Labour and the Conservatives are trying to cling on to the sinking ship of two-party politics. They’ve got so used to the Punch and Judy, ya-ya, yo-yo politics that they assumed it would rule for ever. So they are falling over each other to tell us how much we would regret a hung Parliament, despite the evidence to the contrary from so many other countries. They seem genuinely annoyed that citizens should question the status quo.
It reminds me of the episode of The Simpsons in which Mr Burns berates politics to his sidekick Smithers after the Simpson family ruins Mr Burns’ chances of becoming governor. “Ironic, isn’t it Smithers? This anonymous clan of slack jawed troglodytes has cost me the election. And yet, if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail! That’s democracy for you.”
We have lived in times where politics has succumbed to consumerism just as other realms of life have. As playwright Dennis Potter said in Seeing the Blossom “The commercialization of everything means of course you’re putting a commercial value on everything. And you turn yourself from a citizen into a consumer… Politics is a commodity to be sold.” Perhaps things are changing. People are no longer willing to be bought off by ill-conceived tax-bungs. They no longer trust either of the big parties and the Lib Dems are gaining as people vote for change. And as George Monbiot has pointed out there are a host of digital democracy initiatives helping voters challenge this status quo.
Perhaps politics needs to learn from the business world. Capitalism is having to rethink and reinvent itself for new realities and shift to more co-operative, long-termist, mutual-interest models. So politics needs to grow up and learn to become more co-operative. Leaders in business such as Charlie Mayfield, Chairman of John Lewis, and Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, are saying that long-term focus, ethics and sustainability trump short-term shareholder interests. And Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric and poster child of the ‘shareholder value’ movement, has now admitted that “shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world”. Hopefully this heralds a beginning of a new form of more co-operative capitalism which puts people and planet before pounds and pence.
So too our politicians need to remind themselves that it’s the social-good, not party politics, which they are supposed to be pursuing. They need to see that the longer term interests of democracy and citizens lie not in the tired swings from left to right, but in a new progressive alliance of politics.
We face in climate change, peak oil and wellbeing, some fundamental challenges that only co-operative and often cross-party consensus politics can rise to. Business got the message about the realities of the perfect storm long before politics. And business are now again ahead of the curve on the new era of co-operative models. Politics need to catch up fast.
So the rallying call has to be – force our politicians to co-operate, vote for change, vote for democracy.
