Politicians deserve a better electorate

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/23/politicians-electorate-voters-election

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We know that voters everywhere worry about the quality, commitment and integrity of their politicians. We know because so many of them complain to pollsters when they get the chance. I wouldn’t be surprised if millions of them don’t spend a full minute every day, perhaps more during an election campaign, wondering what should be done to improve this sorry state of affairs.

But do politicians ever worry about the quality, commitment and integrity of the electorate? You bet they do. But, as Ed Miliband said when Nigel Farage attacked the BBC’s studio audience last week: “It’s never a good idea to attack the audience.” So most of the time they keep quiet about voters’ dirty habits except for designated scapegoats on the fringes of the spectrum, benefit claimants, investment bankers and other parasites.

An election campaign is never a good moment to tell folk to stop smoking either, to swallow less booze or pizza and do more exercise. That would help the hard-pressed NHS budget more than most promised “reforms”. But in a society strong on individualistic entitlement and weak on civic virtue, would-be leaders prefer to pander to voters with manifesto offers of more nurses and childcare and 24/7 running hot and cold GPs, but no higher taxes – except for other people.

Voters don’t believe it, many barely seem to listen. Click-driven media coverage shrinks, desperate politicians become more shrill and superficial – it is a vicious circle.

Result: this is proving a thoroughly unsatisfactory election and voters will wake up on 8 May furious with the mess they discover the politicians have probably made of getting a sensible result. However, just this once in the cycle, the blame for inconclusive uncertainty will be their own. The old adage that “we get the politicians we deserve” contains a germ of truth. The current crop is underwhelming, but what did you or I – media abuse must discourage all sorts of decent people from entering public life – do to deserve better?

The old adage that we get the politicians we deserve contains a germ of truth

Back in 1950 when poorer working men and middle-aged women could still remember when they didn’t have a vote – full adult franchise reached Britain in 1929 – the election turnout was 83.9%. Next month, despite the tightness of the race, we will be grateful for 65% (59.4% in the Tony Blair shoo-in of 2001). In the 18-24 age group the turnout may be 50% and students will be strongly represented among the 6.5 million estimated to be unregistered. Yet some idiots (Miliband is one) want to make matters worse by giving 16-year-olds the privilege of not voting either.

Why and how have we (and other advanced liberal democracies) slipped into this condition? Many reasons, among them the decline of faith in ideology – Thatcherite as well as socialist – that generated hope and zeal. The decline of church and industrial trade union, rising expectation fuelled by consumerism and television but doomed to disappointment, even for the rich. Factored in too must be a loss of confidence in an uncertain future as Britain’s extraordinary place in the world shrinks and Asia returns to centre stage. It is not David Cameron’s fault that China’s communists have abandoned communism, though it is his job to address the adverse consequences for our economy.

Yes, disappointing politicians are part of the story too. Yet both Margaret Thatcher and Blair were formidable, triple-winning leaders who gave post-imperial Britain a significant world voice. Their achievements were mixed (whose aren’t?) but Thatcher has since been idolised as a means of denigrating her successors and Blair condemned by the left ( always gagging for a good betrayal) and the tax-shy oligarch press.

But it suits the political and media classes to attack each other while keeping stumm about the third side of the political equation that both seek to sway unfettered by the other: the voters. Millions are wonderful, of course, they watch those arid TV debates and (it is reported) look up “austerity” on Wikipedia. They follow events and, rain or shine, they will vote, especially the old. Hey kids, have you ever wondered why you have tuition fees and we have free bus passes?

But millions more, not just the poor and demoralised, will forget, shrug or even boast “I never vote” before turning back to something that seems more important: football, golf, Spotify, Britain’s Got Talent. They don’t bother to engage, let alone to make the connections between what happens to them and the difficult policy choices that bring it about, good or bad.

In Greece, voters mandate Syriza to end the cuts but stay in the euro; in Scotland, they do the same with sterling; in England, they want pizza and the NHS. Or they opt for panacea parties – from the Greens to Ukip via assorted nationalists – that make them feel better, but whose numbers don’t stack up. George Osborne is a model of fiscal rectitude by comparison. Voting Ukip is the political equivalent of a tattoo imprudently extended beyond the wrist: a form of self–harm to be regretted in due course. And after nationalism as a panacea, what next? Theocracy?

It can be argued that happy is the country whose secular politics are boringly prosaic (they’re not boring in Syria any more) and whose leaders are cheerfully despised, not feared or capable of murder, sackable when they inevitably fail. All true enough, but we live in dangerous global times and, as George Bernard Shaw had one of his characters say 100 years ago: “Do not believe the laws of God were suspended for England because you were born here.”

Optimism is always attractive and most of us still have much to be optimistic about in a rich and safe country, not yet hideously unequal, one where politics as a process for mediating difficult issues does not kill or imprison. This flighty and illiberal hour may pass. But we may also come to regret our insular complacency when something nasty and (not really) unexpected happens. If that happens we will need politicians to demand sacrifices, not just make offers.

“Blood, toil, tears and sweat”, as Churchill demanded of a quietly heroic generation in 1940, in return for a welfare state which Attlee later delivered. Their legacy – and the enduring tension within it between state and private action – has left most of us richer and healthier than the wildest utopian could have imagined then. But has it made us wiser or even grateful? Shrinking civic engagement in the 2015 campaign suggests not.