Elections: we deserve better

As the negotiations continue to form our next government, what are we to make of an election process where nothing was what it seemed – except that the exit polls were pretty accurate and correctly forecast the first Green Party seat in Westminster?

The message the electorate sent to the body politic, and to the mindlessly partisan media, was ‘we deserve better’. Better system, better choice of candidates, better commentariat to help us think through the choices that really matter – e.g. defending the (still) defenceless economy from the barbarian hoards of currency speculators, and working out how to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions in a way that increases rather than slashes and burns the resilience and conviviality of our communities.

In a pre-election debate on the relative merits of the party manifestos, the students on the Forum’s Leadership for Sustainable Development Masters came to the same conclusion. They were asked to fillet the party promises from a sustainability perspective and to discuss the political process in general. Here is a flavour of an energetic and thoughtful discussion.

How many people would read the manifestos with the care the students were asked to do? Of the 30 million voters probably only a handful, so why are they so long and detailed? How many policies would be put into action? Some, but wasn’t the point of the manifestos to give a flavour of the partiess’ approach to policy, rather than write out a full prescription for government? A lot of the policy detail was similar, while the ideologies behind them were different and not always explicit. Students found the manifestos to be defensively and cleverly written to cloak potentially controversial ideas from detailed scrutiny by voters, other parties and the media. Wasn’t this a bad habit, brought forward from the days when manifestos appeared in print only and were discontinued and biodegraded long before the government ran its term? In these digital days every word is a couple of clicks away for anyone wanting to check it out, making a virtue of blandness and necessity of using all the key words.

Were the leader debates a good thing? Well, yes and no, the students concluded. Yes, because the campaign was galvanised, and made it more interesting. No because it became an electoral reality show with an edge of cruelty. Who would slip up and show their vulnerability to the sword of another? Where were the women? What is it about the process that is so unappealing to them? Or, indeed, to many men? Was the rise and stall of Cleggomania a fabrication of the media – desperate for a different story to fill multiple pages for several days? When the students in turn ‘defended’ each manifesto for its sustainability content, they found that, once in role, it was easy to regress into cheap debating points rather than argue content and logic, to be theatrical and to lie when in a corner. Does that mean a certain type of person is attracted to politics, perpetuating the truism widely shared but never overcome, that what you have to say to be elected is different from what you have to do once in power?

With such a tight focus on the party leaders, what does that mean for our form of representative democracy? Wouldn’t many voters be confused to find the names Clegg, Brown and Cameron absent from their ballot papers, with many largely unknown people competing to represent the voters’ interests in each constituency? How clear are we about the difference between a representative democracy and a participatory one? Have the boundaries been fudged by the perpetual recourse of all parties to opinion polls, focus groups and other means of feeling the national pulse between elections? Doesn’t this interfere with the relationship between the elected member of parliament and their constituents? What is stopping politicians exercising their wise judgement on behalf of constituents they know well?

There were many views on this last point, ranging from the debate-strangling use of the party whip on parliamentary votes to the undue influence of the media, corporate interests, and the money markets on the democratic process. We contemplated the fact that we seem to have the worst of all worlds – our democracy is neither representative nor participatory, but rather monitory, in that everyone is monitoring everyone else, by poll, by social media, by targets, by their behaviour. Monitoring for a slip up, a missed target, a failure, a weakness, a scandal. Gordon Brown’s gaffe with Mrs Duffy was an exemplar of a monitory black hole, when everyone was monitoring what everyone was saying and doing as a result. Our attention is atomised and drawn to storms in teacups while financial barbarians gather at the gate and global warming is ignored.

The session ended optimistically, imagining that, this time, there would be a real chance to reform our democratic system. In early June we regroup to consider the implications for sustainability – and our democracy – of the election outcome.