The Trouble with Elections
This coming Thursday we face a general election for the UK parliament which on this occasion seems more than ever fraught with intrigues. As a Christian anarchist I ought to boycott the election entirely because classic anarchists insist that to invest any credibility in the corrupt electoral system is to collude with our powerful oppressors. But the Roman Catholic priest who introduced me to anarchism adopted the view that if we did vote, it ought to be for the party which offers the best opportunity for creating a milieu in which new ideas and proposals can be freely expressed. In the case of my electorate, Brecon and Radnorshire, the choice was easy. The Liberal Democrats hold the seat with a majority at the last election of only 800 over the Conservatives. So my vote goes to the Liberals firstly because they offer the possibility of space to think afresh, secondly because it was the one major party to oppose the war in Iraq, and thirdly because I have no wish ever to live and work under a Conservative government again.
There are too many actions of Margaret Thatcher which I cannot excuse or forget: her decision to go to war over the Malvinas (known here as the Falkland Islands); her championing of the infamous Clause 28 which prohibited schools from discussing homosexuality as an orientation and lifestyle; her creation of a bureaucratic management style in higher education which saw in my case the percentage balance of student contact hours to administrative tasks fall from 80:20 to 25:75; her rejection of the Church of England’s report on urban poverty, Faith in the City, as Marxist rubbish together with her admonition that the Church steer clear of politics and focus only on spiritual values; her cynical use of St Francis’s prayer as if it gave the seal of approved to her social and economic ideology; her insistence that ‘there is no such thing as society’ and in the latter part of her prime ministership, the increasing hubris which prompted her use of the royal ‘We’ as on that famous occasion when she announced ‘We are a grandmother!’. The list is endless.
Elements of the media are suggesting that in this election the Conservatives have become the ‘nasty party’ principally because they have called upon the skills of the Australian guru who has helped engineer John Howard’s electoral successes in that country. They have been running a campaign impugning the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair over both the intelligence and legal advice upon which he based the decision to go to war in Iraq. So on numerous occasions we have seen the leader of the Conservatives, Michael Howard, in addition to raising the traditional war cries of the Right in favour of the creation of bigger prisons and a greatly enlarged police state, and against immigration and asylum-seeking, publicly declaring Blair to be a serial liar. I happen to think that Blair did deliberately deceive this nation in order to go to war. After all, under his leadership Britain has gone to war now on seven occasions so he seems to have a taste for it. I don’t have a problem with Blair being called a liar, just with who it is in this case who is calling him a liar and offering himself as the perfect model of integrity.
Under the lacklustre successive leaderships of John Major, William Hague and Ian Duncan Smith, the Conservatives have lost three elections in a row, something deeply discomforting for a party that considers itself born to rule. Much as I distrust Blair, I distrust Michael Howard even more, particularly as he said this week that he would have gone to war in Iraq under any circumstances just to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I have only once heard Howard speak and that was when he was serving as Minister of Employment in the Thatcher government. The occasion was a day conference organised by the Institute of Directors, one of the bastions of capitalism, to discuss the morality of the capitalist system. The main speakers were the American Roman Catholic academic Michael Novak, the Chief Rabbi, the Bishop of Oxford and Howard. Whereas the other speakers, amongst whom there were clear disagreements, were able to carry forward a conversation in a civilised manner, all Howard could do was rant about the conservative management of Britain’s economy, this mind you at a time when unemployment was soaring and poverty increasing. There was something deeply troubling about his demeanour which was crystallised for me when one of his Cabinet colleagues, Ann Widdicombe, scuppered his first attempt to gain leadership of the party by declaring that there was ‘something of the night’ about him.
In addition to Howard’s abusive style of personal politics, there are other machinations at work in this election. The UK Independence Party, largely made up of disaffected Conservatives who want to see the British Pound retained as the UK’s currency and to have Britain withdraw from the EEC, did unexpectedly well at the European elections at the expense of the Conservatives. And they are campaigning hard again and will hopefully, particularly in the case of my electorate, draw votes away from the Conservatives. Then too the ostensibly non-political Countryside Alliance, which is trying to have the Labour governmen's legislation banning the time honoured upper class ‘sport’ of fox-hunting lifted, appears to have fathered a covert organisation that is working on behalf of the Conservatives in marginal seats to see sitting Labour members defeated. British elections seem to be won or lost in the marginal seats and this year they are attracting even greater attention.
The perennial question of whether Britain should scrap its first-past-the-post electoral system, in which governments win power on a minority of votes – the so-called ‘tyranny of the minority’ – in favour of some alternative is being discussed with even greater fervour this election. This is in part due to the steep rise in voter apathy, with many people feeling either that the main political choices are no choice at all, or that big government has become so unwieldy that the individual voice is of no significance. Commentators seem much more serious this year in discussing the introduction of alternatives such as Australia’s compulsory voting with people fined for not registering a vote, or even, Heaven forbid, a system of proportional representation like that in New Zealand!
There are too many actions of Margaret Thatcher which I cannot excuse or forget: her decision to go to war over the Malvinas (known here as the Falkland Islands); her championing of the infamous Clause 28 which prohibited schools from discussing homosexuality as an orientation and lifestyle; her creation of a bureaucratic management style in higher education which saw in my case the percentage balance of student contact hours to administrative tasks fall from 80:20 to 25:75; her rejection of the Church of England’s report on urban poverty, Faith in the City, as Marxist rubbish together with her admonition that the Church steer clear of politics and focus only on spiritual values; her cynical use of St Francis’s prayer as if it gave the seal of approved to her social and economic ideology; her insistence that ‘there is no such thing as society’ and in the latter part of her prime ministership, the increasing hubris which prompted her use of the royal ‘We’ as on that famous occasion when she announced ‘We are a grandmother!’. The list is endless.
Elements of the media are suggesting that in this election the Conservatives have become the ‘nasty party’ principally because they have called upon the skills of the Australian guru who has helped engineer John Howard’s electoral successes in that country. They have been running a campaign impugning the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair over both the intelligence and legal advice upon which he based the decision to go to war in Iraq. So on numerous occasions we have seen the leader of the Conservatives, Michael Howard, in addition to raising the traditional war cries of the Right in favour of the creation of bigger prisons and a greatly enlarged police state, and against immigration and asylum-seeking, publicly declaring Blair to be a serial liar. I happen to think that Blair did deliberately deceive this nation in order to go to war. After all, under his leadership Britain has gone to war now on seven occasions so he seems to have a taste for it. I don’t have a problem with Blair being called a liar, just with who it is in this case who is calling him a liar and offering himself as the perfect model of integrity.
Under the lacklustre successive leaderships of John Major, William Hague and Ian Duncan Smith, the Conservatives have lost three elections in a row, something deeply discomforting for a party that considers itself born to rule. Much as I distrust Blair, I distrust Michael Howard even more, particularly as he said this week that he would have gone to war in Iraq under any circumstances just to get rid of Saddam Hussein. I have only once heard Howard speak and that was when he was serving as Minister of Employment in the Thatcher government. The occasion was a day conference organised by the Institute of Directors, one of the bastions of capitalism, to discuss the morality of the capitalist system. The main speakers were the American Roman Catholic academic Michael Novak, the Chief Rabbi, the Bishop of Oxford and Howard. Whereas the other speakers, amongst whom there were clear disagreements, were able to carry forward a conversation in a civilised manner, all Howard could do was rant about the conservative management of Britain’s economy, this mind you at a time when unemployment was soaring and poverty increasing. There was something deeply troubling about his demeanour which was crystallised for me when one of his Cabinet colleagues, Ann Widdicombe, scuppered his first attempt to gain leadership of the party by declaring that there was ‘something of the night’ about him.
In addition to Howard’s abusive style of personal politics, there are other machinations at work in this election. The UK Independence Party, largely made up of disaffected Conservatives who want to see the British Pound retained as the UK’s currency and to have Britain withdraw from the EEC, did unexpectedly well at the European elections at the expense of the Conservatives. And they are campaigning hard again and will hopefully, particularly in the case of my electorate, draw votes away from the Conservatives. Then too the ostensibly non-political Countryside Alliance, which is trying to have the Labour governmen's legislation banning the time honoured upper class ‘sport’ of fox-hunting lifted, appears to have fathered a covert organisation that is working on behalf of the Conservatives in marginal seats to see sitting Labour members defeated. British elections seem to be won or lost in the marginal seats and this year they are attracting even greater attention.
The perennial question of whether Britain should scrap its first-past-the-post electoral system, in which governments win power on a minority of votes – the so-called ‘tyranny of the minority’ – in favour of some alternative is being discussed with even greater fervour this election. This is in part due to the steep rise in voter apathy, with many people feeling either that the main political choices are no choice at all, or that big government has become so unwieldy that the individual voice is of no significance. Commentators seem much more serious this year in discussing the introduction of alternatives such as Australia’s compulsory voting with people fined for not registering a vote, or even, Heaven forbid, a system of proportional representation like that in New Zealand!
posted by MichaelElliott @ 8:02 AM
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