951–64 and 1979–97) resulted in a lot of soul-searching, and the party now represents a more centrist, social-democratic position. Since 2008, it could be argued that Labour has become even friendlier towards big business, and many long-term supporters feel the party has betrayed its roots. It has not taken long for initial excitement with Labour to turn to disenchantment.

Conservative

Known as the Tory party, and also the subject of a period of redefinition following a bruising extended period in opposition. Founded in the nineteenth century and traditionally a right-wing party, it could now be seen as centre-right. They are in an odd position, ideologically – what some see as support for individualism and the fight against the ‘nanny state’ others see as being out of touch and wanting to maintain the status quo at the expense of progress. Struggling to shake off the spectre of Thatcherism, the party has adopted policies which would have been unthinkable in the 1980s: an engagement with poverty and social division, and open support for civil partnerships. But some commentators feel the disagreements on Europe which plagued John Major in the 1990s have not gone away, and could come back to haunt a future Conservative administration.

Liberal Democrats

Until the 1920s, the Liberal party was one of the two major parties in British politics, but it was eased out by the rise of Labour. A Liberal party, in some form, traditionally occupied the centre ground of British politics throughout the rest of the twentieth century. The Liberal Democrats were formed out of the former SDP/Liberal alliance in 1988. Continually frustrated by the media portraying UK politics as a two-horse race, and often struggling for airtime, the ‘Lib Dems’ have nevertheless made some bold advances. They always tend to do better in local and European elections – and in by-elections – than in general elections. Their supporters would say their centrist position encourages support from both Left and Right and, indeed, that they want to erode those old definitions and ‘isms’ – their detractors would claim that they attract equal hostility from both sides!

And it’s only fair to mention a few of the others.

The next biggest in terms of seats is the Democratic Unionist Party, founded by the shy and retiring Reverend Ian Paisley, which wants to maintain the cultural ties between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Fifth biggest is the Scottish Nationalist Party, which does what it says on the tin – it wants independence for Scotland. Devolution appears to have gone part of the way towards keeping the latter happy, but their MPs still sit in Westminster. Sinn Féin is the major left-wing Irish Republican party. Plaid Cymru stands for the establishment of an independent Welsh state within the European Union, and has a handful of MPs. The UK Independence Party currently has no representation at Westminster and sports possibly one of the least imaginative of all party logos, featuring a pound symbol on a plain background with the party name, but has had eloquent spokesmen in Nigel Farage and subsequently in Lord Pearson. Respect is a coalition created in 2004 out of issues around the Iraq conflict, and has since broadened its remit, while the Green Party has members in the European Parliament and the London Assembly, and have been poised for a while to take their first Westminster seat. Putting it all into perspective is the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, standing, in its own words, for ‘Insanity, Satire, Pragmatism, Existentialism’.

Here is one possible wording for a sticky label for ballot papers, suggested by the ‘Abstain 05’ campaign during the 2005 general election: ‘This vote is an abstention. I deeply mistrust the current political system such that I cannot cast a vote today in favour of a particular candidate and I am therefore abstaining. This should be a wake-up call for all politicians who think they can treat the electorate in the way they have done over the past few years or more. I will continue to abstain until I feel I can again trust one or more of the political leaders.’[1]

None of the Above?

There is an argument for a ‘none of the above’ or NOTA choice – or indeed the RON (Re-Open Nominations) so beloved of student councils, although the administrative headache a victory for this category would produce hardly bears thinking about. Never mind the confusion which could arise if there actually was a candidate called Ron. And how many people would actually trudge through the pouring rain to their local polling station just to say that none of the options on offer was any good? And what would happen if NOTA got the most votes?

If you really do find all the proffered candidates unpalatable, here are a few suggestions from some useful sources.

The campaign ‘Positive Abstention’ lobbies for positive abstention votes to be included on ballot papers and in election statistics. This may appeal to you. (www.positiveabstention.com)