Politics: the only way is down

By Pete North - September 27, 2021

My expectations of British party politics could not sink any lower. Party conferences serve only as a reminder as to why I have zero confidence in the Westminster system to bring our political life back from the dead. I scarcely have a dog in the fight. We are a one party state and it’s going to stay that way for the duration. But just when I stop caring who wins the next election Labour pops up to remind us that things could be worse. The leader of Her Majesty’s opposition today could not bring himself to say that only women have a cervix.

Labour has had an intellectual and moral collapse from which it is not coming back. I am concerned about rising taxes, energy prices, mass immigration, care for the elderly, decent wages, job security and national security. I am not remotely interested Palestine, trans issues or green revolutions. But that’s where Labour’s core interests are. Not even the relentless incompetence of the Tories can ever make Labour electable in its own right. It has opted out of serious politics.

That, in effect makes us a one party state where any opposition to the current shambles will have to come from within the Conservative party. On current trajectory Johnson could very easily lose all of his working majority. The headlines are bad for him this week and they’re only going to get worse next year when we start to see the real impact of our hasty and inept withdrawal from the EU. You can only hide so much under the Covid rug and it’s abundantly clear that the post-Covid Tory party is not the Tory party its borrowed Brexit voters voted for.

There is, though, a worrying thought. Whether the Tories rid themselves of Johnson or not doesn’t really matter. Johnson was elected for want of a presentable alternative and that question remains unanswered. Both parties are in a similar state of intellectual and moral collapse and there’s been a complete collapse of trust in government. It’s unlikely the Tories can retrieve it. With no faith in the ruling party and no appetite for the opposition, we’ll have a demoralised nation that gives up on politics as a means to resolve problems. We’ll see widespread disaffection, disengagement, cynicism and withdrawal. It’s hard to say what the practical effects of that are, but when added to the collapse of basic governance we are looking at a more corrosive political landscape than anyone has seen for decades.

At the heart of this is the basic reality that the Wesminster system is fatally obsolete. The political parties as they now stand are not the property of the people. They are Westminster based tribes whose values do not extend beyond the Westminster postcode and small pockets of the internet. They don’t represent anyone but themselves, nor can they. They are narrow sects inside a decaying system. Our politics will continue to drift away from majoritarian norms for as long as it is centralised in Westminster and our main viewing prism is London based media.

The longer this zombie system drags on the less it will enjoy public confidence. It stands without authenticity and legitimacy. As it drifts dangerously further into its own pocket of unreality it becomes every more debased and corrupt, and as it disintegrates so will civil society. Moreover, it cannot be reformed precisely because the main beneficiaries of this systemic dysfunction are the Westminster tribes themselves and they have a vested interest in preventing reform. The most they will offer is proportional representation when we need a much broader rethink of how and where we do politics. We need direct democracy and distributed decision making, but that requires of Westminster that it gives its own powers over to the people – which it will not do willingly.

If there is to be a fundamental change then it will have to come from the outside. Capturing the parties doesn’t really work being that they tend to fragment internally and then run out of steam. But then it’s hard to see where any such external force will come from. Brits are no longer in the habit of doing their own politics. We delegate. We wait for something or someone else to come along and do it for us. If that something doesn’t come along, we’ll simply grumble and complain and watch the UK become a Greek style corrupt basketcase where even basic refuse collection is beyond the abilities of “local” government.

Any which way I look at it, it’s all going to get worse in the short, medium and long term as decades of misrule catch up on us. For just about every emerging crisis we see now, we can find the breadcrumbs leading up to it going back a decade or more. From the care crisis to the HGV driver shortage, the vet shortage and the energy crunch, we’ve had no problems detecting and predicting problems, but it never feeds into the political system. Wesminster exacerbates problems. It does not fix them. It’s too locked into its own version of reality that does not interact with our own.

There will be those who attempt to blame Brexit, but it’s precisely this malaise that brought Brexit about, and Brexit was something of a moonshot with a view to arresting the decline. I think, though, that it came too late, and without a plan, Brexit was to be defined by an establishment that never really cared about it. Reclaiming “sovereignty” was the easy bit. Having a government with the will to exercise it in the public interest seems to be out of reach.

In the end it’s going to take power cuts, rubbish mountains and riots before the public mobilises. And it will happen. Never before has so much been so fundamentally broken and never before has a government been so far our of touch with reality. There will have to be a day of reckoning, and if Brexit was the thing that brought it to the fore, then I suppose that’s the function of it. We can’t go on like this.