The Last Voter in England?

Thursday 15 November, and Election fever grips the Land. Three cheerful tellers sit behind a table in our village hall like the wise old monkeys they probably are, as the People Decide. The girls and boys in political rosettes have stayed away, I notice. Or maybe the Three Wise Ones are political, but hiding it in the interests of Police Impartiality.

The UK Police and Crime Commissioner race is on, and so’s the Kettle.

This is British democracy at its glorious best and awful worst.

I'm a congenital Voter, Me.

Like them or hate them, you can't complain about them if you didn't bother to elect them, say I.

There's enough mitteleuropean blood in my veins from my parents’ generation to appreciate a country where you can vote.

The more of this sort of thing we do, the more we may get a taste for it and build a more participative intelligent democracy. That’s my fantasy, anyway.

So why are some 80% of the voters likely to sit this one out?

Well, for a start, nobody really knows what the hell it’s supposed to be about. In the bad old days you elected a council, and they put people on a governance authority for your local police. It was a bit of British great and good stitch up, but by and large it worked. Jolly PC49’s gave kiddies the time of day, the beer stayed warm, England lost the Test Match, and old maids cycled safely to early communion through autumn mists.

Many suspect this whole thing ain’t broke, and this is just £75m going on another lame stunt by our leaders to convince us they believe in democracy and so should we. They could be right, but...

For seconds, there's little to argue about from a strictly party political point of view, until someone is crazy enough to start a political party dedicated to sacking police officers, penny pinching myopia, mind-numbind levels of bureaucracy, letting fraudsters get away with it, and rewarding Thieves with knighthoods.

No party believes in that prospectus. But they all implement it anyway. So where’s the choice? And why have a Party political beauty contest about it?

Finally, few of the candidates are known across the area they will represent. High deposits and the lack of a mailshot are said to have stacked the odds against independents before they got out of the starting gate. So perhaps this is a referendum on whether you want to vote for party candidates or independents. For all we know some of both are completely crazy, but what do we know? They are all going to reduce bureaucracy, put more officers on the beat, catch crooks, save money and generally make us feel good. They’ll get us Police who are Judge Dredd, George Dixon and Inspector Morse rolled into one.

So what’s not to like? Vote early, vote often, as they used to say in northern Ireland. I managed the first, and felt pretty damn smug about it for at least ten minutes. Next step in my democracy rollout — a directly elected General Synod.

Gordon Brown: Der Untergang

Fully Democratic voting systems deliver 36% of the power for 36% of the votes. This is boring for career politicans, but it’s also predictable. Most European politicians have to exercise skills to work together in the national interest more than once every 36 years plus remembrance day. As the only way to more power is to win more votes, they have to work harder with the public, and are generally more respected for it.

As it is in the UK, ninety years of cruising around in the belief that 36% of the vote entitles our political masters to 100% of the power has scarce prepared them for an hour such as this. Although they are being uncharacteristically soppy-stern and polite, they don’t seem to know how to talk with each other, rather than at each other. One optimistic hope is that they will learn, and this will be good for us all. The problem has been acknowledged since the 1860’s, and the kind of solution we need an open secret since the Royal Commission of 1908-10. They can hardly say they weren‘t warned.

And as the great Poker Game in the Sky grinds on around Westminster, first man down is Gordon Brown. How will historians see him?

Two interesting counterfactuals could be run:

• What if John Smith had lived another ten years?
  
  
• What if Brown had cut and run in 2007 to establish his legitimacy?

To Brown’s credit, probably, is his performance as a very British iron chancellor. His staunchest opponents will have to grudgingly admit he held his nose and did what probably had to be done about the credit crunch, and competently. His tax credits scheme was a way of redistributing income without raising income tax. He generated shedloads of cash to throw at education and health after thirty years of cuts. Yes, there’s a comparatively high peacetime public debt, but everyone’s got one of those coming out of recession, whilst economic historians will point out that as a proportion of GDP it’s actually lower than for most of the tweniteth century.

Brown was a Roundhead at Tony Blair’s Cavalier party. When Blair and Brown met at the Loch Fyne Fish Restaurant, or wherever, they carved up the next 13 years of the governance of Brtain between them. The process was probably much swifter and easier than what has been going on since last Thursday, and considerably more lasting.

However, as Blair swigged the champagne, Brown gagged on his Irn Bru. Therein lies tragedy.

Once Brown had gotten over the joy of playing with the real levers of power at Number 11, he probably hated the party, but hung on in there for the joy that lay ahead. How sad that it was so joyless when he got it. Nobody knows at what point Blair and/or Brown bricked up the corridor from Number 11 to Number 10, but his estrangement from his ertswhile dinner companion was disastrous. Brown, as a man of genuine rectitude, probably found it hard to believe what some of his less puritanical colleagues were up to.

But Brown was a genuine conviction politician. I remember his appearance at the Lambeth Conference. He obviously knew and owned the Millennium Development Goals without cue cards. He actually belived in that stuff.

Colleagues from all over the world, who believe the English to be clever but devious, were impressed by his obvious sincerity and passion. Not quite English. Scots, in fact.

Too passionate, not emotionally intelligent enough? How about what they are already calling Bigot-Gate? Other politicians suggest they would never call a voter anything as rude as “that woman.” When the great bin of emails is emptied out on the day of doom, and the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, I believe it will show other politicians have, in fact, called voters, and their colleagues, considerably ruder things and got away with it. But not with the microphone on.

And after all those complaints about Tony Blair’s addiction to spin, it’s ironic and sad, in some ways, that Brown’s “Lion in Winter” style was such a rat sandwich to Fleet Street, if not all the British public.

Blair danced for us and we tried to dance, with all the finesse Btits bring to that activity. Brown wept for us and we would not wail. He’s almost certainly done the decent thing politically. I think history will be kinder to him than the Sun. Let’s see who’s next.

Two Real World Interludes

As someone who leads a strictly non-profit, but I hope not entirely unproftable, life, I don’t do advertising, but my eye was caught by the Trail of Hope. In a year Slumdog drew attention to Indian Streetkids, two friends from South Africa have hatched a vision for creating a community of Capetown’s homeless young people, under the auspices of the MyLife foundation. Albert Arcona and Tendai Joe are riding motorbikes from Capetown to London this autumn, taking in various sights along the way — the HIV/AIDS context mkes the need particularly acute, and anyone interested in Streetkids, Zimbabwe, South Africa, could well want to be part of this project.

Meanwhile, Beyond the Fringe taught us there is a time in any struggle when a pointless gesture is called for. As thousands take to the streets of Tehran, there are not many oogedy boogedy Ayatollahs using Twitter, but we know many democracy campaigners are. If they open the main Twitter stream, which we know they are using as a significant tool in getting and keeping their act together, and see a large number of green avatars, they know they are not alone, and have an instant database of overseas friends and allies.

The proposal is that anyone anywhere else in the world who supports Iranian democracy can “Green their Avatar” to show solidarity and support to people who need it, when they need it. So, that’s my futile gesture for a bit. I'm greening my Twitter Avatar for a while in support of Iranian Democracy. If you’re a Real Twit, why don’t you?