While I’ve had enough letters about the economy, job losses and cuts to public services to fill a room, I’ve had just one single letter about AV. Most of the media commentary has concentrated on the rifts in the coalition, or the quality of the campaigns.
Charlie Brooker, writing in The Guardian, said the two camps had created a “stupidity whirlpool” that will turn people off voting at all.Regardless of the quality of the debate, the dominance of the AV question has become symptomatic of the gulf between the Westminster bubble and the rest of the general public.
While in Wigan I am dealing with children who cannot get wheelchairs on the NHS which they desperately need, and people made redundant who cannot get help with their mortgage, the political elites are engaged in discussion about marginal changes to the voting system. I cannot help but think it is this gap between the issues of burning importance to the public and the issues that dominate the Westminster bubble that turns people off politics.
While re-connecting people with politics is a constant source of discussion in Westminster, we might do better to try to reconnect politics with the people.The relevance of the political debate is a key problem, but the commentators’ relentless focus on disagreement within the coalition is yet another.
It paves the way for the sort of mudslinging that people detest and makes it appear that politicians are all the same breed: playing political games with one another while people lose their jobs and services. Or, as one man put it to me in Wigan recently: “As far as I’m concerned, love, they’re all paddling in the same canoe”.
In the run-up to the local elections, I have been out talking to people on the doorstep across my constituency. The message coming through is of distrust of politicians. In the wake of the expenses scandal it is unsurprising. But the “broken promises” that people most associate with Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats are also a problem for us all. In the short term, this may help Labour and the Conservatives.
In the long run, no political party should be too quick to celebrate. AV campaigners on both sides argue the electoral system is relevant to this debate. Opponents of AV say the electoral system must be simple and fair if people are to trust it. Proponents argue AV will bring a new kind of politics characterised by less disagreement and more consensus.
My concern with this is that the wider public seem to want genuine political disagreement – it is surely why conviction politicians of all political parties are the most enduring and most admired. I am increasingly convinced that less mudslinging would do more to restore trust in politicians than any other measure. Yet AV – where it would have an effect – would not necessarily minimise this kind of politics. It could, if elections are increasingly close, make it worse.
The key to restoring faith in politics is to ensure there is genuine debate about things that have a direct impact on people’s lives. We need less pretence at agreement and more recognition that political parties are broad churches that deal with complex questions. Few of those questions are black and white, and it is insulting to the public’s intelligence to pretend otherwise. Allowing parties to air disagreements in public, without an ensuing media frenzy, would be a first step to raising the tone of the debate, and bringing about better informed solutions backed by the public. Decent politics is about bringing more people to the table, not silencing people who dissent.
To reconnect politics with people, we need to look far beyond the AV debate to a completely new kind of politics. Let’s start by listening to people outside the Westminster bubble. lLisa Nandy is Labour MP for Wigan
