4th May 2010
My hero Armando Iannucci, the man who brings us THE THICK OF IT, argues in today’s Independent that the public has had a good election.
We’re winners. We are media-savvy.
“We asked big questions, we got annoyed they weren’t being answered, we allowed another guy to have his say and thought he was decent enough to be given serious consideration, we said we didn’t like negative campaigning and made sure it stopped, we roared with mockery when old-fashioned sleazy headlines were brought out on the nation’s front pages, and we quite simply refused to be bought with easy promises, fancy slogans or cheap bribes. If the public were up for election this time round, I’d vote for them….”
The question is: is this media-savvy public also choosing wisely on policy substance? Or are we blinded by our own brilliant understanding of how the machinery of politics works? Have we seen so much THICK OF IT that we can’t stop saying “we’re cleverer than you take us for?” And in doing so, are we, with tragic irony, failing to examine the issues?
The LibDem surge, which Armando is famously backing, is all about voter disaffection. Sometimes this manifests itself as a cry for electoral reform. In Armando’s case, he positively wants a hung parliament. He wants to ‘knock some sense’ into the politicians, and points readers in the direction of a couple of websites for advice on how to ‘achieve’ the hung parliament.
A hung parliament would require a lot of back-room horse trading to form and maintain a coalition government. The voter would be a million miles away from that, and without a say in the process. Who knows, if it comes to it, whether the LibDems would go with the Tories or Labour? They’re chalk and cheese – utterly different directions – but we won’t have a say. How democratic is that? And how democratic is it that a party with 80 – 100 seats would hold what is laughably called the “balance” of power and freeze out a party with 250 or more seats? How democratic is it that Nick Clegg would seek to insist on the choice of leader of another party?
The truth is that good guys like Armando want a new world order; they want to “actually knock some sense into a political system [of] iniquities, brutalities and downright inefficiencies”. I’m afraid they might usher in the very opposite scenario. A hung parliament promises much more of “the same old politics” – with much less accountability.
Whatever your politics, the public is only the winner and has only had a good election if the political outcomes are well-chosen. The LibDem surge is all about voter disaffection, and the danger is that that disaffection turns into political outcomes the nation doesn’t actually want.
Paddy Ashdown said on Radio 4 today, “vote for what you believe in, otherwise how can you get what you want?” The trouble is, the LibDem surge is about ‘anti-politics’. You can believe in that if you like. But giving the LibDems disproportionate power in a hung parliament will not give you what you want.