Party leaders – from Tony Blair to David Cameron – have promised a new way of doing politics when campaigning for election, yet failed to deliver on such commitments when elected. Dave Richards writes that there is a link between such calls and the rising climate of anti-politics, yet there is no sign that the Westminster bubble will burst anytime soon.
In the midst of the Watergate Scandal, the BBC approached the eminent political economist J.K. Galbraith to make a television documentary reflecting on the tensions of that era. It led to both an acclaimed series and book – The Age of Uncertainty [with a discernible nod to Eric Hobsbawn] – in which Galbraith explored the rising challenges confronting a set of deeply embedded modernist certainties.
Four decades later and with the after-shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidential victory freshly reverberating across two of the oldest, modern democracies, Galbraith’s title takes on a fresh resonance. These are undoubtedly times of uncertainty, no more so than in the way modern democratic politics conducts itself and for the traditional institutions of the liberal-democratic state which aggregate our individual political impulses.
An increasingly prominent feature in the current climate is the so-called rise of ‘anti-politics’. It is a somewhat slippery term covering a multitude of pathologies concerning power, democracy, legitimacy, participation, and accountability. One of its more popular caricatures is reflected in a perceived growing public disenchantment with the way politics is done, expressed for example in the disengagement with traditional forms of arena politics (voting, joining a mainstream party etc.). Another is in the depiction of the so-called ‘left behind’, of those who are: ‘on the wrong side of social change, are struggling on stagnant incomes, feel threatened by the way their communities and country are changing, and are furious at an established politics that appears not to understand or even care about their concerns’.
One response has been to vote [sometimes for the first-time] for the increasing number of ‘insurgent’ or ‘populist’ parties who seek to offer an alternative to the failings associated with traditional mainstream, party politics.
Part of Trump’s successful electoral campaign, mirrored somewhat in the strategy adopted by Brexiteers in the EU referendum campaign, can be explained by the effective use of populist and anti-establishment rhetorical appeals. An example, from which there are many, is Donald Trump’s call for the need ‘to drain the swamp in Washington’. It is a sentiment now echoed by the major UKIP financial donor Arron Banks. In the context of Westminster, he has offered to bank-roll candidates to challenge, Martin Bell[esque] style, what he regards as the 200 worst and most corrupt sitting M.P.s:
‘It’s a very simple agenda: to destroy the professional politician. I like the idea of clearing the place out, setting new rules, maybe reducing the number of MPs. Not a party from the left or right. Just to clear out the worst lot.’
Such calls are symbolic of an ever louder cacophony of voices being heard railing against a disconnected, out-of-touch, self-interested and self-serving set of elites, operating in their own bubble and who are seen as incapable of listening to the everyday needs of those who they purport to represent.
In the context of the UK, as elsewhere, studies have shown that anti-politics is by no means a new phenomenon, though it has gained fresh traction in more recent times. The political class are of course not immune to this live issue, given their reliance on claims to democratic legitimacy as the lodestone of the representative process. And it is here that an intriguing paradox has emerged in recent decades. A pattern of leaders of mainstream opposition parties calling for a ‘new politics’, but then when in office adhering to the established ways and means of governing.
In surveying the calls for change in the last twenty years, while the context behind them may vary, they are bound by a familiar ring in their rejection of the old ways of doing politics and the need for an alternative. In May 1997, Tony Blair argued his government: ‘…will govern in the interests of all our people…and restore trust in politics in this country. That cleans it up, that decentralizes it, that gives people hope once again that politics is and always should be about the service of the public.’
In April 2010, David Cameron observed that the UK electorate had been: ‘…betrayed by a generation of politicians, by an elite that thinks it knows best. People have lost control. The politicians have forgotten, the public are the master, we are the servant. That’s what needs to change in our system…Blow apart the old system. Overthrow the old ways. Put people in the driving seat.’
His Coalition partner, Nick Clegg in a similar vein mused: ‘This government is going to transform our politics so the state has far less control over you, and you have far more control over the state,…break up concentrations of power and hand power back to people…This government is going to persuade you to put your faith in politics once again.’
Fast-forward to the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and Alex Salmond asserted that: ‘Whatever else we can say about this referendum campaign, we have touched sections of the community who have never before been touched by politics….I don’t think that will ever be allowed to go back to business as usual in politics again.’
Finally, and most recently, there is Labour’s own careerist insurgent turned Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who saw his elevation to Leader of the Opposition as: ‘…a vote for change in the way we do politics…Kinder, more inclusive. Bottom up, not top down. In every community and workplace, not just at Westminster…Something new and invigorating, popular and authentic, has exploded.’
What binds all these leaders’ narratives together is the way in which they are implicitly seeking out a position not wholly removed from that of an anti-establishment platform. One that is committed to taking on vested powers and interests, challenging the status quo and in so doing, changing the way politics is done. Theirs is an offer of a new, more devolved, deliberative, bottom-up and participatory approach, one that is capable of listening and being receptive to the needs of the electorate. It is hard not to ignore the obvious link between such calls being made and a rising climate of anti-politics. It is ostensibly a search by an elite wishing to burst its own bubble by offering a new social contract of renewal and re-legitimation for the governing class.
Yet, if we survey the political landscape of reform in the UK during these same two decades, reform has been limited and where it has occurred, for example Scottish devolution and more recently Brexit, it appears more as an unintended consequence, rather than the culmination of government strategy, even less so a new politics. It is at most, an ad hoc approach, the grafting on of reform to the existing Westminster system, which remains an elitist model based on weak, limited principles of representation and an electoral system that privileges stability over proportionality and participation.
The British approach to governance has of course long-been recognised for its centralising and top-down tendencies – what has been called elsewhere a ‘power-hoarding’ approach. It is difficult then to see how a circle can be squared between the old politics of the Westminster model and the pressures building for a less elitist, more de-centralised and responsive polity evidenced in the persistent calls for a new politics to address the pathologies within the rising tide of anti-politics.
There is an emerging post-Brexit irony that should be lost on no one. As the government maps out a new political settlement for the UK, its attempts to reconstitute the Westminster model as part of a simple, zero-sum game in sovereignty grab-back from Brussels [which appears its current position in the scant pronouncements so far made], is the very antithesis of previous calls for a more devolved and deliberative approach to politics required to address the serious discontents revealed by some in the run-up to the Brexit vote.
Douglas Jay’s euphemistic observation that ‘the man in Whitehall knows best’ was understandable in 1937; it is not a mode of governing fit-for-purpose in the twenty-first century. As Tony King observes, it is an approach organised round a set of principles that do not: ‘…so much disdain deliberation as ignore it altogether…[and is] not concerned with promoting the value or principle of citizen participation.’ The May Government needs to explain how ‘taking back control’ by a Whitehall-driven, centralising strategy will resolve the U.K.’s longer-term democratic incongruities? Brexit presents a unique, if uncertain, opportunity for change, yet there is no sign that the Westminster bubble is about to be burst by a self-inflicted, pin-prick.
Elsewhere, the question that has not been put to the political class, but is one that needs answering is why for two decades they have persistently called for a new politics when in opposition, and yet patently failed to deliver on such a commitment when holding the reins of power.
The answer one suspects can be found in the comfortable blanket of power and control afforded by the Westminster model. In an age of uncertainty, it is hard for minsters to once again resist being enveloped by this protective metaphorical blanket of power provided by Whitehall, rather than being left exposed to the risks involved in pursuing a real form of new politics.
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Dave Richards is Professor of Public Policy at the University of Manchester.
Blair, Cameron and Clegg have transformed politics, their Neo-Liberal agenda was united in delivering wealth and power redistribution upwards.
It is little wonder that people finally reject a political establishment that says you can vote for any political party so long as it serves the interests of a tiny elite.
The real agenda was spelled out in Margaret Thatcher’s 1982 secret cabinet papers released in 2012:
https://skwalker1964.files.wordpress.com/2016/10/cab-129-215-6.pdf
We all need to wake up in this country, the agenda is there for all to see, and just who are those politicians serving at all those G7-20 or Bilderberg meetings and why all the secrecy? It speaks for itself.
Thanks Dave for identifying the drift towards dictatorship that seems inevitable in all social systems because of their common factor ,they are seeking to influence the behaviour of human beings.
I suggest that we are faced with big threats to the way we organise our society as a result of the internet and its wide open opportunity to ignore facts in pursuit of influence.
Unless we get some reorganisation of how democracy implements the best interest of society the very real external threats of climate change, inequality and ignorance will “doom us” by 2050 as predicted by the Club of Rome forecast on 1970.
Or am I mussing something?
It is quite obvious why in the last 4 decades, progressively people have felt increasingly frustrated by existing governance structures – eu membership.
Eu membership through the eu treaties and eu law placed a stranglehold on popular democratic decision-making which relegated political parties to managers of eu policy and law.
So taking back control from the eu is the first step (brexit) and making our governance systems more deliberative is the second. Obviously the second cannot be achieved without the completion of the first so I disagree – the May government is actually in the process of taking back control beyond mere electoral rhetoric, however there are many who wish to continue the status quo of a remote disconnected politics that puts the eu at the centre.
I think that the Brexit route is a red herring of a solution. But your comment that the Government can be more deliberative is part of the answer to making the people more content..
The forces against that contented feeling are growing all the time as we pursue the fools errand in believing that increasing GDP will solve the problem . In fact it exacerbates the national and global problem by emphasising competition for the dwindling finite resources.
Regrettably we need to face up to the fact that for a deliberative regime to work, the influence of the ignorant on policy must be by passed and a policy for the long term benefit of the people established. For this to happen we need a national government that has power to ignore the lobbyists and the short term aspirations of most f us. To make this come about needs a war or a disaster because of our mistaken faith in the current democratic system.
Not sure wby you argue Brexit is a red herring when it is surely a step in the right direction in relation to more deliberative fotms of government. The eu’s alternative was subsidiarity which is a red herring.
Similarly who are these ignorant people you refer to. Certainly the people I know are not ignorant, they simply exercise their right to have different points of view.
For me the goal of deliberative democracy is simple, let local people vote on local licensing, planning and development decisions in other words constituency based self-determination on cultural, economic, political and ecological decisions.
“Anti-politics” is a naive position — it is more a response to modern complexity, a reaction, than a realistic analysis or policy. For the latter see John Dewey’s, “The Quest for Certainty” — Dewey punctured this particular pipedream there, as surely as Isaiah Berlin did Inevitability and Hume did Natural Religion — these are myths, manufactured to assuage human insecurities, nothing more.
Yet we make them the basis of our thinking — at times, and only some of us do. The best approach to understanding them is to look outside, take a comparativist approach, think broadly: are the Chinese thinking this way, are they in India, are Syrians or the Japanese or Iranians? There are people some places who are Nihilist, after all — arguably people in and around Aleppo now are — but how realistic is that?
Most such credos are situational, more products of their times & locations & conditions — and primarily the uncertainties of those, per Dewey — than anything else. They are not science — some are art — most disappear with time and some success.
What definitely is happening is change, as it always does… Britain has a long history, and has changed before — so too, now, is the USA and history here has become more important than it was before in our politics — for example our worst election was that of 1800, not the one just-concluded, and knowing that now helps us better to understand. We should study our long histories more.
But it is not anti-politics, now: that is a simplification, designed to comfort, which will make us overlook the complexities — help us to think in black & white, & overlook the greys, and that simplicity always has been dangerous and always will be. So let us be more subtle, not less, let us see more layers — examining the Asians let us see other possibilities, in Africa and Latin America let us see hope for improvement and not just current despair. It all is politics, highly-complicated and moreso than ever before: turning to anti-politics in desperation is a ploy used by dictators, and warriors — but there still are things the rest of us can do.