Rt. Hon. David Blunkett MP, Member of Parliament for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough
Faith in democratic institutions, the media and broader political processes has fallen to dangerously low levels. The 2012 Audit of Political Engagement by the Hansard Society revealed the proportion of the public who say they are ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ interested in politics has dropped by 16% and now stands at 42%, falling below 50% for the first time since the audits began.
Meanwhile, Peter Kellner, president of the polling organisation YouGov, tested in spring 2012 the proposition that ‘Britain would be governed better if our politicians got out of the way, and instead our ministers were non-political experts who knew how to run large organisations’. Almost as many people agreed, 38%, as disagreed, 43%.
It could be described as nothing short of a coup in terms of what occurred last year in Greece, with the removal of the Prime Minister, and in Italy, with the removal of both the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. But clearly, Britain is not exempt from this growing trend of anti-politics.
Yet it is at this moment we need politics and, dare I say it, politicians more than ever. Both to articulate the language of priorities, as described by Aneurin Bevan, but also to mediate and decide between contradictory demands from the public and short term pressures alongside long term imperatives. How much should we cut spending; do we need to raise taxes; how do we structure our health and education systems – making progress on these complex issues can be met only by elections, political engagement and democracy.
Yet in order to defend politics and therefore political democracy, we need to change the way in which we ‘do’ our politics. My pamphlet In Defence of Politics Revisited, published this week, sets out several concrete suggestions for how to achieve this.
One idea, for instance, is that for government to directly support mutual action and key campaigns would be unusual but not unthinkable. In the spring of 2012, Which? organised, under the heading of The Big Switch, almost 40,000 people coming together to negotiate a much better personal deal in relation to domestic energy consumption. Government support for such initiatives would be transformational.
Similarly, nurturing the process of getting people to run their own facilities locally can be seen as one of the few positive developments from the austerity agenda. There are good examples in North America of how services have been reshaped to offer this new way of meeting need. In Oregon in the USA, for example, people with mental health conditions are helped to live independent lives through a personal budget. They are assigned an advisor to identify goals and how to best use the budget to buy goods and services which will help them achieve these aims. ‘Co-delivery’ would help people to help themselves.
At the heart of pioneering a new approach to service delivery, we also need new finance mechanisms to help tackle the widening gap between rich and poor. This should include lifelong accounts developed jointly between the individual and contributed to through government funding.
And at the centre of all this, we must refocus politics on core issues that matter most to people. Taking on the challenges of an ageing population and affordable retirement, and mobilising civil society through volunteering (including direct support to the million young people out of work and training) will require engagement, creative thinking and determination.
We need to reaffirm that the political process is not merely compatible with progress and development in the twenty-first century, but essential to it. By restating the importance of politics and politicians in Britain, we can build from the bottom up, and begin to reverse the worrying anti-politics trend, which empowers the elite technocrats and leaves the man or woman in the street, with a mere vote to cast, defenceless.
In Defence of Politics Revisited, by David Blunkett MP with a foreword by Ed Miliband MP, is available in full on his website http://davidblunkett.typepad.com/
7 Responses to “To defend politics we need to change how we do politics”
David Morris
All very well and good Mr Blunkett. The premise is correct indeed. “Politics” needs to be drastically reformed to regain legitimacy with the majority of the public. Democratic political debate is indeed as important as it has ever been. And yet, your suggestions here don’t go nearly far enough to address the problem, as we might expect from someone who has invested their life in the system as it stands.
What we need to address these problems is widespread and wholesale change of legislative and executive institutions, and also of democratic processes, within the state at a local, regional and national level, but also in economic institutions and civic societies like trade unions. It’s really quite difficult to know where to begin, but those who are politically engaged need to be far more daring and far-thinking when approaching these issues, in a manner that might befit say, the American founding fathers or the French Revolutionaries (c. 1789, not 1793).
treborc1
And yet what have we got a bunch of career politicians who are so interested in them selves they forgot the reasons we voted them in.
Ed Miliband is now saying nothing in case he upsets the swing voters or the progressive right of the labour party.
I can understand why people think most politicians are in it for themselves, mainly because they are.
LB
Quite.
There was no democracy when you were running the shop.
You just dictated to us, just as the Condems are now.
That’s why people are pissed off.
They are going to be even more pissed off when they discover the true extent of the fraud.Namely you have, just like Asil Nadir, Bernie Maddoff and other fraudsters, hidden the money you owe them off the books.
LB
They have to abdicate power and give the approval at least to the electorate.
However, they won’t. They will carry on dictating and controlling.
It’s going to go bad when the pensions fraud in government comes out and they can’t pay the 20p in the pound they currently are handing back.
The flipside. If you aren’t a politician, you aren’t responsible.
Try convincing people to pay 230,000 plus interest as their share of the true governmetn debt.
Newsbot9
“Personal budget”
Ah yes, capping spend regardless of needs. You know about making people defenceless, I’m sure, with your “budgets” which I’m sure will mean that if you’re out of work for too long you simply won’t get anything and can go die in the street.
No, time for REAL change – a party of the left, and voting reform.