The twenty year plan

Apologies for the delay between posts. I’ve been in Spain and am technologically not as good as I think I am. Or perhaps municipal Wi-Fi is still a way off.

Found some interesting stuff here concerning ways of boosting turnout in local elections, including the rather eye-catching proposals from the Councillors’ Commission to issue voters with lottery numbers at a polling station to encourage them to turn out and ‘redundancy’ payments for council leaders who lose their seats. This may be eye catching but it would perhaps be a brave man who implements it.

I’m in favour of virtually anything that engages more people in the political process, but I can’t help feeling that the councillors are barking up the wrong tree with some of these. I read this having just come from a seminar about whether the media and politicians treat the public as consumers or citizens. I have spend more hours than I care to think about in persuading people to physically vote, whether by post or in person. It seems to lead active politicians to wonder if the process is hard, and academics to obsess over declining turnout as an example of fractured communities.

These all seem to be missing the point. Voting is all important but it is only a symptom. You can tell this by the difference between the age groups in persuading people to go and vote. You can get older people to say that they are Labour or Conservative etc, and then your job is to get them out to vote. People I meet who are closer to my age (26, for those that don’t know me) tend to say things like ‘I’m not political’ or ‘I don’t follow politics’. I have spoken to plenty of young people who have opinions but express that they do not feel qualified to engage with party politics or voting.

Politics has always been to some degree separated from the rest of public life, and news in particular. I can’t see any evidence that there was a golden age when the public were excited about politics and thought it was all about their lives. Politicians and journalists have both kept this illusion, participating in points scoring and the soap opera of political life.

But perhaps what the low turnout figures show is that we have professionalised politics to such a degree that we are alienating people. Especially when we only communicate within the political bubble. We know that turnout is considerably higher in marginal seats where people are communicated with regularly. Increasingly, my generation of politicians have the opportunity to study politics and work in politics, (becoming part of the political world at a younger age than the previous generations would have done) and we need to be bringing other people in to central and local government if we are going to be in any way relevant.

Perhaps the key point the Councillors’ Commission need to look at is not how to make people physically vote, but how they maintain their relevance. I know some truly excellent councillors and what the good ones all have in common is the ability to lead in their areas, and to be pro-active in what their areas need. Academics can end up obsessing over the meaning of decreasing turnout and the professionalisation of politics, but really the root of the problem is keeping that relevance.

So the suggestion the Councillors’ Commission make which might be on the right track is that councillors should get more help (financial and otherwise) in continuously communicating with people in their area. That’s the only way they can lead, and make local democracy relevant.

It’s also the way for the political parties to fulfil their function of finding a preparing the next generation of politicians, with a mixture of policy expertise and skill in making judgements. Whichever party is running the country in twenty years time, I hope that a good proportion of the cabinet is currently doing something to help them learn these skills, rather than obsessing over the latest intrigues of the political system.