How the Political Parties Exclude the General Public

By Peter Watt, former General Secretary of the Labour Party

George Galloway was right. I can hardly believe that I have typed that but on at least one thing he really is right. In his post-election interviews he said that:

“There are very large numbers of people completely disenchanted and alienated from the political process and from the mainstream political parties”.

And he is spot on. The problem is that the mainstream political parties can’t see it or choose not to. On the whole the big three UK Parties operate as a closed shop. They talk the language of reaching out to communities and engagement but they don’t really mean it. Instead they operate a series of cosy closed and highly secretive cabals that suit everyone involved and no one who isn’t. That may sound harsh but it is pretty accurate.

Let’s take selecting candidates for election which is absolutely a closed shop. Candidates are selected from a tiny group of activists who have to preform strange rituals to impress other activists in order to try and be selected. You have to stop having much of a life outside of politics in order to focus your efforts. You have to endure endless and often pointless meetings held in bizarre locations and appear to enjoy them. You have to learn how to access blocks of flats with entry phones in order to leaflets that no one reads. And you have to make sure that you learn the language of the political elite, the lexicon of the politically initiated within your chosen political tribe. And all of this just to be considered. The chances are that the whole thing will end up being stitched up in some way or other anyway and your best bet is that you are the beneficiary of said stitch-up.

"The problem is that the mainstream political parties can’t see it or choose not to. On the whole the big three UK Parties operate as a closed shop. They talk the language of reaching out to communities and engagement but they don’t really mean it. Instead they operate a series of cosy closed and highly secretive cabals that suit everyone involved and no one who isn’t. That may sound harsh but it is pretty accurate."

Or let’s take rational argument and debate which cannot happen within the cabal, in fact has to be stamped out. Put simply, if your side’s front bench says something then it must be true and has to be supported. If the other side’s front bench say it then it is a lie, worse a self-interested lie and must be opposed. So Labour opposes Free Schools because they are a Tory policy; even though for all intents and purposes they are academy schools which Labour introduced. Labour opposes the current welfare reform legislation because it is ‘Tory’ reform and therefore bad; even though Labour would have passed something very similar. The Tories accused Labour of cutting equipment from our troops and say it is typical of their attitude towards our armed forces; and then in Government scrap our aircraft carriers. They condemned Labour for blocking any referendum on EU treaties as evidence of their rampant Europhilia; and then in Government block a referendum on changes to an EU treaty.

Or take policy development within parties which is essentially a fix. Structures are created and the language of inclusion and openness is used to justify them. But in reality the process is exclusive, deliberately designed to make involvement more difficult. Certainly more difficult if you are not in the cabal, all but impossible if you are one of the 96% of the population who are not members of a political party.

In fact the party machines have a language and culture that justifies this exclusion. Member engagement is seen a more important than engaging the public. Allowing the public a glimpse of the inner workings of political life is fought tooth and nail by activists who want to preserve their privileges. So attempts to engage the public end up being barely that at all. They are grudging and desperately unattractive offers to the public to visit the Party rather than the Party going out to visit the public. The result are misnamed ‘open days’ at Conferences which you have to apply to in advance. Or handfuls of ‘real people’ being hand-picked to hear a speech after being carefully vetted for suitability. It’s not engagement at all and in fact just reinforces the sense of separation.

My favourite comment from party members is the one about ‘I did/I didn’t hear that on the doorstep’. As if the odd and snatched conversations between a party canvasser and a member of the public is a rational way to gauge opinion! But to hear activists talk you’d think that there is no purer and efficacious way to ascertain what is really going on out there than knocking on the doors of total strangers whilst wearing a rosette and carrying a clipboard!

So it all ends up in a closed and cosy world that benefits a tiny proportion of the 4% of electors who choose to join a political party. This tiny, exclusive and closed elite have developed a system that justifies its own existence to itself. That has a collective belief in its own sense of superiority. That creates jobs and elected positions from within its own ranks. And that is alienated from the vast majority of the public. But they can’t see it. And to be honest even if they could they wouldn’t want to change it because they like it just the way it is.

It’s why there attempts to look in touch look so desperately staid and inauthentic. Ed Miliband might think that buying sausage rolls makes him look in touch; most people suspect that he dumped them when he got round the corner. David Cameron might think that playing badminton makes him look like action man; most people thought he looked a prat.

But it can’t go on. A healthy democracy needs healthy political parties and right about now we have sick and dying parties. And in order to become healthy they will need to open up. Selections need to be open to the public not closed as must policy development. In fact central control generally has to reduce so that innovation and creativity can thrive. And the emphasis should be on being in partnership with electors not being their master. It will certainly take a damn sight more than any of the so called reforms that the main parties have tried so far.

The big political parties are seen as irrelevant by most voters. For now however they tend to vote for them come election time, even if unenthusiastically. But as Bradford West shows you can’t take even that for granted forever.


Reproduced with acknowledgements to Dale & Co., the current affairs mega blog by Iain Dale & Friends

The Biggest Lie in British Politics

By Johann Hari

British politics today is dominated by a lie. This lie is making it significantly more likely you will lose your job, your business, or your home. The lie gives a false explanation for how we came to be in this crisis, and prescribes a medicine that will worsen our disease. Yet it is hardly being challenged.

Here’s the lie. We are in a debt crisis. Our national debt is dangerously and historically high. We are being threatened by the international bond markets. The way out is to eradicate our deficit rapidly. Only that will restore “confidence”, and therefore economic growth. Every step of this program is false, and endangers you.

Let’s start with a fact that should be on billboards across the land. As a proportion of GDP, Britain’s national debt has been higher than it is now for 200 of the past 250 years. Read that sentence again. Check it on any graph by any historian. Since 1750, there have only been two brief 30-year periods when our debt has been lower than it is now. If we are “bust” today, as George Osborne has claimed, then we have almost always been bust. We were bust when we pioneered the Industrial Revolution. We were bust when we ruled a quarter of the world. We were bust when we beat the Nazis. We were bust when we built the NHS. Or is it George Osborne’s economics that are bust?

Our debt is not high by historical standards, and it is not high by international standards. For example, Japan’s national debt is three times bigger than ours, and they are still borrowing at good rates.

David Cameron claims that, despite these facts, they need to cut our debt by slashing our spending because the bond markets demand it. If they do not obey, then our national credit rating will be downgraded, and we will have to pay much higher interest on our debt. But here’s the flaw in that plan. That’s not what the bond markets say. Not at all. Professor Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose predictions have consistently proved right through this crisis, says Cameron is conjuring up “invisible bond vigilantes” who “don’t exist.” Who is the bond market really punishing? It’s the countries that cut too fast, and so kill their economic growth. The last two nations to be down-graded were Ireland and Spain, who followed Cameron’s script to the letter.

It turns out that cutting our debt rapidly doesn’t cause an increase in “confidence” and so save the economy. Professor Krugman mocks this idea by calling it “The Confidence Fairy,” and goes through the historical record to show she doesn’t exist. Cutting doesn’t create fairy-magic. No: it has a very different effect.

Here’s what we learned during the Great Depression, when our view of economics was revolutionized by John Maynard Keynes. In a recession, private individuals like you and me, perfectly sensibly, cut back our spending. We go out less, we buy less, we save more. This causes a huge fall in private demand, and with it a huge fall in economic activity. If, at the very same time, the government cuts back, then overall demand collapses, and a recession becomes a depression. That’s why the government has to do something counter-intuitive. It has to borrow and spend more, to apply jump-leads to the economy. This prevents economic collapse. Instead of spending a fortune on dealing with mass unemployment and economic break-down, with all the misery that causes, it spends the money on restoring growth. Keynes called it “the paradox of thrift”: when the people spend less, the government has to spend more.

Wherever it has been tried, it has worked. Look at the last Great Depression. The Great Crash of 1929 was followed by a US President, Herbert Hoover, who did everything Cameron demands. He cut spending and paid off the debt. The recession grew and grew. Then Franklin Roosevelt was elected and listened to Keynes. He ramped up spending – and unemployment fell, and the economy swelled. Then in 1936 he started listening to the Cameron debt-shriekers of his day. The result? The economy collapsed again. It was only the gigantic spending of the Second World War that finally ended it.

It is working now. There are enough countries in the world trying enough different economic solutions that we examine them like laboratories. which countries have come out of this recession fastest? They are the ones like South Korea, which have had by far the biggest stimulus packages, paid for with (yes) higher debt. Which countries have fallen furthest and shattered most severely? The ones that tried to pay down their debts immediately with huge cuts.

Indeed, there’s an irony here. It turns out that if all you do is fixate on paying your debt now now now, and so you smother your economic growth, you will end up not being able to pay your debts off anyway. That’s what just happened to our nearest neighbor Ireland, may she rest in peace. And it’s what has happened throughout British history. Professors Victoria Chick and Ann Pettifor conducted a detailed study of the last ten recessions, and they found that consistently “fiscal consolidation increases rather than reduces the level of public debt as a share of GDP.” Think of it this way. It’s as if tomorrow you became so panicked about your mortgage that you decided to pay it all off in one year, by ceasing to buy food and water. You get sick, and your house gets repossessed.

So debt isn’t the problem. Debt is part of the cure. The facts suggest need to spend more, not less, to get the economy back to life – and pay back the debt in the good times, when we will be able to afford it.

I am not a doctrinaire defender of the last Labour government. I think Tony Blair should be in prison, and Gordon Brown will be damned by history for his role in deregulating the banks – the real cause of this crisis. But to claim that this crisis was caused by Labour “racking up debt” is simply false. When the Great Crash hit, Britain had the second-lowest debt in the G7 club of leading economies. To react to a recession by increasing spending, and so keeping the economy afloat, is the only rational response. The real criticism is that they didn’t go anything like far enough, and now Ed Miliband’s Labour Party is now too cowardly to defy the false conventional wisdom and make the case for fiscal stimulus, instead promising merely slower, smarter cuts.

The real reason why David Cameron is imposing these massive cuts has nothing to do with the national debt. It is because he regards himself as, in his words, “the child of Thatcher”, and he wants to pursue her agenda harder and faster than she ever dreamed. He can do the difficult job of selling that to the British people if he wishes – but he should stop doing it on the basis of a swollen, suppurating lie.

For further updates on this issue, you can follow Johann on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101 and listen to his podcast here.

Q: When is a racist not a racist? A: When he is in your party

Liberal Democrat MP Mark Hunter has challenged Ed Miliband to condemn the racially divisive tactics used by Phil Woolas in his General Election campaign in Oldham East and Saddleworth.

Mark Hunter said:

“It is becoming more and more apparent as the weeks pass that Ed Miliband just doesn’t have the clout within his party to show some leadership and admit that Woolas was wrong. If he did he’d be shot down in flames by other Labour MPs.

“I was genuinely shocked that Miliband didn’t make a statement as soon as he became leader that this sort of racially divisive politics will not be tolerated.

“For him to then make the monumental misjudgement of appointing Woolas to his frontbench team speaks volumes.

“If Labour is to draw a line under this scandal, then Ed Miliband needs to shout from the rooftops that the kind of campaigning used by Phil Woolas - intended to ‘get the white folk angry’ - can never again be any part of Labour politics.


Reproduced with acknowledgements to LibDems.org.uk.