The cradle of democracy? Westminster is seen by many as an occupying power
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Version 0 of 1. No one can say they don’t have it coming. The Westminster elite, who may be just as hated as the wretched bankers, are being pounded. Both Alex Salmond and Nigel Farage, for example, have roundly abused this clique to great effect. Salmond’s biggest surge in the referendum campaign followed his attack on the Westminster parties for privatising the NHS and agreeing on austerity. With this deft move, he took big chunks of Labour’s base into the yes camp. In his conference speech at the weekend, Farage told delegates that the dominant parties look the same, sound the same, and differ on little of substance – particularly when it comes to Europe and immigration. The same message has come from two defecting Tory MPs, Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless. Both the SNP and Ukip have been banging their respective drums for years – Ukip wanting to rescue the British state from the EU and metropolitan pinko elites, the SNP wishing to inter it – but their current traction is unprecedented. Why should it suddenly be that each finds an enthusiastic audience? Why is it that Westminster increasingly appears to significant groups of voters, to not be the “cradle of democracy” as it has sometimes been vaingloriously styled, but as an occupying power? And why is this impasse of representative democracy registering as a crisis of Britain? In a way, there is no mystery about Ukip and the SNP. They differ greatly, not just in their attitudes towards the British state, but their overall politics regarding welfare, immigration, the military and public spending. Yet each represents a form of populism – conservative and reformist respectively – that argues that the British state has ceased to be a representative and truly democratic one. Each thrives on the fact that the traditional parties are fragmenting, losing their connection to their base, and increasingly professionalised operations remote from the “ordinary hardworking families” they never shut up about. George Monbiot wrote, at the zenith of New Labourism, that Britain had become a “captive state”. It was a society where corporations penetrated the epicentre of government, where politicians of all major parties converged on a single model of statecraft – neoliberalism – and where more and more democratic functions were outsourced to quangos and businesses. This was true enough, and its effects were registered in the ensuing sharp drop in electoral turnout and party membership – the traditional indices of popular political participation. But what we are seeing now may be a deep institutional crisis akin to the collapse of the postwar compromise in the 1970s. The fact that this is expressed in a national form is neither accidental nor a distraction. Britain has been heading toward a crisis for years. As long as it was a multinational state at the heart of a global empire – one in which Scotland was an enthusiastic participant – Britain had a purpose. And in the postwar era, Westminster was able to deliver certain social reforms on this basis. The memory of these goods is what Gordon Brown invoked when he cautioned against the loss of the British welfare state if Scotland chose independence. But there are generations of people who have no memory of either empire or postwar social democracy. It is they, overwhelmingly, who absconded to the yes camp; their elders who remained firmly no. This is why the demand for the reterritorialisation of political authority is gaining popular traction. Whether it is devolution in Scotland and Wales, demands for local representation in Manchester and Yorkshire, or the renewed calls for English votes for English laws, there is a recognition on all sides that the centralised power of Westminster is itself part of the democratic deadlock. It is coterminous with a spatial distribution of wealth and power, which is sometimes too simply called “the north-south divide”. As Danny Dorling argues, this divide is getting worse in austerity Britain. Westminster’s distance from ordinary people is physical, social and cultural as well as political, and the most effective populist responses tap into this fact. The English left has no coherent response. Whereas most of the Scottish left found a renewed purpose in the Radical Independence Campaign, English nationalism has only benefited the right. As such, only in localised situations, where a popular revolt has long been brewing against cartel politics – Tower Hamlets or Bradford, for instance – has the left made a breakthrough. By contrast, the right is filled with energy. Farage speaks of a new constitutional settlement, and the Tories have long appropriated the language of local democracy. This is because they believe local parliaments can be made to compete with one another, thus engendering a race to the bottom over taxes and regulations. Such might have been the hope entertained for an independent Scotland, if it weren’t for the “far left” and “greenies” that Rupert Murdoch warned were empowered by the campaign. This is the problem. If the right leads the way in reorganising the British state, then the populist energies harnessed to that purpose will only be rallied behind a new elite – one still addressed at Westminster. |