Events in British politics over the past few weeks have moved so fast and so unpredictably, observers might wonder if any political certainties remain at all. At some point in this brief chapter in the history of British democracy, Harold Wilson's infamous ‘a week is a long time in politics' morphed into Marx and Engels's prophetic ‘all that is solid melts into air'.
Perhaps it's time to remind ourselves that some things really do stay the same. Here are two absolute certainties. First, if there proves to be a high level of voter interest in Thursday's European elections in the UK, it will not be down to the British electorate's enthusiasm for EU democracy. Second, the results of the European elections in the UK will have a greater bearing on UK politics and policy than they will on EU politics and policy. The only unusual thing, this time around, is this second certainty has been fully proven before voting has even taken place.
On Thursday we may well see a record turnout for European elections in the UK. A turnout of 45% or more, as one survey suggests, would be a sea change from past elections. In the first five sets of European elections, held from 1979-1999, turnout in the UK hovered around the low 30s and was firmly at the bottom of the EU league table. If turnout is up, we will all know why. Nobody needs reminding that this is the first opportunity which all UK voters will get to express their views about MPs' expenses at the ballot box. Yet, if it is to be Members of the European Parliament taking the rap for the misdemeanours of Members of the House of Commons, it will hardly be a victory for democracy.
In a Democratic Audit report released today, Andrew Blick and myself ask an apparently simple question: ‘what are European elections for?' We were minded to ask this question after seeing Eurobarometer survey evidence suggesting that, when it comes to the European Parliament, residents of the UK declare themselves the least interested and least well informed citizens of any of 27 EU member states. Moreover, less than half of British voters said they would describe the European Parliament as ‘democratic', again the lowest in the EU. The latter sits somewhat awkwardly with the fact that a mere 21 per cent of UK citizens polled by Eurobarometer said they would definitely vote in the 2009 European elections.
There is clearly a ‘democratic deficit' in the EU, because the key decision-making bodies which are the sources of most EU law are either unelected or indirectly elected. But while the European Parliament is directly elected on a universal franchise, European elections throughout the EU are fought on domestic issues, and always with lower turnouts than general elections. If it were possible to measure, each percentage point fall in turnout might well turn out to render the democratic deficit a kilometre wider.
In this sense, the attitude of British voters to European elections is part of a broader paradox in EU democracy, and one which not only afflicts the British. The more powers the EU acquires, the more legislation that hails from Brussels and Strasbourg, the less inclined EU citizens are to vote in European Parliament elections. This is not because the European Parliament has no influence; its powers have grown significantly since the early 1980s. Neither is it because European citizens and MEPs have radically different views of the nature of the challenges facing Europe; this is possibly the only thing electors and elected in Europe really do seem to agree upon. Yet, this is precisely the debate which ‘Expensesgate' has pushed even more firmly into the background as UK voters seek to ‘punish' MPs.
So, what of the debates which Expensesgate has pushed to the foreground? The most remarkable of these is the growing support for a referendum on proportional representation. The one signal which the European elections will send out loud and clear is that there are moments in any democracy when large numbers of voters want to vote against the main parties. Since PR was introduced for European elections in the UK in 1999, it has had an obvious impact. The Greens, Plaid Cymru and UKIP have all gained their first seats in the European Parliament over the past decade.
This time around, the gains for small parties may prove to be so dramatic that they will revive the stock arguments against PR - no party would have a majority, it would lead to extremists being elected, and so on. More than ever before, these arguments will greatly miss the point. Volatile elections tell us what is wrong with our politics - more so if they result in anger about events in one parliament being mistranslated into a big shift in representation in a different parliament. As Marx might have said: ‘the voters have interpreted British democracy; the point, however, is to change it'.
