Inequality and democracy: Can they coexist?

Equality (or, at least, fairness) and democracy are closely related. But the first has declined. Can the second survive? And if not, what will the endgame be? Thoughts on inequality, complexity, and collapse

The 1930s Slump. A march in Toronto

Inequality has been increasing. Few people have explained this process so well as Robert Reich, author of the 2010 book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future.

Reich was Labor Secretary in Bill Clinton’s first administration and is now Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at Berkeley. His diagnosis, as set out in Aftershock, is simple; it is that the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few will make everyone poorer, because the rich don’t spend anything like enough to generate employment – that needs a mass market, in which wealth is distributed through the workforce so that everyone can participate in the consumer economy. However, a process of wealth concentration has been going on for years. “The wages of the typical American hardly increased in the three decades leading up to the Crash of 2008, considering inflation. In the 2000s, they actually dropped,” says Reich, and goes on to explain that the economy has grown so much over that period that, had the benefits been divided equally, the typical person would be 60% better off.

If that’s the case, how come that, for 30 years, no-one seemed to notice this upward redistribution was happening? Reich argues that the relative decline in income for most people was masked by longer hours, which meant their overall income did not always decline – so that although their income per hour did, they didn’t always notice. He also notes the participation of women as well as men in the workforce, generating dual incomes so that people did not, subjectively, feel poorer (he does not use this as an argument that women should not be in the workforce). And, most dangerously, the decline in real incomes has been compensated for by an explosion of credit. A quick look at house prices over the last 30 years suggests where much of that credit went. When the property bubble burst, the game, indeed, stopped.

Britain is scarcely better in terms of income distribution. Inequality is often measured using the Gini coefficient, which measures variation through frequency distribution. The coefficient is expressed as a value between zero and one, where zero represents perfect equality and one represents the concentration of all wealth in one individual. According to the OECD, individual countries’ Gini coefficients range from roughly 0.24 to 0.7. That of the US in 2013 was 0.396 and Britain’s was not much better, at 0.358. These figures are high for developed countries; for comparison, France’s and Germany’s were 0.294 and 0.292 respectively. This suggests that if Reich is right and the US has a problem with income inequality, then Britain has one too.

The numbers seem to bear this out; according to the Equality Trust, households in the bottom 10% of the British population have an average net income of £9,277 while the top 10% have net incomes over nine times that (£83,897). The poorest 50% of all households own just 8.7% of the wealth; the richest 10% of households hold 45%. True, the Trust has an angle; its mission is to encourage greater equality. However, the figures have been drawn from Britain’s Office of National Statistics. The Trust adds that poorer children can expect 52 years of healthy life against richer ones’ 71. One could add that even the lower figure is far better than in lower-income countries. Nonetheless, the evidence of inequality in Britain is striking.

Inequality is not good for democracy. Reich warns that, if we’re unlucky, Americans will at last say “Hell, we were screwed”, but then draw quite the wrong conclusion from that, electing a right-wing, isolationist, populist and frightening President. He is wise enough to make this a fictional character (though she slightly resembles a sort of Palin-Thatcher cross.) It is an intriguing premise, given that Aftershock was written many months before the Trump campaign began to gain traction. It is not surprising.  Losers of rigged games, as Reich rightly says, tend to get angry. An alternative scenario that Reich does not consider is that Americans, and Brits, will vote for governments who see the need for greater equality, but that those governments will be hamstrung by markets, trade treaties and, in the US, legislative stasis. In that case people will, quietly first and then in greater numbers, drift away from the system, and society will lose its cohesion; government will become ineffective; and the Western world will decay into irrelevance.

A historical relationship

But the link between equality and democracy is not a new one. Without the former, the latter could not have taken root.

A functioning democracy requires a measure of equality – yet a certain equality is needed to attain democracy. The Industrial Revolution was, in effect, a breaking of that vicious circle. Between 1700 and 1900, Britain broke the cycle of poor nutrition, low output, low income, low consumption and poor nutrition. J.D. Chambers, in his elegant 1972 summary Population, Economy And Society In Pre-Industrial England, credits a fortuitous break in cycles of disease, but also says: “One aspect of the Industrial Revolution… is that the labour force was not only very much larger but that it was worked very much harder.” This needed better nutrition. In a 1990 paper, the future Nobel prizewinner Robert Fogel pointed to “the exceeding[ly] low level of work capacity permitted by the [18th century] food supply… The increase in the amount of calories available for work over the past 200 years… increased the labour-force participation rate by bringing [in] the bottom 20% of the consuming units… [who had had] only enough energy… for a few hours of strolling each day – about the amount needed for a career in begging.” (The Conquest of High Mortality and Hunger in Europe and America: Timing and Mechanisms, 1990.) He concluded that improvements in nutrition and health had accounted for perhaps 30% of the growth in per capita income in Europe between 1790 and 1980.

So the vicious circle had been broken. But those who controlled food and wages did not permit this out of altruism, or because they had read Fogel. Chambers cites the way in which 18th-century labour combined to obtain better wages. Or as the filmmaker Michael Moore put it in his 1996 polemic, Downsize This!, “When the early unionists stood up to the companies, it resulted in a higher standard of living for all of us… Thanks to labor unions, we have… wages that allow even the most unskilled worker to purchase many products – which, in turn, gives more people jobs.” This process of collective bargaining could not have happened under an all-powerful oligarchy. In effect, one type of human right secured another. In 19th-century Britain, freedom – albeit imperfect, the beginnings of liberal democracy – became more than its own reward.

Free debate was central to this process. Brian Inglis’s absorbing account of the social reforms of the 19th century, Poverty and the Industrial Revolution (1971), describes how in 1832 MP Michael Sadler fielded a Bill to regulate abuse of labour in factories;  the evidence collected by the Bill’s Committee proved, as the Leicester Mercury put it, that “cruel over-working [of children] has in many places been practised… It is horrible, and an outrage on humanity, and decency…” The uproar forced the new government to pass its own 1833 Factory Act, which for the first time created an independent inspectorate.  Britain never became a workers’ paradise, but that is not the point; rather, it is that democracy and the free circulation of information allowed the vicious circle of malnutrition to be broken and real growth to begin. It is an argument also stated, in a rather different form, by Amartya Sen, chiefly in his much-read book Development as Freedom (1999). Crudely put, a democracy is a society in which people may empower themselves; to Sen, famously, famines do not happen in a democracy. The development of capitalism and democracy, and the synthesis between the two, in the 19th century seems to demonstrate the same argument.

This is of course an imperfect thesis. Technological change also fed people in the 19th century: tinned goods; the introduction of refrigeration, enabling the transport of meat from Argentina and the Commonwealth; the process of enclosures, which slung people off the land but also created cheaper food; then building of the railways deep into the Great Plains of the US, which brought cheaper grain and in so doing caused an agricultural depression in Britain but also fed people – all of this mattered, and it is dangerous to say that there would have been no rise in living standards without democracy. Yet it is hard to see how ordinary people would have claimed their share without the freedom to organize and to be represented.

Today, however, as Reich has explained, the rich have reacted, and grabbed back a bigger share of the cake.  This reaction has been happening for a while, and it has already destabilized our world.  Consider the following from Reich’s Aftershock. It is a very good summary of what happened in 2008:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth... Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had... drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. ...In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

Except that it isn’t Reich himself and it isn’t about 2008. Reich is quoting long-ago Fed chairman Marriner Eccles. And Eccles was writing not about 2008 but about 1929 and the Great Depression that followed. Yet this is not so different to what happened after 2008, as the British and US governments bailed out the banks that were too big to fail, and ordinary people paid for it through a regime of austerity. After 1929, and again in 2008, it wasn’t the wealthy that paid for their folly.

So why not?

Anti-austerity demonstation in Valencia (Fito Senabre/Wikimedia Commons)

Rousseau is alleged to have said in a speech, “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” Actually the rich are quite good at making the poor eat each other instead. One can see this in the carefully whipped-up rhetoric against “scroungers” and the “workshy”; those of limited means are encouraged to blame their troubles on those less, rather than more, fortunate than themselves. Meanwhile the rich have helped themselves to the country’s assets. Anyone who doubts that this is what has taken place in Britain should read Owen Jones’s excellent The Establishment and How they Get away With It, or James Meek’s shrewd take on privatisation, Private Island.

This is part of a process by which wealth will become more and more concentrated. At some point, the consumer economy and the mass-markets it supports will go into decline. It will not be for the first time. Some have argued that this was the fate of Mayan society; it all became too much and the great mass of people stopped supporting their priestly class, and simply dissolved back into the jungle. (The American anthropologist Joseph Tainter has seen this process slightly differently, as one of societies collapsing because they support too much complexity; more on this below.) Is that what will happen to us – that the system will simply decay, leaving our societies to decline into illiberalism and superstition; a repeat of the end of the Roman Empire? That is somewhat apocalyptic, but as the philosopher John Gray has pointed out, the idea that history is, by its nature, progressive has little to support it.

But the threat to democracy in a society doesn’t just come from the inequalities within it. It comes also from inequality between societies – global inequality.

Global inequality

There is a rising tide of xenophobia in some European societies that is at least in part the result of a broader dimension of economic inequality that is threatening European democracy – global inequality and the refugee crisis. In 2015-2016, we saw the arrival, in Europe, of large numbers of refugees and illegal economic migrants (we should be careful about this distinction; one may be a refugee from poverty). This gave rise to a liberal and decent reaction in some quarters, but has also been of use to the radical right.

As Slavoj Žižek puts it (in Against the Double Blackmail, published in 2016), after the terrorist outrages in Paris in November 2015, these liberal impulses were drowned out by the rhetoric of the war on terror. It is, he writes, “easy to imagine what will follow ...The greatest victims of the Paris attacks will be the refugees themselves, and the true winners ...will be simply the partisans of total war on both sides.” Žižek’s answer to this is a global solidarity that attacks the causes of conflict and migration – global inequalities – at their root. In fact, there is sometimes more at issue than that; the specific problems of Syria and Eritrea are not solely about north-south inequalities. In principle, however, Žižek is right. Global, as well as internal, inequalities are threats to democracy.

Moreover, the two types of inequality are related, for those who feel themselves disadvantaged will always be vulnerable to the siren call from those who would have them believe that their enemy is not the rich, but those who have nothing. In such a mood, no-one will be disposed to listen to the reasoned arguments that tell them refugees and the poorest are not the cause of their problems. We saw a process of this type in the 2016 Brexit referendum in Britain, where millions trooped to the polls to vote “Leave”, convinced that the tide of migrants from Europe was making them poorer. In fact, the evidence suggests the exact opposite. What will happen when, too late, people find that their standard of living is not rising but dropping? Again, as Reich suggests in the case of the US, they may decide that democracy is not the answer.

So what is to be done?

Robert Reich’s book is lucid and enjoyable (as is the film based on the book). But although it’s great on diagnosis, I’m not so sure he has solutions. He suggests a number of measures to address inequality. One is a “reverse income tax” that will subsidize the middle class (why does the US not appear to have a working class, one wonders?). The money would be funded by a carbon tax, and would be added to paychecks. This reminds one of the system of poor relief devised by magistrates at Speenhamland in Berkshire at the end of the 18th century. “Speenhamland” was, when I was young, always taught as an example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. It simply allowed employers to lower wages, thus accumulating wealth for themselves while making the public pay their wage bill. In fact, recent research has suggested that Speenhamland’s outcomes were not so clear-cut. Still, with many lower-paid workers in Western countries now drawing welfare to supplement their wages, one wonders whether we already have Speenhamland writ large. In any case, this is tinkering around the edges. Wouldn’t we be better off having a much higher, and strongly enforced, minimum wage? Far from bankrupting employers, it’ll make us all richer in the end. 

Even more important, we could address the whole question of governance. Reich does suggest measures to get money out of politics, but what he does not discuss is the weakness of electoral systems that give voters a limited choice between at most two candidates. You want to throw the bums out? Give us a system that lets us choose a better government. But in any case, suppose we did get one; it might not be able to do much about inequality, and that might make things worse. Progressive rates of taxation are one answer. In Britain, however, a modern government would find it very difficult to return to the rates of supertax that applied before 1970; neither is it entirely clear that it should, as it would be hard to collect and might not, in the end, make much difference. Other forms of taxation change are possible, with a move back towards the social-democratic model. But at the moment there seems little prospect of it.

I suspect the answer lies in some major shift in economic life. This may be something like automation, which we have seen coming, but for which we have done little to prepare. But it is not really clear what the consequences will be; many may find themselves without jobs, but they may be the people least able, as a class, to effect change. If so they will simply suffer.

But perhaps leadership is not the answer to this anyway. Joseph Tainter, mentioned briefly earlier, would not think so. Complex societies, he says, “do not evolve on the whims of individuals.”

The collapse of complexity?

Tainter’s 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies posits that social systems evolve by meeting challenges through the development of complex structures, both social and technical. This is not hard to believe; as the population rises, innovations such as (for example) public irrigation systems will be needed to grow their food, and roads to carry it to them. To run these systems demands complexity, with a growing number of people in roles that are removed from primary production. At some point, the marginal rate of return on this complexity will fall to a point where it can no longer justify its cost, and the complex society will collapse. Tainter presents a number of examples to support this theory; the Mayans are one, the Western Roman Empire another. The latter’s collapse, says Tainter, is seen as a lapse into darkness; actually it may have been a logical response to an overly complex system that could no longer justify its existence, and it ceasing to support it, the population made a rational economic decision.

One must not oversimplify Tainter’s argument. He does not, for example, see collapse as occurring in societies that have stronger neighbours. They will simply get taken over. Moreover he sees a society’s resources in terms of energy; if it can expand those resources, through conquest or technological change, it may be able to sustain complexity. Given that we may be on the verge of an energy revolution, this is interesting. Nonetheless Tainter’s vision is compelling; of a society splitting into multiple specialized sectors as it evolves, and acquiring more and more functions that are removed from primary production, until at some point the whole shebang simply cannot pay its way. Oddly, the group closest to this argument, for me, may be the 18th-century Physiocrats, who believed all wealth derived, in the end, from the land; they would have understood Tainter perfectly.

Tainter is not talking about inequality. He is talking of the costs of complexity. But it seems axiomatic that these would fall hardest on the poor. Tainter does comment that, as the rate of return on complexity drops, “parts of a society perceive increasing advantage to a policy of separation or disintegration. ...Various segments increase passive or active resistance, or overtly attempt to break away.” So can we apply his theory to our own situation? Is growing inequality in the UK and USA a symptom of excessive complexity? If so, Tainter may have shown us the exact mechanism through which inequality will destroy democracy and, if we are unlucky, much else besides.

Droning monks

One can even guess which area of complexity will be the first to exhaust everyone’s patience. Earlier, I quoted Mariner Eccles’s diagnosis of what happened in 1929 and suggested that 2008 had not been so very different. In these cases, the part of society that went wrong was the financial sector. This sector adds to complexity. But it is not a luxury; it grew up in order to finance productive enterprises, including infrastructure – a cursory dip into the history of the railways, shipping and other industries will confirm this. Thus, if Tainter is right, the marginal rate of return on this aspect of complexity should be adequate. But in both 1929 and 2008, it showed itself not to be, as it had acquired functions that served its own existence rather than the needs of society as a whole – for example, through the “securitization”, or packaging, and sale of mortgages that should really have remained with the original lender. 

The resulting losses fell not simply upon society as a whole but on those parts of it that could least afford it. The results, in the 1930s, were catastrophic for democracy, and 2008 seems to have had a similar (if so far milder) effect.

If my analysis is correct, then, we can both attack inequality and preserve democracy by removing layers of complexity, rather than, as in Tainter’s prognosis, collapsing or being swallowed up by neighbours. And the interesting thing is that in England, at least, we have been here before.

I have lately been ploughing through a mighty tome called The England of Elizabeth. It has 533 close-set pages (excluding index) and this was just the first volume. The book was the crowning achievement of the historian A. L. Rowse, who died in 1997 at the age of 94. It is packed with detail – too much, perhaps; yet it is a magisterial picture of a country in an age of self-discovery, facing multiple dangers from within and without, guided to safety by a monarch of extraordinary ability. I’ll be returning to this in a future post. But what is striking in this context is Rowse’s take on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which took place not many years before Elizabeth’s accession; looking back, we see this as a political event, but profoundly affected the economy. According to Rowse, it threw:

“one-sixth of the whole cultivable area of the country upon the market ...the settling in of numerous hard-headed, hard-fisted families to screw the utmost return out of the land in innumerable places where idle monks had droned away their lives [means] there must have been a considerable increase in productivity...”

Dissolved: Whitby Abbey (Ackers72/Wikimedia Commons)

There surely was. But more relevant here, perhaps, is the fact that the monastic structure must have made huge demands on the resources of the society that supported it. We are back with Tainter; there was a burden of complexity that could not justify itself economically. But instead of collapsing, this complex society laid a part of that burden down. To be sure, it did not do so solely for that reason. The Dissolution was a political act. Yet it both released the burden on resources, and increased them. In so doing it was part of the roots of the Industrial Revolution.

So what will our Dissolution be? And will it throw Tainter’s process into reverse, as the Dissolution appears to have done? If not, the weaknesses caused by inequality will be laid bare, and democracy will find it harder and harder to justify its existence.

But what if none of this is inevitable? Maybe Tainter has shown us how things might end, but a complex society in which everyone does have an interest in the level of complexity may prove resilient; why not? Of course, if its level of complexity continues to rise without delivering sufficient benefits, it will collapse. In this, Tainter is surely right. But if those benefits are more fairly shared, the burden of complexity will be tolerated for longer. It is this challenge that we face now. Ask someone on the conventional left, and they may argue that it can be met through progressive taxation and through State ownership of key sectors. They may be part-right. But to me, only a more fundamental reform of democracy will enable it to meet the challenge of inequality, just as it did in the 19th century.

A couple of years ago I wrote in these pages about the way the political agenda in the US and especially the UK is distorted by the electoral system, making it open to manipulation (Don't like anchovies? Don't bother voting, then, July 2016). There is no need to restate the arguments in detail here. But in a nutshell, the current systems allow vested interests to target a very small number and homogenous type of electors in order to swing the result. A few months later, the US Presidential election showed how horribly right this was. The extent to which that very small number of floating voters in swing states actually were targeted and their minds changed, by outside interests remains open to dispute. However, the implication is that the agenda can be distorted. Thus the decline in real wages for (say) socioeconomic groups C3, D1 and D2 may be the main concern for millions of people, but the election will be fought instead on some matter that only really exercises a few hundred thousand – say inheritance tax on homes worth more than £325,000, although few people outside South-East England really own them (in fact the average house price in the UK in February 2018 was £225,047). Thus the costs of maintaining a complex society are shifted onto the shoulders of those less able to bear it, and at some point, they may decide not to do so.

The danger at that point is that they will set about some droning monks. My guess is that it their victim would be the financial services industry. In a way they will be right. Many of its activities are superfluous and damaging, as we found out in both 1929 and 2008. But it provides over a million jobs and generates a trade surplus of £60 billion. And as stated earlier, it does have productive functions. What if the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater?  And what about other “non-essential” sectors – foreign aid, the arts? Would they survive?

In a sense, this has already happened. Disenfranchised in general elections, millions of people trooped into the polling booths in 2016 to vote to dismantle one aspect of complexity: Britain’s membership of the European Union, with its tangled skein of rights and obligations, its notorious (though overstated) bureaucracy – and its net benefits, which were just too hard for people to envisage. Maybe the Brexit vote was the collapse of complexity in action. And maybe the rapid reform of our democracy is the only way to halt this process, tackle inequality and prevent everyone melting, like the Maya, into the jungle. As Tainter points out, for some, to abandon the Western Roman Empire was a rational decision. But we should remember what came next – the Dark Ages.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

 Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads

Don't like anchovies? Don't bother voting, then

There is more than one threat to democracy in Britain, but the worst is an electoral system that seems set up to sabotage it

As I write this, the survival of democracy is, in most places, not a given. In Britain, a misled and angry electorate has made a decision on the EU that will certainly damage them, and others. In the US, democracy may soon elect a man who appears to care little for it. Across Europe, the far right has been empowered by racist rhetoric. 

There has been an assumption that democracy is the ultimate form of human organization. Nowhere was this assumption better embodied than in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992). But it was not a new view; the presumption in favour of democracy as the final form of government had been embedded in Western thought since 1945. The idea that democracy could not be wrong underpinned the Vietnam War and the invasion of Iraq. There has been an innate view that the world progresses towards democracy. But there is no such thing as automatic progress. In fact, as the English philosopher John Gray has pointed out (notably in his 2007 book Black Mass), the idea that history cannot go backwards is arrant nonsense.

Voting in the desert, 1945 (Imperial War Museum)

And there are plenty of challenges to democracy. They include rising inequality, the refugee crisis and the rise of the radical Right, social alienation and division, and the instability of the world financial system. However, democracy in Britain, and to a lesser extent the US, faces a particular danger – electoral systems that can disenfranchise their voters, distort the political agenda and permit the election of governments that do not have popular support.  Given recent events in Britain, and the nature of the US general election due in November 2016, this is a very acute question.

One man, one vote? Forget it 
First, the United States. For Presidential elections, each state sends elected representatives to an electoral college, the number of these electors being proportionate to the population of the state. However, the representatives are elected on a winner-takes-all system, so a Republican voter in a mostly Democrat state has little effect on the result. Some votes thus have far more weight than others, and it is quite easy for a President to be elected with a minority of the votes cast.

There have been a number of such cases since a popular vote became the rule in all states (in 1872). Harry S. Truman’s surprise win in 1948 was achieved with 57.1% of the vote in the electoral college, but he had received just 49.5% of the popular vote.  The most egregious case was Woodrow Wilson in 1912 (81.9% in the electoral college and just 41.8% on the ground). However, that was a long time ago, and was – unusually for the US – a four-way fight. More recently Bill Clinton scraped in twice on a minority vote, with just 43% of the popular vote the first time round. It should be noted that he did beat George H.W. Bush, who got 37.4%; the balance was taken by independent Ross Perot. However, when George W. Bush won the deeply controversial 2000 poll, rival Al Gore actually did beat him in the popular vote, by 48.4% to 47.9%. (President Obama did win the popular vote, in both 2008 and 2012.)

More seriously, these figures are of votes cast and do not reflect abstentions. Both candidates for the November 2016 US election are detested by some of those who would normally vote for their side. At the time of writing (July 2016), it is hard to know how this will affect the result, but it may be that many people will simply not vote.  This could result in a President who has won not only a minority of the votes cast, but those of an even smaller minority of the electorate.  Turnout of voting-age population in presidential elections has not reached 60% since 1968 (and has only once exceeded 55% since, in 2008). In the disputed 2000 election, it was only just over 50%. So how great a mandate does a President have when they walk into the White House, and what does it entitle them to do?

In the United States, of course, the Constitution has checks and balances, and a President has some things they cannot do; they must get their measures through a potentially hostile, and separately elected Congress. Having done so, they may then see such a law struck down if it is not in accord with the Constitution. The United Kingdom has no such safeguards. A government elected on a minority vote will have more or less untramelled power, as it requires only a majority in Parliament, nothing more; the Lords can review and delay but not prevent legislation, and the head of state, by convention, does neither. In view of this it would appear essential that the composition of Parliament reflect popular voting intentions.

But it nowhere near does. The current government received the support of 37% of the voters at the last election, and only 24% of those registered to vote. Again, the culprit is the “winner-takes-all” electoral system.  According to the UK’s Electoral Reform Society (The 2015 General Election: A Voting System in Crisis), this was “the most disproportionate result in British election history. Labour saw their vote share increase while their number of seats collapsed. The Conservatives won an overall majority on a minority of the vote, and the Liberal Democrats lost nearly all their seats – despite winning 8% of the vote. The SNP won 50% of the Scottish vote share, but 95% of Scottish seats.” The anti-EU party, UKIP, won more than one in eight of the votes cast but just one seat.

These inequities have several consequences. The first is simply that the government of the day lacks legitimacy, which makes the UK marginal for being a democracy. The second is alienation; if your vote is not going to affect the issue in the constituency where you live, why would you vote? But also, why would you feel any loyalty to the State?

Don’t like anchovies? Tough 

Inequitable voting systems hold a further threat to democracy that is more subtle, and dangerous.  A political party or a Presidential candidate now sets policy for the voters that can affect the result – that is, floating voters who live in swing states or marginal constituencies. Modern campaign managers have databases such as the Republicans’ Voter Vault (now called GOPData) and the Democrats’ Demzilla that can narrow this group down with extraordinary accuracy. As Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger explained in the LA Times some years ago: “The program allows ground-level party activists to track voters by personal hobbies, professional interests, geography — even by their favorite brands of toothpaste and soda and which gym they belong to. Both parties can identify voters by precinct, address, party affiliation and, often, their views on hot-button issues. ...Voter Vault includes far more information culled from marketing sources — including retailers, magazine subscription services, even auto dealers” (The GOP Knows You Don’t Like Anchovies, June 25 2006). Meanwhile in the UK the Conservative Party in the 2015 Election mounted a mobile “battle bus” campaign carefully targeted on marginal constituencies. How this was paid for, and by whom, is currently (July 2016) of interest to the Electoral Commission. But it worked. And in general, as Green MP Caroline Lucas points out in her recent book Honourable Friends?, campaigners target only floating voters, and have little interest in those that don’t vote, or vote the other way.

This is not just about the relative weight of votes; it distorts the issues on which an election is fought. A newspaper may have stirred up concern about (say) Syrian refugees coming to the UK, even though very few are, because it has determined this is of interest to its middle-class readers, who happen also to be the swing voters in semi-rural seats such as Upper Snodgrass or The Merkin. Your own concerns may be completely different – a dodgy hospital trust, a lack of policing; but because you are not of the CW1 demographic, are not in a marginal or do not like anchovies, you do not matter, although your concerns may be far more widespread than those of the voters who do. The election will be fought on the anchovies issue because the Daily Mail has convinced its own relatively narrow readership that it is what matters.

Moreover the voter’s choice is further limited because the electoral system in the UK and US forces parties to be much broader coalitions than they should be. A Republican voter may therefore find themselves faced with only one choice – Trump, for example. In this case, s/he will at least have had a chance to vote in the primaries. A British voter will not have had any role in choosing who their constituency candidate is, unless they are an active member of a political party. It has been this, in part, that has led to the implosion of the two main British parties following the vote to leave the EU in June 2016. There is no consensus within either party as to how to proceed, or under whose leadership. This is because both parties really need to split in two, and offer the voters a choice. Neither can afford to let that happen. A party that splits will, under a non-proportional system, simply disappear.

A choice. Demagogues? Or good government? 
However, there is a yet further danger to democracy because of the electoral system, and that is that a demagogue or mountebank with only minority support can come to power. In the US there would be some constitutional checks, though they might be subverted (Nixon, however, failed in the end to subvert them). In Britain a demagogue elected by a minority would face little opposition once in power.

It should not be argued that proportional voting would make the subversion of democracy impossible. That is clearly nonsense. Hitler came to power under a proportional system (albeit a party list system, which would not be my first choice). However, it should be noted that Hitler’s total – he won 33.09% of the votes cast in November 1932, on a turnout of about 80% - represented about 26.5% of the registered electorate. This was more than the Conservatives won in Britain in 2015, and would have carried him unchallenged into absolute power under the British system. In Germany, it at least required the (reluctant) consent of the President.

Any form of human organization must be underpinned by mechanisms that prevent its subversion, and the electoral system is of course only one of them. E.M. Forster, whose belief in democracy was qualified, commented that “no device has been found by which... private decencies can be transmitted to public affairs. As soon as people have power they go crooked...” (What I Believe, 1938). That is a cynical view, but it is true that nowadays the “devices ” are in poor condition. They include a venal media, antiquated Parliamentary procedure, the degradation of MPs to lobby fodder, the lack of an effective review chamber and an inactive Head of State. However, most of these would be of less consequence if it were not for the electoral system.

It is this that is the central threat to democracy in Britain, depriving governments of legitimacy and alienating millions from democracy. With electoral reform, many of the ills of British governance would right themselves, forcing the media to adopt a broader agenda and almost certainly leading to reform of Parliament. Without electoral reform, however, it is hard to see why people will want to defend what little democracy they have.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

 Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads

Post-factualism

British voters have made a choice that defies logic. The reasons for this are more complex than they appear. And they are very worrying

In voting for Brexit, British voters have made a rotten decision. Worse, they have consigned leadership of their country to vocal but foolish people who cannot build but only destroy, and have no idea what to do next.  As The Economist said on June 27, the UK is rudderless, with no-one willing to take responsibility for the decision or its consequences. Predictably, all my friends’ Facebook walls and Twitter feeds are full of comments about how bloody stupid the Brexit voters are.

The Full English. With beans

I resent this. As I explained in my previous piece, I was a Brexit supporter myself only a few years ago, and I refuse to accept that everyone who voted that way is a thick bastard. The unfair voting system in Britain means that most people are effectively disenfranchised and this was their only chance to protest. There has also been a feeling that English identity is denigrated. This is not imaginary. There’s a pic doing the rounds on social media today that shows lots of supposedly delicious European food on one side, and on the other, a solitary can of baked beans. I grew up on a traditional British diet, and my mother was a wonderful cook. I found the picture offensive. Racism is the big taboo of the liberal – unless it is against the English (or the Americans). That, it seems, is OK. So I understand why people voted Out.

That does not mean voting for Brexit was a good idea. And as Huffpost and others have reported, the Leave vote has led to a perceptible uptick in harassment and hate crime, with EU nationals (and non-white British people) being screamed at and asked when they are going home. This won’t, in the end, protect British or English identity; it will destroy it. As a German friend pointed out in a sincere and decent blog post (A Letter to English Racists) on June 27, for Germans, the racist crimes of one generation undermined the sense of identity of those that followed.

Moreover, while I can’t condemn Brexit voters wholesale, they should not be wholly off the hook. They are not all racist bigots, of course. But they have accepted lies and ignored facts, just as Germans did in the 1930s. Within 24 hours of the vote Leave leader Daniel Hannan staggered the BBC’s Evan Davis by admitting frankly on air that Brexit wouldn’t stop free movement from the EU, at least not if we want access to the single market. Meanwhile Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph on June 26 that: “British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down.” But this won’t be possible unless EU nationals can do the same in Britain. So either Johnson is lying, or this bitter referendum has been for nothing. As for the claim that pulling out would give us an extra £350 million a week to spend on the NHS, Nigel Farage now admits that won’t happen (and anyway, the figure was spurious).

But what is important is not that the Brexit leaders lied. It is that the facts did not matter. Michael Gove said the country was fed up with “experts”.  When the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that there could be a big financial black hole in the event of a Brexit, Nigel Farage said it was biased because it was part-funded by the EU. The IFS does get about 10% of its funding from the European Research Council, but this is a highly reputable funding agency and five of its grant recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.  Anyone with Internet access could have found this out in five minutes, as I did. They didn’t bother. Let it be said, Cameron and Osborne were at it as well – as Peter Oborne pointed out back in May. But for barefaced lying, the Brexiteers took the biscuit.

Why did the voters not call them out on this?

Post-factualism
The answer is something very dangerous – post-factual politics. It’s a phrase that has been flying around in the US with regard to the Trump campaign, but the idea has been around for a while. As writer and former Sanders aide David Sirota wrote in the Huffington Post back in 2007 (Welcome to the Post-Factual Era): “Why is politics the only arena where those who turned out to be right still get flayed as outcasts, while those who are known to be utterly wrong get rewarded as visionaries? In business, if you make the wrong calls, you lose money and, most often, lose your job. ...In politics, it generally works the opposite way. The people who make the right call ... are punished with elite vitriol, and those who repeatedly make the wrong calls are vaulted into the highest echelons of the Establishment. ...Nowhere was this more obvious than in the Iraq War.” Sirota says this is “to do with where the money and power is.” He is part-right. But there is something else here. Politics has moved online and few people now engage politically face-to-face.  

The morning after the vote, I wrote the following on my Facebook page: “All the people moaning all over social media this morning should ask what they themselves could have been doing to prevent this disaster. With one exception, nobody I know has.” I then pasted an extract from a piece I had written three years earlier (actually after the death of Thatcher).  It was as follows:

In a 2008 Guardian article, Vernon Bogdanor pointed out that when Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 it had a membership of about 1.5 million; 30 years later it was down to 145,000. Labour underwent a similar decline between 1996 and 2008, from 400,000 to 150,000. In the 1950s one Briton in 11 had belonged to a political party; now just one in 88 did. Voter turnout, well over 80% in 1974, dropped to just 59% in 2001 (it has since recovered a little). ...There is an increasing disinclination to take part in the mainstream democratic process.

“This might be a good time to stop writing "Oh God I'm ashamed to be British" on your wall, and start thinking about how things change,” I added.

But why should politics on the Internet not be politics? Must we really go out on a wet winter night and huddle in a church hall somewhere with about four other people we don’t much like, arguing?

Yes, we must. 

The disputed view
We have lost the facility to argue, debate and reach consensus; we see only those arguments that accord with our own. This is true of me as much as almost everyone else; virtually none of my friends backed Brexit – yet the fact is, many other people on the Left did. But because they do not belong to the same social circles as me, I am not hearing their arguments. Had I been to a bunch of Labour Party meetings over the last six months, I would have done.  Nearly 40 years ago, as chairman of my university Liberal party, I travelled to Blackpool for a special party conference, to debate the arrangement the party then had with Callaghan’s Labour administration (not a coalition; it was basically confidence and supply). Several of our delegation were determined to end this arrangement. Halfway through a speech by the then Liberal Leader David Steel, a friend turned to me and said, “He’s right. I’ve changed my mind.” And so did I.

Would that happen now? Would we hire a draughty railway carriage and have it shunted from train to train to get to Blackpool, then listen to arguments for and against and make a decision?  Most of the people ranting about Brexiteers on my Facebook wall would not do so, and have not acquired the skills one needs to make a fellow-voter think again.

It goes deeper. Even 60 years ago, Party members were a minority, albeit a much bigger one. But people were still exposed to more debate than they are now.  For a start, they didn’t spend every evening in. Now they likely do. In December 2014 the Institute of Economic Affairs reported that the number of pubs had dropped from 58,000+ to 48,000 since 2006, a decline of nearly a fifth in just eight years.  There are a number of reasons for this decline; the IEA has ascribed it to the smoking ban, a decline in beer drinking as opposed to wine (the latter was expensive when I was young), increasing alcohol duty and more. Whatever is driving the drop in pub-going, however, it is a loss to democracy. I spent much of my misspent youth fishing cigarette-packets out of pools of beer while the person opposite me told me I was talking shit and made me defend what I had just said.

Social engagement: Central London, 1983

This is not just about pubs, or political parties. In January 1995 Robert D. Putnam published a paper called Bowling Alone. Later developed into a book, the paper posited that the propensity of people to associate with one another in civic fora was a key to a healthy democracy and to good governance. It was a thesis Putnam developed more fully in his famous (for academics) book Making Democracy Work, which examined the success of local government in northern and southern Italy. Civic engagement, said Putnam, was in decline. “The number of Americans who report that ‘in the past year’ they have ‘attended a public meeting on town or school affairs’ has fallen by more than a third (from 22 percent in 1973 to 13 percent in 1993). Similar (or even greater) relative declines are evident in responses to questions about attending a political rally or speech, serving on a committee of some local organization, and working for a political party.”

Putnam suggested several reasons why this was happening. Greater participation by women in the workforce had reduced the time they had for (for example) parent-teacher associations. However, he found that men’s attendance in civic fora had also declined. Putnam pointed to online shopping replacing the corner store (a decline in human contact), the growth of the VCR and, particularly, TV. “The new ‘virtual reality’ helmets that we will soon don to be entertained in total isolation are merely the latest extension of this trend. Is technology thus driving a wedge between our individual interests and our collective interests?”

Should we blame TV? Putnam himself admits that changes to people’s living environment, for example slum clearance, are also a factor, breaking up social networks. This will also have been a factor in Britain, where the built environment has changed immeasurably since 1945. Indeed, as far back as 1934, T.S. Eliot could write (in The Rock):

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads

And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor

Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance.

...Nor does the family even move about together.

But every son would have his motorcycle,

And daughters ride away on casual pillions. 

Slacktivism
But although TV may have kept people at home, historically, in Britain at least, it recreated the space for dispute and discussion. The BBC has always been required to reflect “balance” in its news coverage, and ITV also inherited this obligation when it started broadcasting in 1955. At that time there were only two TV channels; a third (BBC2) arrived in 1964 and a fourth (Channel 4) in 1982, but they were bound by the same strictures. Moreover the fact that there were few viewing options meant that there was a national conversation.  

This was certainly the case in the European referendum of 1975. In particular, two days before the vote, millions watched the Oxford Union debate between Edward Heath and Jeremy Thorpe on one side, and Peter Shore and the great Barbara Castle on the other. Castle (who spoke for Out) later felt that she had been a failure, but I remember the debate 41 years later, and I suspect I am not alone. To be sure, one shouldn’t be too starry-eyed about the quality of the 1975 argument (as this piece from Prospect demonstrates). But was there an event like the Union debate this time, in which the main players were picked up upon what they said, and made to defend it? I didn’t feel there was.

To an extent, this reflects a decline in the quality of the political class. That of 1975 understood history because they’d been part of it. Heath had taken part in the Normandy landings and seen the destruction in Europe. Castle had been brought up in the North during the Depression and her mother ran a soup-kitchen.  Cameron, by contrast, has never worked outside politics, and a growing number of the political class are the same.  But there is something else going on here: Slacktivism.

There are a few definitions of this, but broadly, it’s the use of social media to express one’s views, followed by a feeling that one has done what one can. In fact, posting on Facebook and “liking” posts about racism require no real commitment. Or risk; I am just old enough to remember the civil rights and Vietnam protests in the US. The cost to those who took part, and the fear involved, could be high. (If anyone doubts this, they can watch the remarkable documentary Freedom Riders – a story of a time when activists, African-American but also some white middle-class liberals, did more than just click ‘like”, and were threatened and beaten for their pains.) No problem now. Click Like and all your friends will roar approval, because, of course, your friends mostly share your views. I am as guilty of this as anyone else.

Just how this works was described very well by sociologist Joel Busher in his excellent recent book on the English Defence League, The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest. A recurrent theme through the book is the way in which activists’ beliefs, lifestyles and relationship reinforce another. Much of this happens online. It is as true of people like me, on the Left, as it is of the EDL. There are no more draughty church halls. There are no more cigarette packs soaked in slops. No-one need watch Newsnight anymore. Politics has become a dialogue of the deaf. No-one who does not share my views will hear my arguments, and I will not hear theirs.

This is why we had a disaster last Thursday. All the information about the consequences of this vote was available beforehand; the threat to the Northern Ireland peace process, the fact that we would still have to have free movement of people (or limited access to EU markets), the fact that the UK might break up, that the pound would fall, that markets (and thus pensions) would have millions of pounds wiped off their value; it was all there. But no-one thought of these facts when they went to vote. They had felt no need to acquaint themselves with them.  People’s interactions are now grouped in vertical silos, into which no information may enter from any source that they have not chosen. It has thus never been easier to manipulate people, for they are complicit in their own deception.

Few people outside Britain welcomed the Brexit vote, but those who did included Marine Le Pen and Greece’s Golden Dawn. “A direct consequence of Brexit will be the empowerment of patriotic and nationalist forces across Europe,” said Golden Dawn’s spokesman, Ilias Kasidiaris.

I can hear the drip, drip, drip of factoids being fed into those vertical silos right now. It’s the Poles. They’re scrounging bastards. They’ve taken your job. Those bastards. It’s the Romanians. It’s the Tutsis. It’s the Gypsies. It’s the Jews. The Jews. The Jews. The Jews.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

 Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads