I went the other day to London Metropolitan University, the former North London Polytechnic, about a mile north of Granita, the restaurant where Tony Blair and Gordon Brown decided how Britain would be governed after the 1997 election, and about a mile south of the Finsbury Park Mosque, where many British terrorists allegedly received their spiritual education. I wanted to talk to the students who won’t be voting on 5 May.
The Blair years have been marked by mass abstention, and it has become a cliche among right-thinking left-leaning people to pretend that the citizenry is as political as it has ever been; what has gone wrong is that citizens’ righteous concerns are being disregarded by an isolated and complacent political class. Refusing to vote is an informed protest against a closed system. The real action is at Countryside Alliance and Stop the War marches and through consumer boycotts of genetically modified foods.
I wish I could say that I found evidence of such unrepresented passion. It wasn’t a scientific sample and I am sure the university has many bright students, but those non-voters I spoke to didn’t let loose a stream of compellingly reasoned invective about the failings of democracy. They shrugged and grunted. Those who said they were going to vote were not much better. None had anger against or enthusiasm for a political party. I wouldn’t put money on them making the Herculean effort to take five minutes out of their busy lives to visit a polling station.
As the rain fell, I resented wasting time with incurious and lazy people and became more depressed when I realised that there were millions more where they came from.
In 1997, the turnout was 71 per cent, the lowest since the end of the Second World War. But that seemed an outbreak of mass political hysteria by 2001, when only 59 per cent voted. For the first time, more people had not voted than did vote for the winning Labour Party. The younger you were, the less likely you were to vote. A mere 39 per cent of 18- to 21-year-olds voted.
The betting markets are predicting that this time turnout will rise slightly. If you compare the local and regional elections of the 1997 and 2001 parliaments, the argument runs, you see turnouts rising from the laughable (just under 20 per cent in one by-election in the late 1990s) to the merely disgraceful. Gamblers I know are risking good money on betting that turnout will rise to 65 per cent. Even if this peak is scaled, that would still leave at least one-third of the adult population outside democratic life – and in reality many more.
Turnout figures are proportions only of those registered to vote. In fact, thousands, perhaps millions, aren’t even on the electoral roll. Officials in Preston report that the electoral roll has fallen by 17.5 per cent. They do not have the faintest idea why 14,000 people have vanished. Maybe they have left, maybe they can’t be bothered to register; no one can say.
The results of the 2001 census meanwhile continue to defy rational explanation. This is a country where cameras blink at every street and motorway, credit-card companies can track where and when customers have shopped, and the police can locate your position from your mobile phone. Yet the simple task of counting every person on these islands, which Britain had managed to do since 1801, was beyond the statisticians. The count fell one million short of the expected total and most of the disappeared were young men. All kinds of explanations were put forward. Statisticians claimed that they had emigrated – but why had no one noticed that a million young men had gone abroad? And where had they gone?
A soothing explanation has been offered ever since voters began to vanish across the advanced democratic world. Capitalism has triumphed, class conflicts are over and most people are richer than they have ever been. When we live in such a happy world, politics can only be about competing ways to micromanage the status quo. Why shouldn’t people let politicians get on with it? The sociological hypothesis behind this complacency is called “public choice theory”. It is a very capitalist theory, arguing that people determine their behaviour by constantly assessing profit and loss. In an election, there is a greater risk that you will be run over on the way to the polling station than that your vote will change the outcome, so it makes sense to stay away and forget about civic duty and the public interest. The theory is the sociological cousin of the “rational market hypothesis”, which held that whatever price the stock market quoted for a company must reflect the company’s real value, because investors could not be fooled for long. That hypothesis, which won Nobel prizes for economics, took the mother of all kickings when the dotcom bubble burst.
Less far-fetched and far more disconcerting is a view I have had put to me by a couple of television executives: that politics is a dying form of entertainment, like poetry, the theatre or opera. The idea is nowhere near as frivolous as it sounds. The golden age of representative democracy ran from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. Huge audiences went to hear the great public speakers from Gladstone through to Bevan, in part because these men were as good at conveying emotion as the best actors, and in part because there wasn’t a great deal else to do in Leicester, Cardiff or Wick. Attending a political meeting was as much an amusement as an opportunity for enlightenment and debate.
Radio and television destroyed the political meeting, but that did not matter, because the number of channels was limited and their controllers had to meet public-service standards and provide serious news coverage. Now we have 300 channels and all but limitless opportunities to find entertainment on the internet, from our mobiles and from the new games technologies. Our social situation is summed up by Shaun of the Dead, the British comedy-horror of last year, which showed the hero switching channels every time the news came on and failing to learn until it was almost too late that Britain was being invaded by zombies.
Politics can’t compete in this world. Like the serious theatre, its audience is composed of obsessive anoraks and those who trudge along because they think they must. Those programmes that give space to politics try to fight falling ratings by imitating successful formats: humiliation television, with Jeremy Paxman as Big Brother; or celebrity trivia, with Piers Morgan and Amanda Platell as Ant and Dec. I doubt even these debased tactics will work in the long run. At the moment, the BBC and the up- and mid-market press are covering the election because they feel they are duty-bound to do so. They know that most of the audience is not overly interested. The long-term logic of the market is that they should bow to the sovereign consumer or accept the long-term logic that the consumer will go elsewhere.
In both journalism and politics, it would be healthier to face up to what is happening and try to preserve a serious space where all would be free to congregate if they wished. Look at the postal voting scandal. The suffragettes fought and died for women’s right to take part in secret ballots: today, it has been compromised. Brutish husbands can now stand over their wives and tell them how to vote. Elections have been corrupted – for the sake of persuading a few idle people to participate in a democratic process that they are too silly to cherish. Better to protect democracy until they learn, the hard way if necessary, that if they don’t vote, their lives will be dominated by those people who do.
Eight ways to revive democracy
Participatory budgeting. Started in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1989. Regional and neighbourhood meetings discuss investment priorities; citizens then present a city-wide budget to the legislature.
Citizens’ assembly. Started in British Columbia, 2004. Assembly of 160 randomly selected citizens makes recommendations (in this case, on the local voting system), which then go to a referendum.
Community policing. Started in Chicago 20 years ago. Monthly police-community meetings in 285 areas work out priorities for action to improve public safety and review progress. Each month, about 5,000 attend; participation rates higher in poor areas.
Town meetings. Started in New England in the 19th century (and earlier in ancient Athens). Open meetings that still have powers to raise taxes. Attendance of 26 per cent in Vermont.
Initiative. Used in Switzerland and some US states. Citizens collect a required number of signatures (typically 8 per cent of electors) to propose a new measure. This then goes to a ballot or debate in legislature.
Recall. Most famously used in California, where it led to the removal in 2003 of Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s predecessor as state governor. Citizens can force a vote on an official’s continuation in office with a petition signed by, say, 25 per cent of voters.
Positive abstention. Used in Russia, parts of eastern Europe and some US states. Voters who do not wish to support any candidates on the ballot paper can put their cross against “none of the above”.
Deliberation day. Proposed in the US. National holiday declared two weeks before major election. Neighbourhood meetings discuss central campaign issues throughout the day in groups of 15 and then in groups of 300. Those who turn up get $150 if they vote in the election.
Extracted from Beyond the Ballot: 57 democratic
innovations from around the world by Graham Smith, out this month from the Power inquiry (www.powerinquiry.org)
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