I've always been interested in politics. I remember in 1997, when I would have been
fourteen, waking up on a geography field trip in Dovedale on the morning of the
General Election result. I tried in vain
to find out whether Blair had won, or if Major had somehow defied the
odds. No-one knew - teacher or pupil –
or, even less, cared. It took until
lunchtime to discover the horrendous news on a radio liberated for ten minutes
from playing pop music.
It shocked me at the time that so many supposedly
intelligent grammar school pupils and teachers could care so little about a matter
of national importance. It continued to
shock me over the years as I met people who didn't know who the leader of the opposition
was, didn't bother voting, didn't watch the news or read papers, and generally
just went about their days in blissful ignorance. "How the hell can you live like
this?" I thought.
Until this week.
Then, it finally caught up with me.
I got fed up with politics.
Unfortunately, however, it didn't stop me being a geek, so I looked at
the figures.
Between 1945 and 1992, the voter turnout in general
elections oscillated happily between 83.6% and 72.6%. Indeed, even in the 1997
election, the turnout was 71.3%.
But then, something shocking happens. In 2001, it suddenly plummets to 59.4%, and
in 2005, 61.4%. What happened?
Well, we got Tony Blair and a disingenuous Labour
government, who even tried to claim that the historically low 2001 turnout "reflected
the voters' satisfaction with the [...] Labour government". What rot!
In the past, the two major parties were diametrically
opposed: Labour was more to the left and supported mainly by the working classes,
and the Conservatives - to the right of their current position - with the
majority of their support coming from the middle classes.
Under the guise of ‘New’ Labour, the traditionally working-class
party started to gain increasing support from the so-called ‘middle-Englanders’
through Blair's manoeuvres towards the centre ground. He got rid of Clause IV, and the party declared
itself perfectly happy with people becoming "filthy rich" and went all-out for the centre-right vote, all of which was pivotal to their winning
the 1997 election.
Voters thought they had seen the worst excesses of
parliamentary sleaze under the previous Major premiership, what with Neil Hamilton's
"cash for questions" scandal, David Mellor's undermining of the
"Back to Basics" campaign with his extra-marital shenanigans,
Jonathan Aitken and his "sword of truth", and so on. Indeed, John Prescott was regularly to be
heard bawling, "Tory sleaze!" from a sedentary position on the
opposition benches in an irony that would only reach its full, juicy ripeness
some ten years later.
Little were the voters to know how much worse was to come.
After 1997, extra-marital affairs that were previously a
resigning issue would became de rigueur. Peter Mandelson would be sacked and re-instated
three times; Blair would show his readiness to leap into action on behalf of
very rich men ranging from Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone, to the Indian
billionaires the Hinduja brothers and steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal; and so on, and so on, and so on. A pattern of degradation in the morals of our
most important public servants emerged.
Something had gone horribly wrong with the British political system,
culminating in the expenses scandal, implicating most MPs, and defenestrating
supposedly the very symbol of parliament, the ineffectual Speaker Michael
Martin, in the process.
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| Anti-war protest, February 2003 |
Concurrently, the public were not being listened to. The Countryside
Alliance march elicited no change in the government's policy. Worse, the march against the Iraq war in
February 2003, attended by an estimated million people, did not dissuade Blair from
his determination to invade without any adequate plans for the aftermath.
No, instead the government legislated in the Serious
Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 to make it a criminal offence to protest
within the vicinity of parliament without authorisation. They later promised to repeal this unpopular
measure but it was inexplicably dropped during the pre-election “wash-up”
period.
Add to this the sexed-up dossiers containing passages plagiarised
from PhD students, lies to parliament, and the questionable role of the
un-elected Alastair Campbell. Hell, even
the Chilcot Inqury, set up in 2009, still hasn't yet reported. The Hutton Inquiry into the dodgy circumstances
of Dr David Kelly's death is still contested by leading doctors, and the
post-mortem report and pictures of the body have been brazenly classified for
70 years, apparently to spare Kelly's wife and daughters from further media reports. I'm sure they'd rather have the truth.
In 2005, Labour even argued in Court that their manifesto
promises should not be legally binding [Wheeler
R (on the application of) v Office of the Prime Minister & Secretary of
State for Foreign & Commonwealth Affairs [2008] EWHC 1409]. The wise and impartial judge ruled that
this was indeed so. No matter that if a
business acted in the same manner, it would find the directors charged with many
offences. In other words, they can
promise you the moon on a stick, but they can, instead, place a wet cow pat in
a brown paper bag on your doorstep, set fire to it, ring your doorbell and run off.
And yet despite all this, and more, Blair still managed to
win three general elections. Desperate
Conservative politicians, marooned on the opposition benches for years began to
feel that Blair's way was the only way.
And so they elected Cameron.
The iconic and meaningful Conservative torch of freedom was
duly extinguished, to be replaced by a scribble of a tree. A bloody tree! Cameron ran off to Norway to hug a huskie and
warn us all of the dangers of global warming, and stuck a little electricity-generating windmill on
his house, bless.
Thus began the shift of all parties to the supposed
political Nirvana of the "centre ground".
The problem is that once you're in the centre, you don't
actually stand for anything any more.
There is no differentiation between the parties. We're stuck with the EU; we're stuck with the
Human Rights Act; we're stuck with the Quangos; we're stuck with the bloated
public sector; and we're stuck with a bunch of career politicians whose only
desire is to be elected, rather than to change the country (with a mentionable
handful of exceptions).
So, politicians, you can stuff your rhetoric, your newspaper
columns, your speeches and your pleas for votes. Until you actually stand for something worth
standing up for, rather than tinkering round the edges and actually see it
through; until you prove yourselves to be men and women of vision and courage,
with a desire to see this country flourish on the world stage; until you stop
playing silly politics with ticket upgrades, alleged insults to police officers
and whether it’s acceptable to say “calm down, dear”; until you prove yourselves
to be grown ups, then these ears will remain wilfully deaf.
Simon
