The Mike Robbins blog

Saturday, 9 July 2016

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

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Tuesday, 28 June 2016

Post-factualism

(This was written less than a week after the 2016 Brexit vote in the UK. As we come up to the 10th anniversary, I've considered updating it. But there's nothing I'd change. If I were writing it today, I might say something about the added dimension of AI, but perhaps that's a subject in itself. So let this stand. – Mike, May 29 2026.)

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 important 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
Changes to the world of broadcasting have also been crucial. TV may have kept people at home but 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.

This reflects the atomisation of broadcasting and the multiplicity of news sources (of varying quality) available on TV and online. But it also 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 is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.