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Remember when we used to complain about political apathy?
Jonathan Sumption is notorious for being one of Britain’s cleverest persons. The retired judge doubles as a historian and if there are thoughts to be thunk then Sumption is your man.
With that in mind, the BBC has invited him to deliver this year’s Reith lectures. On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning listeners were offered a taster. If the taster is any guide to the starter and main course then, in this case, I suggest sending it back to the kitchen, with instructions for the chef to rethink.
The central premise of his argument was that there is a dangerous shortage of political engagement in Britain, highlighting a decline in politics.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with politicians,” he said.
That’s a stretch. Even if you think – as I do – that there are quite a few capable politicians in Britain right now, most of them below cabinet level, it is surely the case that the pitiful shambles of the last year or more suggests that there is, in fact, quite a lot wrong with our politicians.
Sumption said that disengagement with politics is reflected in low voter turnout “and general contempt for the political process.” Hold on. Turnout in the 2016 referendum was high – by modern standards – at 72.2%.
There is indeed considerable contempt for the process, yet quite a bit of it stems from leavers and others furious that the referendum result is in the process of being ignored.
One aspect of the problem, Sumption told a polite but probably sceptical Justin Webb, is the decision to hold that referendum in the first place. “We have adopted a method of decision making – the referendum – which is deliberately designed to circumvent the ordinary political process.”
Fine, I get the point, but he overlooks the reality that referendums, like them or not, and I dislike them, have for some time been an established part of the ordinary process. There was a referendum in 1975 to confirm whether or not we should stay in the European project. Scottish and Welsh devolution was underpinned with a pair of referendums. The sainted Good Friday Agreement was similarly endorsed.
A lot of people are unhappy with the 2016 referendum, partly – it seems – because this was their first experience of being on the losing side in a referendum. Most seemed relatively relaxed about the concept of a binary vote when they thought Leave had no chance. Afterwards? Not so much.
But Sumption’s bigger point – that there is a lack of engagement – rests on what can only be a misunderstanding of what is going on out in the country right now. Far from there being a lack of engagement, there is a flowering of engagement. There may even be too much damned engagement, or more than is healthy.
“The basic problem, I think, is the declining level of political engagement by people in active politics,” he told listeners. He then made it clear that by active politics he means the established main parties.
“A generation ago the political parties had hundreds of thousands, millions in fact, of membership.”
As he then acknowledged, Labour has seen a surge in membership under Jeremy Corbyn. It did not run into the millions because life has changed. Complaining about there not being multi-million party memberships like wot there used to be is to overlook the invention of the television, the gramophone (and now Spotify, an internet-based gramophone) and the widespread popularity of restaurants and foreign holidays. People have far more in the way of options now when it comes to spending their time. Sitting in a hall listening to activists is low on the list of desirable leisure activities.
Sumption rightly says that this puts power in the hands of local parties: “The parties have tremendous power because local constituency associations control who is the candidate in each constituency and they have an important voice in the choice of leaders… it’s not good enough to turn up in numbers to polls .. the way the political system operates gives very small numbers of people huge amounts of power.”
Right, sure. But that, surely, means that politicians are failing to attract and inspire sufficient members to their cause who might then make smart choices in selections. There is clearly something wrong with the leading politicians involved, if they have failed in this regard, although Sumption says the politicians are fine.
There is something much bigger going on here, and Sumption, one of the nation’s leading intellects, seems to have missed it or misunderstood its significance.
There is a surge in engagement. The old parties are being melted down and will have to reinvent themselves again, as they have done before as society changes. The shift is ring driven by a rise in single-issue activism and consumer demand for more direct say and control. Politics is in ferment, but it is, in a strange way, booming.
The irony is that for many years, academics and commentators and politicians bemoaned public apathy. How, they asked, might this apathy be addressed? How might “the yoof” be inspired to care about stuff? How might voters in seats controlled by one party be encouraged to try spreading their votes around, to use their small amount of power and to avoid being treated like cattle by Labour and the Tories.
No-one is complaining about apathy now. Quite the opposite. For understandable reasons, the old parties and established thinkers such as Sumption don’t much like it.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.