Potholes

The first episode of a new season of The Reunion on Radio 4 was one of those episodes where, 20 years on you can tell the guests are still not going to agree. Indeed the programme showed that the emotions of those involved in the 1984 miners' strike were still very raw, at least the emotions of those who were emotionally involved in the first place: Ken Clarke did a good job of presenting the cold, 'rational', ideology-dressed-as-economical-necessity of the Thatcher government. This struck me as perhaps the most notable fact of the whole program: that even then the Tories were presenting their ideology as simple economic necessity, unless of course this was Ken Clarke re-casting history to align with contemporary policy. Whether it was conscious or not, this was the point at which Fukuyama's end of history could be seen to have occurred in Britain: the Conservatives won the argument by presenting the arguments of the left as fanatical ideologies that had no practical basis, but rather existed just to oppose progress in a violent and destructive manner. All of the left became the loony left; reason resided with the right. 

I draw attention to this, because I think my generation is fundamentally a post-miners' strike generation and therefore our view of politics is filtered through Fukuyama's post-historical lense. I remember the euphoria in 1997 for those of us who had only known Tory government. We thought Tony Blair had managed to make the left acceptable again, when in fact he had made Labour acceptable again by moving it to the right, to the world of 'rational necessity'. Blair had recognised the power of the image of leftist ideology as irrational and saw no way to counter it other than doing away with leftist ideology almost completely. Perhaps he had seen the way the left in America had been wiped out by the end of history logic of the right and saw the same as inevitable in the UK. This is understandable, as the stigma of unreason is a powerful tool of those who fear ideology: look at the way feminism is consistently and successfully presented as the preserve of unhinged women; the spectre of hysteria still looming large in the language of the patriarchy. The problem with Blair's response is that it is a pre-miners' strike approach to a post-miners' strike situation. 

Many of us who have grown up politically in this era often struggle to fully understand the world that brought such a conflict about. We struggle to comprehend the extraordinary hubris of the left in believing in the ubiquity of the power of mass labour. From our 'enlightened' vantage point, the whole thing seems a little bit simplistic, a binary conflict of black and white viewed from a world where there are so many different shades and colours. Of course we would view it that way, that is how the post-historical viewpoint is supposed to appear: these things are too complex for simple working folk and are best left to the technocrats. This has partially succeeded in turning younger generations off politics, but in many cases they have simply changed their approach away from a traditional party oriented view to a single issue oriented one. This acceptance that the complexity of the world means that voting for the party that best fits your worldview doesn't really work anymore obviously hasn't really permeated our political institutions. Like many outmoded organisations, the politicians at Westminster cling to the status quo tenaciously, hoping that getting their aides to run a Twitter account will suffice in terms of their engagement with the electorate. Meanwhile, as the traditional vote fragments, the likelihood of majority government fades away and MPs have started thinking about how they can keep their seat at Westminster. This is most notable amongst the new Tory cohort, who have repeatedly voted against the government when they thought it was in their own best interest (i.e. they thought they'd get a kicking from their local constituents). This would seem to point to a greater degree of representation and in many ways it does, especially if the MPs take notice of constituents who didn't vote for them as well as those who did. Of course in a world where people no longer vote for parties, any politician would always look to be keeping the largest number of (active) constituents happy. Such a system requires a bit more of voters than simply showing up at a polling station once every five years, but it seems they are willing to engage when a matter concerns them anyway, and often more so than if they were required to get off their arses and actually vote. The potential danger is that politicians will only react to those who shout the loudest, but it ever was thus: politicians currently gear their policies towards older voters who are much more likely to actually vote. The other worry is that politicians become simply the mouthpiece of anyone with an agenda, but at least it would be transparent and anyone with an agenda would need to engage others rather than simply being rich enough to lobby directly. The complexity of the system would lie in establishing a functional executive, as the role could not simply be handed over to the party with the most MPs. In a post party parliament, the current coalition government would appear even more utterly dysfunctional than it currently does, as the executive would have to be chosen by general consensus, based on each candidate's suitability for the post. 

This is clearly a bit of a pipe dream at the moment, but it is not inconceivable. Currently the only thing keeping our major parties from financial ruin is the 'largesse' of a few individual donors, and such power over politics in the hands of a few wealthy individuals or organisations cannot be good for democracy. Therefore the only thing standing between the current situation and my dream of the future is limits on individual party donations, and I mean limits of hundreds rather than thousands of pounds. This would inevitably lead to the collapse of all the major parties, but what is lost if they no longer exist? Traditional party structures appear solely to facilitate the power of minorities and such an illusion of democracy is something that we should be consigning to history and the failures of the twentieth century. 

Hopefully the conceptual problems that my generation have with the miners' strike is the fact that it illustrates the failure of pre 21st century representational democracy, rather than we have all been brainwashed by a 'post-historical' right wing perspective. If we view the miners' strike as the struggle between two executives, neither of whom had the full backing of their constituents for their actions but both of whom used a dysfunctional model of democratic representation to justify their actions, then we understand the democratic ideals which modern communications should allow us to aspire. If we just look at all forms of protest and political conflict as things that only trouble the unsophisticated democracies of the past or other countries, then we completely deserve whatever government we get.