After yesterday’s rant, I thought I’d bring you some calm
reflection. Consider the way that politics is understood in the UK. Parliament
is made of two great bodies of opposing ideas, made real in the form of two
great political parties, facing each other in the caldron of public debate, separated
only by the length
of two drawn swords.
Sounds romantic, right? Principles forged into parties then
refined by parliament. The only thing is that it’s probably not true. There is
a large and convincing body of political science which considers the type of
politics that a democracy has to be a product of the election rules that particular
democracy has. Because we elect a single MP for a single area we are likely to
have a two party system (for the geeks this is referred to as Duverger’s law). In
countries like Germany, where they have different rules, there are lots of
different parties, who always govern in coalition.
This has a fascinating implication. Every time you hear a
party fanatic, be they Labour or Conservative, extolling the virtue of
their world view, this view is not only the product of principled reasoning,
but also of their picking a side in an artificial debate. Party allegiance is,
for the most part, a similar process to that which causes a child who lives in
Surrey to become a fanatical Manchester United supporter.
This is not to say that there are no other political ideas
and perspectives out there. Marxists, Libertarians, Greens, Liberal Democrats (who
knows what they believe) and many others all compete with each other for the
right to be mocked or ignored by the general public. Yet power is always
divided by the two parties which are the product of our election system.
Think about the consequences of this for the public debate
around policy making. Instead of being implemented on merit, a policy must be
acceptable to the artificial world view of one of the major parties. Questions
which are by their nature managerial, for example how to improve school performance,
are seen through an artificial ideological prism rather than a neutral process
of cost benefit analysis. It can, and
has, been argued that this process is why the government is sometimes an
ineffective provider of services. A proper analysis of policy making requires a
certain detachment from politics. It seems most unlikely that you will ever see
that happen in the mainstream media, which is notoriously party political, and
our public debate is all the poorer for it.
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