The counts are over. The trestle tables are stowed away in the town hall cupboard that is kept for no other purpose. The mayor and officials have gone to bed. Somewhere in the streets, the ex-candidates, winner and losers, stare at each other in wild surmise. What happens next?
Winning an election is quite different from managing the national estate once in power. One is a wholly inadequate preparation for the other. As a candidate, you listen to the woes on the doorstep, make pledges, and shake hands with the sincerity of someone who hopes to be given the chance to carry them out.
As an elected member, you are pitchforked into the pile of malodorous matters left behind by the last incumbent. When you lift the corner of the carpet to find the hidden secrets, the bell rings for yet another division, another chance to leave your stain on history, and so on, into the next election.
Politics is marketing when we need leadership
Today may prove itself to be a turning point, the election to change all elections and the time when we British realise that, if democracy means anything at all, it requires something more than the chance to choose the next tenant of 10 Downing Street. “Unhappy is the land that has no heroes”, mourns the assistant in Brecht’s Galileo. “No”, replies Galileo. “Unhappy is the land that has the need of heroes.”
We have run out of heroes. We have figureheads who speak the language taught by PR officers, harvested from focus groups. They are not saviours. Party politics has become like any other kind of marketing. It follows the three basic processes taught by the Harvard Business School: market research, maximising assets, and marketing.
Policy determined by focus group
It has an easy-to-read instruction manual. You assemble a representative sample of humanity, whether by canvassing or coffee mornings. You ask for their wish lists, tabulate the answers and mix them into your draft manifesto. You run the document through your team of special advisers to weed out the risky ideas and then present it as your party’s programme for government. You cost it, elaborately, to leave the impression of due diligence and candour and sell it to your shareholders, the electorate. Send out the sales teams!
This is a tried-and-tested model. It meets the first criterion of a democracy. It reflects a cross-section of opinion, which is a plausible substitute for the ‘will of the people’. It produces a winning team to run the country and a losing opposition to keep it in check.
Treating symptoms rather than causes
As an electoral method, however, this approach has its limitations. It picks up the symptom rather than the cause, the cough before the cancer. In the 2024 by-election in Uxbridge, more citizens complained about ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) than about air pollution. Party manifestos, compiled from such market research, reflect the grudge and the short-term fix, rather than the long-term solution. “It has been said”, stated Winston Churchill, “that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried”.
Today may be different. This fourth of July may be as memorable as the one across the Atlantic in 1776. It may witness the decline and fall of market-led democracy. The signs are there. A record-breaking Tory victory in 2019 will, if polls are correct, be turned into a record-breaking Labour victory in 2024. The lost special adviser, Dominic Cummings, compared Boris Johnson to a wonky shopping trolley. But is the nation shopping around for better bargains?
Will 2024 be different?
The whole 2024 campaign has been an oddity. Typically, the governing team seeks to defend its record against a crusading opposition. This government under Rishi Sunak has asked us (after 14 years!) to forget its record and to focus instead upon its questionable plans for the future. Labour has dropped the Corbynistas and promised not to raise personal taxes. Keir Starmer insists that he has changed his party. Perhaps he has. They are the new conservatives, sound on money, weak on anything else.
Neither side is seeking to occupy ‘the higher ground’. In the elections of 2017 and 2019, the battles were over Brexit, sovereignty and ‘levelling up’. These ambitions have since been forgotten or ignored. Few on the Conservative side now claim that Britain will soon become the Singapore of the North Atlantic, a world leader in advanced technology, and a beacon of freedom in a naughty world.
Reality is biting
Instead, Britain is at the bottom of the G7 league for inward investment, chastened by the UN for its treatment of immigrants, and at loggerheads with the European Court of Human Rights. The UK has elected to exclude itself from EU-sponsored scientific research programmes and its university students can no longer take part in the Erasmus network. Its reliability as a trading partner has been called into question by Brexit, and its wider reputation will take a long time to recover.
This should be time for national self-reflection. This should be the election when we consider the direction we wish to travel and the future we want to build. We should be listening to advice, comparing models and studying history. In the late 1970s, with the Cold War still at its most freezing, former prime minister Edward Heath was a member of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues, chaired by former German chancellor Willy Brandt, which produced the report North-South: A Programme for Survival (1980), “Arguably the most comprehensive and solutions-oriented analysis of critical global economic issues to date”, concerning the distribution of the world’s resources and warned of our current migration crisis.
Key issues are being ignored
In contrast, we are in danger of forgetting the 2022 Conference on Climate Change in Glasgow (COP 26) and backing away from its pledges. Global heating, Brexit, our hack-prone telecommunications infrastructure, the impact of AI and other important matters are barely being discussed in the party debates, except on the fringes. These topics appear too big and controversial for the shopping lists.
The public mood, however, is changing. Audiences are sceptical. Politicians are on the defensive. Their replies are swamped with statistics, which can be read as a sign of defeat. Ill-conceived government schemes, such as sending immigrants to Rwanda, have turned into vote-losers. Their pledges are not believed. The way ahead is murky. Apathy looms.
People do care about the issues
In streets around the country, however, protest demonstrations continue week by week. Thousands march in support of a ceasefire in Gaza, to stop oil, to rebel against extinction, to save the NHS, or to support Ukraine. Online, activist groups crowd-fund their appeals to the High Court to challenge self-evident injustices, from the scandal of the Royal Mail’s sub-postmasters to the pollution of the waterways.
Parliament is in danger of losing its pre-eminent place as the nation’s debating chamber. What happens next? How can we transform a market-led system into one which prepares and plans for our national future at a far deeper level? How can we widen our discussions to include the former estates, such as the universities, the law societies, the social services, trade unions and the churches? We ignore specialist opinion at our peril.
While the polls indicate a decisive result in the election, there is evidence of much uncertainty. We have been through some stormy years and lost our sense of direction. We do not expect much from the incoming government, whatever it may be, but the chance to steady our ship.
At the next election bar one, however, we must decide where we want to go and what sort of society we hope to build. To be or not to be, that is still the question.
