Читать книгу Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics - Philip Collins, Philip Collins - Страница 17

Politics, as Peel put it, is supposed to supply a sense of popular power and the material outline of a better life. If it has fallen in esteem that is in large part because it has ceased to be reliable in achieving either. Perhaps it is also inevitable, as democracies go through what David Runciman has characterised, in How Democracies End, as a ‘mid-life crisis’, that cynicism becomes habitual. Politicians routinely lie, it is said. Voting changes nothing; they are all in it for themselves. Episodes such as the expenses scandal, or instances of sexual harassment, do as much damage as concrete examples, which are frequent enough, of genuine incompetence.

This is dangerous territory, for the only alternative to established politics is proving to be attractive to many electorates. The trick of the populist is to channel the prejudices, fears and intimations of a section of society. Cast as the tribune of the people, the populist has a ready-made scapegoat in the political class. This is why lazy criticism of the political process is a gift to the enemies of democracy. If the trading and negotiation of politics is not defended then the door is left ajar for unscrupulous politicians. The question has to be not how we replace broken politics with something else but how we recognisably improve it.

There is the rub and there is the nub of the question, because underneath the clichés of cynicism lurks a critique of some merit. The question about the esteem of politics is in fact a question about its efficacy. Britain has stumbled on with an electoral system that no longer produces the executive authority it promises, with moribund political parties financed by interest groups or wealthy individuals, with an upper house of Parliament that is, remarkably for a democracy, not elected and with a civil service that has resisted reform for too long. It is, understandably, difficult to raise much popular interest in and enthusiasm for changes to the constitutional arrangements yet politics, on which we rely to prevent anything worse from rearing its head, cannot be improved without change. And that change, in turn, will not be possible unless we redraw the map of political power in Britain, which is the subject of the eighth urgent question.