Why We Hate Politics. Colin Hay. Polity Press.
Colin Hay is a Professor of Political Analysis and has produced a book typical of the academic genre – tightly argued and well referenced if somewhat dense, and at times, abstract. His main focus is that politics is ‘an increasingly dirty word’ and he sets out to examine why.
In fairness, some of the information he presents is rather good, especially in the earlier chapters where he looks at trends in political participation within the major developed states of the world, identifying and seeking to explain declines in voter turnout, falling membership of political parties and prevalent attitudes towards democracy and participation as sampled in opinion polls. He notes that somewhat paradoxically, just as traditional political participation has declined in recent decades, so have attitudes towards democracy as a form of running society improved, with less anti-democratic sentiment than in earlier times. This seems to be because while parliamentary democracy may not be perfect, any known, established alternatives to it (e.g. dictatorship from the far left or right) have proved to be even less attractive propositions.
While just over three-quarters of people in Britain consider democracy to be the ‘best form of government’ this means – rather worryingly – that nearly a quarter would prefer something else (e.g. dictatorship), but this is one of the highest levels of anti-democratic sentiment still existing in the Western world, in distinction to the Scandinavian countries, Germany and Japan, for instance, where pro-democracy sentiments are almost universal.
Rather like a bourgeois economist, Hay examines contemporary attitudes towards politics and political participation in terms of demand and supply. He argues that most writers examining this problem have focused principally on the demand side of this equation, in that they have been content to analyse the declining ‘demand for political goods’ amongst the electorate as manifested in voter turnout, political party membership and so on. When turnout declines the blame is apportioned to the voters, not the purveyors of political goods and services like the politicians and spin-doctors, who seem content to market themselves as competing branded versions of essentially the same product.
He argues that this issue of political supply – and the problems associated with it – has largely been ignored. The supply side essentially constitutes ‘changes in the content of the appeals that the parties make to potential voters’ and ‘changes in the capacity of national-level governments to deliver genuine political choice to voters’. Interestingly, unwitting support for this ‘supply-side’ view of political decline comes from the politicians themselves, who seem increasingly keen to abdicate responsibility for the running of society and for the political choices involved in this. In this respect, Hay’s piece de resistance is a quote from Blair’s old lieutenant, former Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, Lord Falconer:
‘What governs our approach is a clear desire to place power where it should be: increasingly not with politicians, but with those best fitted in different ways to deploy it. Interest rates are not set by politicians in the Treasury, but by the Bank of England. Minimum wages are not determined by the Department of Trade and Industry, but by the Low Pay Commission . . . this depoliticisation of key decision-making is a vital element in bringing power closer to the people.’
While Hay seems to imply that this is a dereliction of duty by politicians that has led to even more cynicism from the public, it is just as much an admission of their practical failure to create worthwhile change or improvement through active intervention. After all, if there’s little or nothing you can do, then why not (under the guise of being ‘democratic’) effectively hand over the supposed ‘powers’ concerned to someone else? Then they can, at least, take any blame that is due from a weary and sceptical public.
Dave Perrin
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