Yahoo News Britain’s real democratic crisis? The broken link between voters and MPs
You may have heard that Britain is in crisis. Indeed, there’s a good chance that you will have heard little else. Turn on the TV, and a political reporter brings tidings of a fresh crisis for Theresa May. Flick on the radio, glance across the front pages, and one word will be splashed over and over again. Some mornings it seems the UK is under aerial bombardment from a noun.
But what a funny, contained emergency it is, full of Westminster people doing Westminster maths and deploying their Westminster terms. It is as if someone has drawn a thick red line along the perimeter of the parliamentary estate and labelled it, in big and self-important letters: National Crisis. Look at the politicians and pundits cramming the studio sofas, chattering about John Bercow and processology, swapping a Cooper-Boles for an Erskine May, and so excited that they crackle like acrylic jumpers.
Why is a stalemate among MPs a matter for such concern, yet the extinction of mining communities passed over in silence?
In this way, an extraordinarily serious moment for the country is shrunk to fit our TV screens. A national vote precipitated this mess, don’t forget – one in which the then prime minister, the leader of the opposition, the Bank of England, the Confederation of British Industry and the Trades Union Congress united to give their solemn advice, and still the stubborn voters rebelled. Yet stick on the BBC on any given Sunday morning, and it is as if the revolution of 1789 was being covered entirely from inside the Versailles court of Louis XVI.
That vast disconnect between elite authority and lived experience is central to what’s broken in Britain today. Why is a stalemate among 650 MPs a matter for such concern, yet the slow, grinding extinction of mining communities and light-industrial suburbs passed over in silence? Why does May’s wretched career cover the first 16 pages of a Sunday paper while a Torbay woman told by her council that she can “manage being homeless”, and even sleeping rough, is granted a few inches downpage in a few of the worthies? Oh, some may say, they have no connection. Except that the death sentence handed to stretches of the country and the vindictive spending cuts imposed by the former chancellor George Osborne are a large part of why Britain voted for Brexit in the first place.
A couple of years ago, I wrote here about a woman from Newcastle who greeted warnings that leaving the EU would damage the economy by shouting: “That’s your bloody GDP. Not ours.” In the same spirit of blunt truth-telling, we should tell Westminster that this is their bloody crisis – not ours. But we have long suffered under a crisis in how we are governed.
Far away from the Speaker’s House these old, pre-2016 crises rumble on. In the spirit of that Geordie heckler, let us define them crudely. We have economic policymakers who can’t grasp how the economy has changed, elected politicians who share hardly anything in common with their own voters, and journalists who too often display a remarkable incuriousness about the country they are meant to be reporting on.
Over a decade from the banking crash, the failings of our economic policymaking need little elaboration. Not content with missing the great meltdown, the state’s economists have spent the past 10 years forecasting a magnificent recovery that never actually turned up. Meanwhile, the basic language of economic policy makes less and less sense. Growth no longer brings prosperity; you can work your socks off and still not earn a living. Yet still councils and governments across the UK will spend billions on rail lines, and use taxpayers’ money to bribe passing billionaire investors, all in the name of growth and jobs – no matter how poor the quality. It is called economic policy. It looks more and more like ripping off the public.
That breakdown between policy and outcome ought to be reflected in our politics. The fact that it is not is in large part down to the narrowing of our political class. Reviewing the backgrounds of the MPs elected in 2017, Channel 4 News found that over half had come from backgrounds in politics, law, or business and finance. In fact, more MPs come from finance alone than from social work, the military, engineering and farming put together. That winnowing-out of other trades and ways of life has a direct consequence on our law-making. A University College London study published last year shows that as the parliamentary Labour party became more “careerist” under Tony Blair, it also grew increasingly fond of slashing welfare. Social security was not something these professionalised MPs or their circle had ever had to rely on, so why not attack scroungers and win a few swing voters?
The other great ventilator of national problems should be the media, yet some of its most powerful institutions are not doing that job. Take the BBC, the subject of a must-read essay in the latest issue of Prospect magazine. Its author, Mark Damazer, who was until 2010 controller of Radio 4, diagnoses how the corporation fails to reflect the concerns of Brexit Britain. He describes a recent TV news package of a kind that we’ve all grown tired of: set in Mansfield – yet giving no information about the town’s labour market, schools, NHS waiting times, merely popping in on the old cliche of a working-men’s club and vox-popping ex-miners. Damazer writes: “The reporter, who normally can be expected to know little or nothing about the place, has harvested their balanced soundbites, has dutifully proved that ‘real people’ are fed up with it all, fled and filed their report.” It is a verdict all the more damning because its author has tried, so far, to be understanding of his former colleagues’ difficulties. Yet it is a fact that the BBC’s foreign correspondents display a greater knowledge of Syria than some of its home reporters are expected to have about their own country.
Forget your red-faced parliamentarians and clever backbench amendments. This is what a real democratic crisis looks like: failed policies forced down the throats of a public whose own representatives don’t get them, and whose media see them only as fodder for vox pops. Institution after institution failing to legislate, reflect or report on the very people who pay for them to exist. This is the very definition of national failure. And until it is even acknowledged, Britain will be stuck, seething with resentment, in a political quagmire.
• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
