Jon Bright (London, OK): Is UK politics in a state of crisis? OurKingdom is founded on a belief that it is, to an extent at least. This crisis has many facets. But one of the ones that has been interesting me most recently is disengagement. The nearness of an election sent those of us who live in or around Westminster village into such a frenzy of speculation that it was easy to lose site of the fact that, even if the thing had been called, 30-40% of the country wouldn't have been interested in taking part.
Do people find politics off putting because it has been reduced to mosaic charts and polling of key marginals - everyone furiously marching towards the centre ground and stealing each other's clothes? However off putting or cynical Brown's election screw up looked, most people would agree that any politician would have done something similar in his position - considered an election when the polls were high, then ditched the idea when it looked like he might lose. His real bungle lay in the media presentation - he cried havoc then didn't let the dogs loose. If everyone would act the same given the same circumstances then we need to change the circumstances - change the system.
There are a lot of systemic changes being suggested. Fixed terms is one: something which OK, Iain Dale and Stephen Tall are supporting a campaign for here, and which would remove the possibility of a repeat of the September we just had. Compulsory voting is another, something I am a lot less convinced about. A change in the way people vote - AV, PR, DV - has been floated many times, both here and elsewhere. If politicians had different incentives - to campaign for their base voters rather than swing voters - would they be more likely to stick to what they really believed in? Could system changes give our democracy a fresh start?
Or does focusing on the system ignore a wider problem? Are humans powerless in the face of the systems they have created? Many social science debates hinge on this distinction between structure and agency. If politicians, like the rest of us, are rational beings pursuing gains and constrained by systems, then their role becomes almost robotic, the only unpredictability generated by the imperfect nature of their decision making circuit.
The new powerlessness of the human is something felt keenly by society at the moment. Not too long ago the idea of state intervention into your eating habits would have seemed perverse. Now a headline on childhood obesity is predictable to the point of banality. Are we so incapable of managing ourselves that if given unlimited food we would eat ourselves to death? As state intervention in more and more areas of life becomes routine, the idea of control, of human agency, is thinned out - contributing to an idea of powerlessness and disengagement.
I'm not fully convinced by either side of this argument. I think UK politics does have a serious system problem, and some of the changes proposed above would be positive. But I'm not sure system changes are the whole solution - and I cannot accept that humans are powerless in the face of systems, because to do so would be to abandon any hope of meaningful change. Anyone else wake up thinking about this?
