Commenting on the May 1st byelections in England – Could the two party Labour and Tory dominated political system be over? – Richard Murphy had this to say of rising support 1 for Nigel Farage’s far right Reform Party:
[Labour and the Tories] have failed, and let’s be blunt, it is neoliberalism that has failed them. Putting up sock puppets, people who have no opinion, nothing to say, who’ve only learned the party line, who can only repeat the maxims that have been handed down to them by head office, or report the latest text message that they’ve had on what they must say; those people will never endear themselves to an electorate. The electorate has rumbled that that is what they’re being given. They realise that these people have no opinions of their own and no ability to deliver on their behalf because they’re so out of touch with the reality of life, and the consequence is they won’t vote for them …
… Reform is the answer to no conceivable political question in UK politics. But when the Tories and Labour, and to a very large degree, the Liberal Democrats have no answers either, and the Green Party still remain out in the wilderness with regard to its economic policy, people are left devoid of political choice.
I agree, but Professor Murphy goes on to offer a remedy I see as akin to aspirin for cancer:
… they’re not voting and won’t again until given a voting system that lets them express their opinion. That is the crisis facing the UK and its democracy, and its governance, and its very future. Without electoral reform, we’re deluding ourselves and heading into a ghastly pit of neo-fascism and actual fascism, which is what Reform represents.
My response to such arguments is the same as that to British republicans: worthy cause, and I’m all for it. But if you think the root of all that is rotten in our politics is FPTP, or the secretive shenanigans of the House of Windsor, you need to look a lot deeper my friend!”
For a less superficial assessment of the state not only of Britain’s sham democracy but those of the West at large (embracing both first-past-the-post duopolies like Britain and America, and proportional representation in much of Western Europe 2 ) I offer that of Chris Hedges in Let’s stop pretending America is a functioning democracy. With only minor adjustments his words apply across the West at large.
Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office. 3
Those who think class rule was shown the door by universal suffrage are much mistaken, while those who believe class rule compatible with meaningful democracy live in cloud cuckoo land.
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- My original opening sentence told of a “huge surge” for Reform but a friend emailed to say:
Though it’s not unusual for local elections to have a low turnout, turnout on this occasion was 35%, with the lowest at 19%. Of the 35% that could be bothered to vote, and who can blame them, Reform received a third. Almost two thirds of those eligible to vote disengaged altogether from Hedges’ ‘tawdry carnival ‘.
I haven’t studied in fine detail the results at Runcorn/Helsby and the other byelections. As I recall, Professor Murphy speaks of a 45% turnout. Either way, the far right needs no ringing mandate. The refusal of an electorate too disgusted to show up at all will suffice. I’ve replaced “huge surge” with “rising support”.
- Has Professor Murphy not noticed the ascendance in Germany of the AfD, or in Holland of Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom? Does he seriously believe the rise of the far right, which he correctly locates in fifty years of neoliberalism, can be halted by electoral tinkering?
- Re “an oligarchy that determines who gets elected …” see my two posts, Britain Decides and Monolithic control at the Guardian? I can think of no more cogent argument for insisting that Western democracy is ninety-five percent bogus than that (a) democracy implies consent, (b) consent is meaningless if not informed, and (c) informed consent implies truly independent media. That last we do not have when they are, as Chomsky reminds us, “large corporations selling privileged audiences to other corporations”.
And an education system aimed at enhancing critical, unbiased and ethically-based thinking and then an understanding of as much of broadly based history, politics, economics etc. as possible. But don’t hold your breath for it.
The two posts linked from footnote 3 target news media aspects of Western society as the most propagandised in history. On the why of this, deep conditioning is a corollary of the coexistence of class rule with the trappings of democracy. (You don’t need to fool people quite so thoroughly when the tools of repression are in full view.) As for the how, look no further than state of the art tools of psychological persuasion deployed by the advertising industry. Such is our collective naivety, and such the normalisation of that industry, we either fail to see it as remarkable else implicitly suppose a hermetic seal between the commercial and the overtly political use of those tools.
As Caitlin Johnstone put it:
Western civilization is dominated by a power structure that has invested more heavily in “soft power” (mass-scale psychological manipulation) than any other in history. It pervades our media, our internet services, our art — literally all of mainstream culture. The politicians lie, the news media lie, the movies lie, the internet lies, the advertisements lie, the shows between the advertisements lie. They lie about our world, they lie about our government, they lie about what’s important, how we should think, what we should value, and how we should measure our level of success and worthiness as human beings.
You don’t have to choose between being happy and being informed
On the aspects you raise, a third post I often link alongside those other two has to do with ideology more broadly. Why do turkeys vote for Xmas? I skim the surface of that deep, complex and frequently bewildering question – for decades the fiefdom of post-modern opacity – in what of ideology when reality intrudes?
On the subject of tawdry acts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAhzdfkWJo4
Eighty years after fighting Nazi Germany, a slovenly bunch of neo-Nazi regime troops who cannot even march in time with each other properly amble down Whitehall in front of the British Establishment and are cheered by the ancestors of those who died fighting these knuckle draggers.
All those involved in organising this travesty – whoever they are – shame the memory of all those who died fighting this cancer.
In 2019, five years after the US ousted the democratically elected Viktor Yanukovch, and installed Petr Poroshenko as its Kiev puppet, Volodymyr Zelensky was elected to the presidency on a ticket of mending fences both with Russia and the besieged eastern oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk. He was quickly forced to U-turn on that mandate by men like this:
Your comment and my response are a stretch from the thrust of my post but, given the truth inversions of mainstream narratives on the Ukraine war, follow from footnote 3.