The Guardian view on trust in politics: by dodging the voters politicians risk damaging democracy itself
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Version 0 of 1. In the past week, David Cameron has pledged an Act of Parliament to outlaw tax increases, Nick Clegg has produced proliferating numbers of unbreakable red lines, although not on an in-out referendum on Europe, and now Ed Miliband has had Labour’s six key election promises engraved in stone. This is desperate stuff. With less than 100 hours of campaigning time left, voters are still reluctant to give their support to any of the main parties, and politicians are experiencing a crisis in confidence in their ability to win support beyond their core loyalists. Collectively, they appear to have concluded the best thing to do is avoid ordinary voters as far as possible while continuing to fight an election. David Cameron is the worst offender: he has pulled out of a Citizens UK event on Monday and he is the only party leader who is refusing to do the BBC’s radio phone-in Election Call. This is a bad misjudgement. As last Thursday’s Question Time showed, the rarer the political encounter, the angrier the electorate becomes. If the whole country now seems to be full of people as jarred off as Gillian Duffy was when she met Gordon Brown in Rochdale in 2010, political leaders have only themselves to blame. But all of us will feel the consequences. No politician has ever basked in the uncritical admiration of ordinary voters. A quick visit to the British Museum’s current exhibition, Bonaparte and the British, shows there’s nothing original in voters scorning their leaders. Yet there is something different this time. It is the depth of resentment that is so clearly felt at the way politicians try to avoid answering legitimate questions provoked by their own policies, whether it is David Cameron’s unspecific threats over benefit cuts or Labour’s reluctance to explain how it will reduce the deficit every year without making painful cuts too. The rise of voter scepticism has enhanced the importance of the independent expert. Although neither the Institute for Fiscal Studies nor the health economy experts at the King’s Fund are new, their views are becoming so eagerly sought that they are in danger of carving out a constitutional role as arbiters of the parties’ policy offers. Last week, the IFS criticised what it called “vaguely defined and opaque tax changes” coming from all the parties and warned that there was not enough detail to conclude anything except that none of the changes would make the system work more coherently – a finding that will only make voters feel even more frustrated. It is no better on health and social care. On these pages last Wednesday, a letter from the King’s Fund and the Nuffield Trust raised their profound concerns about the inadequacy of the parties’ funding proposals for health and social care,highlighting the crisis the NHS will face on day one of the new parliament. They accused the parties – despite all of them making a commitment to big spending increases – of failing to say how they will pay for the improvements and staff recruitment they also want, and they pointed out that social care budgets had endured 12% cuts already, and yet no party was explaining how to meet the cost of the changes that are needed to introduce integrated provision. Today, the Royal College of GPs adds to the authoritative questioning, warning that it will take 20 years for either of the main parties’ policies to deliver the extra family doctors that are required. It will be even tougher for departments that are not ring-fenced, like defence, or criminal justice or – as Ed Miliband pointed out yesterday – higher education, where under the Conservatives tuition fees might have to rise to compensate for more cuts to the universities budget. The plain fact is that all the main parties are committed to another five years of austerity in varying degrees while refusing to explain to voters just how painful it is likely to be. That sense that none of the main parties has levelled with country will do more than fuel support for outliers like Ukip, making it more likely that no party will win a mandate. The complexities of forming a government will be challenging but they are not insuperable. What will be worse is that millions of people may be deterred from voting altogether. And that would damage the legitimacy of parliament itself. |