‘Have 20th Century election processes become obsolete?’
IT is interesting to see the latest opinion polls on people’s response to Brexit. To the question of the UK’S influence in the world and world affairs, 52% of those questioned said the UK had less influence since Brexit, 19% said more, and 30% said it remained the same.
So, what does this tell us about what our standing is in a world burdened with distress and worry? What do we want from our government, and from those we elect to represent us?
The big issues facing us as a nation are many. The highest nationally is the troubled economy, the cost-of-living, and the stagnation of earnings.
Then there’s the consequences of the war in Ukraine, and the pressure and impoverishment of the NHS and social care.
The energy crisis is painful, pegged pensions and mortgage costs are worrying, and the ominous catastrophic effects of climate change is fearsome.
There is no getting away from the fact that the politics of democracy is on very shaky ground, and there’s every indication that our outdated nonconstitutional party system is no longer workable.
This is abundantly clear in the fragmentation of political strategy inside the Conservative government, the bygone bugle of representative capitalism.
Before the last general election, results were based around strong allegiance to a particular party.
But the results of elections since the Brexit referendum show this is no longer true.
Party loyalty is crumbling, and this is weakening party attachment to a state that creates wide-reaching instability in electoral behaviour.
The causes for this can be laid distinctly at the door of vague and capricious philosophy reliant on the processes of the old inflexible groundworks of party practitioners.
For simplicity they see modernisation as bowing to the paraphernalia of populism.
This leaves the current government fundamentally short on unstructured management, unsure of its objectives, unsure of outcome, and unsure of leadership. This makes it impossible to effectively govern in times when sound leadership
and cohesive control is vital. Our democratic electoral system began in 1918. It openly became mistrusted with the financial crisis of 2008, the point at which the left and the right wings of social and economic democracy began to look the same.
Then came Brexit, fashioned by the crazy idea of letting the electorate decide with a referendum.
The populist pied pipers appeared, plying us with pockets full of promises that Brexit would recover the UK’S place in the highest strata of world authority simply by shedding EU bureaucracy.
Party confusion increased when Labour elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader, a move that inexplicably attracted waves of regional Conservative votes in the 2015 Theresa May election.
The nation’s initial positive reception to Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, however, was being countered by Labour’s right-wing cautionary response.
And all this matched the urgency of Brexit’s implementation from which emerged the cavalier ‘I’ll get Brexit done’ Boris Johnson who led an astonishing victory by capturing many befuddled Red Wall constituencies like Stokeon-trent.
Even though he was forced to
resign from office when most of his government turned against him, Johnson remains oddly popular. You can hear ‘Bring back Boris’, on sporting terraces, in community centres, from women who venerate his scruffy-haired anecdotal performances, from barroom habitues who relate to Johnson’s laddish buffoonery, and everyone who yearns for the ‘good old days’ when things were easier to understand.
Meanwhile, an unelected British Asian multi-millionaire is the latest experiment in the register of aborted test tube trials.
Personally, I think Brexit could be the biggest democratic mistake in our history, one that will produce massive problems for following generations.
But it could also be the point at which our electoral system began its departure from its obsolete 20th century election processes, the point at which Great Britain acknowledges its place in ‘one world’ democracies, the point where politics has a reason to exist, when social democracy means something for all of us collectively.
THREE men have been charged in connection with the alleged theft of a vehicle in Etruria. Staffordshire Police were called to an address near Mereside Close at 9am on Tuesday, November 8. A delivery driver reported being assaulted and now three men - from the West Midlands - have appeared at North Staffordshire Justice Centre. They have been charged with robbery. Karanpreet Singh, 22, of Grasmere Road, Birmingham, Diljot Singh, 21, of Bridge Street South, Smethwick, and Simranjit Singh, 19, of Avenue Road, Handsworth, appeared in court charged with the offences.