The road to Brighton Pier
How I tried to Make a Difference
I’m standing outside Brighton Pier, on my soap box, in the biting wind. People are hurrying past, eager to take advantage of the first break in the heavy rain: young families, school girls, a crowd of Sikhs. Most studiously ignore me. Others offer a nervous smile and hurry past.
I’ve never made a political speech before, but here goes. I stand up straight, wave my arms a bit and call out. “Hello! Can I have a moment of your time. I’m not selling anything, I don’t want your money. I just want two minutes to talk to you …”
Before I continue, I should explain where I started my political odyssey. In 1987, my father stood against the SDP leader David Owen in Plymouth. He attracted substantially more Labour support than previously; but failed to oust the politician who had done so much to split the anti-Tory vote. In other words, I grew up sympathetic to the Labour party and fiercely averse to its opponents. But times change, and a couple of years ago I decided to join the Tories.
Why? Because Tony Blair’s Labour government has been a terrible disappointment. I marched against war in Iraq, but Blair disregarded my call for peace. As for climate change: I’ve switched to eco light-bulbs, a green energy supplier, an electric car, and a doorstep delivery of local, seasonal food. But some things only governments can change and Blair’s government seems unwilling to take the steps scientists tell us are necessary.
Joining the Tories had started as a joke – a way to shock my right-on friends. But there was something serious about it too. Britain’s political system restricts an individual’s participation to just one vote every five years or so – a vote that can be used by the winning party to justify more or less anything. By joining a party with a realistic chance of winning elections I thought I might help to shape its policies.
Throwing myself into the project with enthusiasm, I attended all kinds of events, even including the annual gala dinner of the Gay Conservative Association. I didn’t mention that I am married with a daughter – but then I also didn’t mention that when I was at school I helped to collect money for striking coal miners. Unsurprisingly, my plot failed. I didn’t belong. By the time of the last general election my party membership had lapsed. I avoided voting altogether by going on holiday.
There always have been people who reject formal politics, but there seem to be more of us today than ever before. Look at the decline in voting. Labour won the election last year with 9.5m votes; in 1992, under Neil Kinnock, Labour got 11.5m votes – and lost. Meanwhile, party membership has plummeted: the three main parties, in 2001, had a quarter as many members as in 1964. At 208,000, Labour’s membership is half what it was in 1997. Rather than chase new members, the leadership seems to have developed a hunger for cash donations from plutocrats.
The political analyst Peter Kellner says that my withdrawal from politics is typical of people my age and younger. In the past, young people started voting around the time they started to pay taxes. Today, young people don’t seem to be picking up the habit, and old party loyalties have eroded. Few people nowadays want to identify themselves with a political party by putting posters in their windows; in the 1950s, Kellner says, to do so was utterly normal.
Earlier this year, the independent Power Enquiry chaired by Dame Helena Kennedy delivered a devastating critique of the state of formal democracy in Britain. Political parties and elections have been “a growing turn-off for years”, it said. But the cause is not apathy: single-issue pressure groups are thriving, some 20m people regularly volunteer, and hundreds of thousands have joined protest marches. “The problem,” Kennedy’s report concluded, “is that we don’t feel we have real influence over the decisions made in our name.”
The advent of a new Conservative leader, David Cameron, has been – well, mildly interesting. Me, I’ve been impressed by what Cameron has done to raise the importance of climate change, and stirred too by his sympathetic social commentary, summarized by cynics as “hug a hoodie”. But is this merely the same manoeuvring Blair effected: stealing the clothes of your opponent in areas where your own party is weak, while simultaneously throwing a handful of policies at your core vote in appeasement? More than half of the general population is unsure what Cameron stands for, according to a recent YouGov poll.
Frustrated and confused, I recently rejoined the… Labour Party. I joined specifically to support John McDonnell’s bid for the party leadership – or at any rate to oppose Gordon Brown’s coronation, perhaps start debate on issues the leadership avoids. I confess that I’d not heard of McDonnell, a left-wing MP, till a few weeks ago, but I admired him for daring to stand, and for setting out his policies clearly.
In hope of a cure for my democratic malaise, I took the train to Brighton and Hove: Britain’s newest city hailed me no less urgently than Wigan previously summoned George Orwell, when he set out to understand the working class. Me, I was looking for trendy lefties – people a bit like myself, relatively well off and given to earnest hand-wringing. People who might have answers to the big political questions. Who should we believe? Is voting a waste of time? Does it matter that you can’t tell a Tory from a Green (or can you)? Do we have the politicians we deserve? And is bottled water ever really acceptable when you can get perfectly drinkable stuff from the tap?
As the national capital of right-on, earnest progressives, London-on-Sea (as the city’s commonly known) is a stronghold of the Green Party. But it’s not exclusively the preserve of radicals. One of its parliamentary seats, Hove & Portslade, was gained by New Labour in 1997 and remains a key target for the Tories.
By tradition, Hove is characterized as genteel and elderly. But Bruno Rost of Mosaic, which analyses voter behaviour, says Hove has a disproportionate number of people living in bedsits, as well as youngish professionals like me. Mosaic has catchy names for these demographic types: Grey Perspectives, Bedsit Beneficiaries and Urban Intelligence. Many would be inclined towards New Labour, Rost says, and would have voted for Blair in 1997. They’re key to the outcome of the next election, not just here but nationally.
Arriving in town on my fold-up bicycle, naturally I went first to Hove’s health-food shops and alternative-therapy centres – Planet Janet on Church Road, and the nearby Sanctuary Café. Here I met a group of vegetarian teachers, no less disillusioned with Labour than me. Matt McKee and his partner Gwyneth Curtis are the parents of eight-month-old Kai; they’d moved here from inner-London for his sake. McKee works as a science teacher in a secondary school. Their friend Kate Heym teaches in a primary school.
Try as I might, I couldn’t excite them about formal politics, only personal ethics. Over nut roast, gurgling from small children, and dainty folk music from the café’s speakers, Heym remembered turning vegetarian as a teenager under the influence of a teacher. “We had a sociology teacher who talked about what it meant, what the animals go through…”
Children can exert an influence on teachers too, she said. “In our school, we’re finding it difficult to get the council to give us recycling bins for paper, which is prehistoric, and I thought at first, can I really be bothered to take it all myself? In the end I had to. It was the kids who decided it. Putting a piece of paper in the dustbin would be like swigging a bottle of whisky in front of them.”
I was grateful for the reminder that political change can be effected at the personal level. (“More is done by being a positive example than by being a whingeing git,” says McKee.) But I wasn’t sure that setting an example is enough. Sometimes governments need to be prodded into taking difficult or unpopular measures – and that means active participation by citizens. To find out more, I needed to talk to some politicians.
Joanne Heard joined the Conservative party two years ago. She’s been a supporter ever since her mother correctly predicted that an incoming Tory administration would give her a scholarship for private education. She’s standing for the council at next year’s elections, and took me for a drink at the local Conservative club, a smoky place with noisy music and slot machines. “Not many young people,” she noted glumly as we walked in.
She has an instinct for public service. She’s run a Neighbourhood Watch scheme, and she’s putting on a show to raise money for Alzheimer’s. But she only became evangelical about formal politics after a friend was elected as a councillor in Crawley on the toss of coin. “It was 500 votes each. They had to flip a coin. On the basis of that, Crawley council switched from Labour to Conservative. So every vote counts.”
Heard believes party loyalty remains essentially tribal. But her partner is a Labour supporter. Why is that? “He knows what Maggie did in the north,” she said darkly. “He watches a lot of documentaries, delves into things.” Also, he believes that Blair has presided over the ten best years of his life. It’s odd to hear Heard, a would-be Tory councillor, defending Blair – “I do think, on the whole, that he has done a great job” – but that perhaps explains why many Labour supporters loathe him.
The next day, a Saturday, I found Heard among the Conservatives working on a stall in George Street. With balloons and leaflets they urged people to sign a petition against “Brown’s cuts to the NHS.”
Wasn’t it a bit cheeky, Tories fighting to protect a Labour invention? Not at all, said Brian Oxley, leader of the Tories on the council. “It’s a settled debate. People want the NHS to be there for their family and to work as well as it can. David Cameron said recently that founding the NHS was one of the great achievements of the 20th century.
“This is an important issue. The system is stretched already, and now people are going to have to drive here from Worthing for A&E. I would like to see the people responsible for these cuts trying to get here by car on a bank holiday!”
Mike Long, who chairs the local Conservative association, said it’s a good thing the main parties all occupy the middle ground. “That’s where Britain wants to be. We don’t want to be far left or far right. These days politics is about who can manage things best. It’s like Marks & Spencer. UK Plc will work better under a change of management.”
So the difference is merely competence and commitment? Like Heard, Oxley has a strong public-service ethos. “The city has always had Labour administrations but I still get things done for people. I think that politics can be a noble cause. That sounds ever so – well, I don’t know, naïve, but you do have to have some idealism.”
I was impressed by how many people rushed to sign the petition. Most were elderly, and identify themselves as Tories by inclination. One, Phil Cooper, said he’s supported Labour and the unions but had had enough of the tax rises, and the war in Iraq.
Several passing toddlers seemed keen to take a balloon, but their parents looked aghast. One woman did let her grandson take a specimen of inflatable propaganda, and only when it had been tied to his coat did I hear her say, “Oh, is it political? I can’t see anything without my glasses.” Another agreed to sign the petition but said firmly that she would continue voting Green.
One man wheeling a bike refused to take a leaflet. I pointed out that it only asks him to oppose cuts to the NHS. “They’re Tories,” he said, as if that settled everything. He refused to give me his name. “Call me ‘Man with Bike’.”
I told him what I was doing, about being politically agonized and so on. He sighed. “Look, there is nobody I can vote for at the moment. Iraq has made me most disillusioned. And climate change needs to be tackled. They’re building another lane on the M1. It’s going to cost billions. Are they going to tax aviation fuel? I don’t think this will be tackled till something terrible happens.” Something like Hurricane Katrina? “Yeah, when Brighton turns into Venice they’ll do something.”
I asked Oxley why people are cynical about Cameron. Will he disappoint us just as Blair has done? “No, because he is starting things from first principles. There is a genuine debate. He’s trying to make the party a reflection of the country as a whole.”
But Cameron’s innovations haven’t all gone down well with party members. The Tories in Hove & Portslade rejected candidates from Cameron’s A List in favour of a local man.
Mike Weatherley, the prospective parliamentary candidate, was among the people handing out leaflets this morning. I asked if he’s bothered about climate change as well as the NHS. “It was Mrs T who started off the environment debate. She highlighted global warming before any other politician. I’m really glad that David Cameron has taken that on board. It needed someone like him to do it. Of course policing and anti-social behaviour are important, but if we have not got an environment in 100 years those things will be meaningless.”
I asked if Weatherley was in favour of leafleting 4×4s with fake parking tickets. In fact, I had a clutch of spoof tickets in my pocket. “I don’t know if you will see Conservatives leafleting 4×4s,” he said nervously. “At the end of the day it’s still people’s choice to drive one.”
After 90 minutes, the defenders of the NHS packed up early. They’d run out of space for signatures. As they wandered off, a dilapidated man approached me with a slavish smile. “Excuse me, sir… are you the new Conservative candidate?” I didn’t know whether to be insulted or pleased.
A little distance away, I found that the Tory campaigning had an unforeseen political impact. A fundraiser from Friends of the Earth was talking to a woman with a pushchair and a young child who held one of the Tory balloons. “I think in some ways it was the balloon that made me stop and talk to you,” she told him. “Because Cameron does talk a bit of sense about the environment.”
At the council offices, I mentioned this to the leader of the Greens, the grizzled but bustling Keith Taylor. I asked if he welcomes the Tories’ environmentalism. He doesn’t. “Cameron is just testing the water. Anyway, the Tories continue to support the extension of runways at Gatwick.”
I decided to find out more about the only declared candidate for Labour leader, John McDonnell. One of his local supporters, Jon Rogers, agreed to meet me in a pub, the Charles Napier. On arrival, I was greeted by a man lowering his trousers and mooning at friends inside. Mercifully, this was not Rogers.
A longstanding Labour member and a union man, Rogers is much given to old-fashioned socialist talk about the working class. Won’t that put people off? “The working class is almost everyone, in my book. I wear a suit to work so you could call me middle class, but I sell my working power and that makes me working class.”
But he’s affable, and funnier than this makes him sound: he made me laugh aloud when he talked about getting “quality time” with his family on demonstrations. He’s also surprisingly optimistic, considering how little impact McDonnell has made on the general public. “As someone backing John, I’m happy. I’m enthusiastic. I’m backing someone I believe in. And what I find about everyone else is that they’re unenthusiastic about the alternatives. There is no enthusiasm for Gordon Brown.”
How did he account for the decline in political participation?
People are passionate about their civic responsibility, he said. Look at the march against war in Iraq, the Make Poverty History movement, and the increasing numbers of demonstrations against cuts in the NHS. But we’re losing faith in political parties, he believes, because they offer little choice. “They ought to express coherently different philosophies on what they stand for. If there is no choice, then what was the point of the Chartists and the Suffragettes fighting for the vote?”
McDonnell’s supporters claim to have recruited hundreds or thousands of people back to Labour. “And this is going down a storm among union activists. The Electoral Reform Society found that John had 59 per cent of the vote at the TUC.”
There are three million union members, Rogers pointed out. If they’re given a genuine choice in the leadership election, “We have potentially a huge exercise in political participation which could be turned to the party’s advantage at the next election. We can really decide what the party actually stands for.”
At Labour’s annual conference, the leadership was carefully kept off the agenda, as was the replacement of Trident. “The conference has been decaffeinated. We have over-learned the lessons of the 1980s, and we’re going to have to unpick the damage that was done when nearly everyone thought that Blair walked on water.”
As Rogers sees it, the Tories aren’t necessarily the biggest threat. “The problem with my family is that most of them vote Green. The debate within the family is between people like me who say, why should we leave our own party and abandon it to them, the Blairites, and the others who say we’re wasting our time, we need to build an alternative.”
Better to be inside pissing out, I suggested, than outside pissing in? “I’d rather be inside, pissing in.”
Fundamental to this approach is the idea of “managing your MP”. “You write to them every so often, and you put up a motion in your branch. That can provide cover for them in the whip’s office – an excuse for not voting with the government. And even if they think you’re a pain in the arse, they won’t be openly rude because you’re one of the people going out to campaign for them at the election. We have dozens of members in our branch, but only half a dozen come to meetings. If you get involved you can have disproportionate influence. That is one of the side-effects of the decline in activism.”
According to the Power Inquiry, one of the greatest causes of political disaffection is the sense that we have no power at all between elections. What Rogers suggested might help overcome that. But do I really need to join a party? My own local councillors, in London, are Lib Dem, my council is run by Tories, and my MP is Labour. Thanks to Tom Steinberg, a policy wonk who formerly worked at the Prime Minister’s strategy unit, and his techie colleagues at MySociety.org, I can manage them all at once. MySociety’s websites enable anybody easily to identify representatives at every level, to see what they’re doing, and correspond with them at the click of the mouse.
I called Steinberg. To be absolutely clear, he said he’s not interested in getting people to polling stations. “But in between elections,” he said, “there are more than a thousand days and any number of decisions are taken every day. We have tools to help you influence those decisions.”
Before leaving Brighton and Hove I wandered to a rally about climate change put on by the Labour MP, Celia Barlow. With sponsorship from a big local employer, Barlow had got hold of a film projector so that voters could watch Al Gore’s documentary, An Uncomfortable Truth. “I have seen this before,” she told the audience, largely comprised of Urban Intelligence and Grey Perspectives, who overflowed the seats and stood all round the hall. “I was shocked and horrified… Remember the tsunami? The danger that we face now is far larger. This is a moral issue we are facing.”
The first speaker was a professor at Sussex University. In keeping with the revivalist tone of the meeting, he said he used to be skeptical about climate change – but no more. “It has become very clear that there are going to be some big impacts.” And that’s what his slide show made clear. Most chilling were the warnings about what might happen if the Amazon dies off, or Greenland melts – both already happening. These “tipping points” might lead to catastrophic climate change beyond human control. “The last time the temperature was just three degrees hotter, the sea level was 25 metres higher than today.”
Among other speakers is local teenager Jordan Stephens, one of nine children from across the country appointed to be “ambassadors” for climate change – making talks at schools and so on. He was impressively confident, and obviously on top of his brief, but on this occasion his feisty challenge to the audience – ‘how many of you have ever bought a long-life bulb?’ – fell slightly flat as everybody immediately put a hand up.
Barlow is parliamentary private secretary to the minister of state for climate change, Ian Pearson, whom she had invited along to talk. His speech began defensively: “I want to tell you what we are doing, and then you are going to tell me that we are not doing enough. And I agree with you.”
But he made clear that the government will not be able to do more about climate change without overwhelming pressure from citizens. “The more people press the government to do things, the more government will do.”
Taking him at his word, I grabbed the minister afterwards. Conscious of what Man With Bike told me, I asked furiously whether Pearson was doing anything to persuade the Department of Transport not to spend £1bn on widening the M1. How will road-building reduce emissions? “I have not been involved on the M1. But congestion is a problem too.”
And remembering what Rogers said about Trident being taboo at Labour’s conference, I asked if the £25bn wouldn’t be better spent on clean energy. The minister shook his head. “We need a deterrent,” he said.
I returned to the hall, where an elderly resident lamented the seeming impossibility of recycling plastic. She said it broke her heart to put milk containers in the bin.
A speaker from the Friends of the Earth, Martyn Williams, told the audience about an experiment on Newsnight, in which a reporter spent six months trying to tackle his own emissions. “He managed to cut them by 35 per cent, by doing fairly simple things. That’s great, but it’s really difficult for him to do more. The rest is down to government. For instance, it’s very difficult for any of us as individuals to do anything about coal fired power plants.”
It doesn’t matter what party you belong to or vote for, Williams added, you must use your politicians properly. “Don’t just vote and leave them unbothered for five years between elections. The problem will not be solved by this prime minister or this secretary of state. The problem is going to last for 50 years. Cutting emissions by 60 per cent by 2050 is a NIMTO target – Not In My Term of Office. We need annual targets, so we can hold governments to account.” The fact that there is going to be a climate change bill in the Queen’s Speech, he said, was entirely down to pressure groups. “Over recent months 600 MPs have been visited in their surgery by Friends of the Earth supporters.”
It was a valuable lesson, and confirmed what others had already taught me. Indeed, I’d learned something from nearly everyone I’ve met on the road to Brighton Pier.
The person who had the most impact was Rogers, the card-carrying champion of the working class. Others may have matched his public spirit, or his analytical reach, but Rogers combined those with a palpable sense of excitement and optimism.
But Rogers is just one man. He’s not the official voice of Labour. So I can’t say I’ve reached a firm conclusion about which (if either) of the two main parties I should support. In fact, the presence of the similarly enthusiastic Taylor, and others, on the council proved that voting Green needn’t be a wasted vote. So yes: I’ve learned all over again that voting really is important.
But more important, I think, is the duty to do more as a citizen in a democracy. And that’s pretty well what I tell the 50 or so baffled people who kindly gather round my soap-box – an unforeseen but strangely unavoidable destination on my political pilgrimage – to listen to my impromptu speech-making.
I talk about the urgency of the many issues that need addressing, and remind them that it may be four years till the next election gives them a chance to register their wishes. “Don’t wait!” I yell. “Use your politicians properly! Use them now!” Then I spell out carefully the name of websites, founded by Steinberg, that might help. “TheyWorkForYou.com allows you to keep track of your MP’s activities!” I howl into the onshore wind. “And WriteToThem.com helps you to, er, write to them!”
It’s not the finest political speech in history, but nobody heckles. A man from Croatia, having just acquired British citizenship, seems genuinely impressed. And a group of schoolgirls take turns to shake my hand because I have heard of their home-town, Harpenden. The rest smile, step back, and stride onto the pier.
Better government is within our grasp if we lay claim to it
The power inquiry was set up in 2004 to explore how political participation can be increased in Britain. Independent of any political party, the commission chaired by Helena Kennedy toured the country for 18 months listening to thousands of hours of testimony on elections, political parties, and the role of the media, campaign groups and local democracy.
The inquiry found that the public is not apathetic about politics. It noted the massive marches that have taken place recently, and the numbers of people signing petitions: up from 23% in 1974 to 81% in 2000. On internet forums such as myspace.com, politics and current affairs are “among the most popular” topics. It dismissed the theory, popular among politicians, that people don’t vote because they’re basically satisfied. If that were so, you’d expect lower participation among the better off and well educated. The opposite is the case. It showed that, with the main parties differing little on policy, they tend to differentiate themselves by attacking each others’ competence and probity giving a sense that corruption and incompetence are characteristic of all politicians. But it found little evidence that the public disapproves of adversarial debate. “Indeed, the strong preference for distinct parties suggests adversarialism may be welcomed.”
In conclusion, the inquiry explained disengagement by pointing to “the emergence of a population that requires a more regular, meaningful and detailed influence over policies and decisions that affect their lives”.
To satisfy this, the report suggested taking power from the prime minister, party whips and quangos, and redistributing it among MPs, select committees and local government; and capping donations from individuals at £ 10,000. “Too much power goes unchecked,” it concluded.
And it called for the creation of a culture of political engagement. It recommended lowering the voting age to 16, increasing interactivity on political TV programming, and giving citizens the right to initiate legislation and public inquiries.
But none of this can come about if we leave it to politicians. “We, the people, have to stake our claim on power.”
12 November 06