Voting for Democracy

Britain's Prime Minister announced this morning that an election for members of the UK parliament's House of Commons will be held on 5 May 2005. With that announcement came the election campaign’s first reminders of the deep inadequacies of British democracy.

In Britain the precise timing of a general election is in the gift of the Prime Minister, who is constrained only by the limit on the maximum length of a Parliament. Within that limit he is free to choose the day on which he thinks he is most likely to win; an advantage one could not begin to describe as democratic.

In order to call an election the Prime Minister must ask permission from the Queen to dissolve Parliament. In this situation the role of the Queen herself is of course purely ceremonial. But here we are reminded of the royal prerogative to dominate the political scene that is largely invested in the Prime Minister of the day. This aspect of Britain's top-heavy and unresponsive system of government results from the fact that Britain merely adapted its former monarchical regime to incorporate some democratic systems, instead of replacing it with an inherently egalitarian constitution.

In a healthy democratic system power is spread widely and thinly. An over-powerful Prime Minister is one example of how that principle is undermined in Britain; but there are others.

Unlike in a grown-up democracy, the UK voting system does not throw together a varied range of politicians representing the myriad of political views that make up a diverse civil society; representatives who must then work together through dialogue and compromise, much as we all do in our day to day lives. Instead Britain's voters elect parliaments that are dominated by one political grouping. Under our system a party must win the most votes in a regional constituency to have a representative in parliament. The result is that parties with a degree of support across the country but no actual majority in any one place (e.g. the Greens) have no representation whatsoever in government. The system under-represents the small parties and over-represents the large ones, creating parliaments that in no way reflect a balance of the public’s views. The dominating party might have the support of less than two fifths of the population, and many of them may only have supported it for what they perceived as pragmatic reasons. The leader of this over-represented political grouping is then made Prime Minister and given quasi-monarchical powers of patronage to form a government which can barely be held to account by an under-represented opposition.

However, it is the location of power in our economy which places the really decisive limits on our democratic rights. Whilst democracies distribute social power - in the form of the vote - on the basis of human equality, markets distribute social power - in the form of control over resources - according to ability to pay. The government must answer to the electorate every four years or so, but it must answer to those who own the economy every day of the week. Every day those wealthy enough to own newspapers can put pressure on our government of the kind the average voter alone could never muster. Every day private employers can threaten to take their business to a country where they can employ people more cheaply and with less strings attached. Every day owners of capital can threaten to withdraw their resources from the national economy unless these, and other favourable investment conditions, are created or enhanced. These pressures and threats - sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, never democratic - govern capitalist democracies with much greater effectiveness than mere votes.

Under these circumstances elections become little more than vacuous, personality-centred pantomimes, organised by the PR industry, where voters are invited to select a group of managers to run the country primarily on behalf of big business. These gaudy extravaganzas, with their bunting, balloons and glossy brochures, are presented to us as the triumphant realisation of every ideal of liberty and equality that we aspire to.

But none of this provides any of us with an excuse for not voting. Whatever the inadequacies of our democracy we still enjoy a far greater degree of political freedom than most societies. Because that allows us some influence over how our country is run we all then share in the responsibility for what our government does. After all, everyone is responsible for the consequences of their actions or inaction, and that simple truism applies here no matter how poor our electoral system or how narrow our choices. There is therefore a moral obligation upon us to vote; especially since the way Britain conducts itself is literally a matter of life or death, the Iraq war being only the most obvious, current example of this. The differences between the parties may be small but where a powerful country like Britain is concerned, small differences translate into large outcomes.

Of course voting is just one way we can influence how Britain is governed. There are four to five years between general elections and plenty we can do in between times in terms of organisation and action. But since the election plainly has at least some effect on how our country is run the question is how to make best use of it. There are a plethora of websites and organisations offering answers to that question.

Tactical Voter concentrates on keeping the Conservative Party out of power so that a dialogue between progressive parties can reform British politics in its absence. Their aim of "decapitating" the Conservative Party leadership presents a particularly appetising prospect.

With the UK giving virtually unqualified backing to the hard-line administration in Washington Vote4Peace aims to help elect as many MPs who are prepared to oppose future military aggression as possible.

Also from a progressive, anti-war standpoint there's Strategic Voter and So Now Who Do We Vote For?.

There are also attempts being made to decapitate New Labour. Reg Keys, father of a British soldier who died in Iraq, is standing against Tony Blair in Sedgefield. Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan who came under pressure from the British government after criticising the human rights record of our allies there, is standing against Foreign Secretary Jack Straw in Blackburn. Defeat, or even a decent scare for the incumbent in either constituency would send a very clear anti-war message to the political classes.

All these options are worth a look and all broadly take the same view; that while one election won't redeem British politics this is still a small opportunity both to punish its very worst excesses and to push it in a progressive direction. By “a progressive direction” I mean away from a society dominated by small concentrations of power and toward a system which truly gives life to those principles of liberty and equality that are so debased by this forthcoming charade. The election may well be a caricature of democracy. But so long as it provides the merest of opportunities to advance our wider efforts towards the real thing, and to mitigate the worst excesses of the current system, then its an opportunity that we should take as best we can.