To vote or not to vote?

How to get beyond desperation

In the UK, the calling of a surprise general election has put the country into a spin. Over the pond, Americans have been fretting for the past two years about the Presidential elections in November. Elections are central to Western society, a once-in-a-five-year opportunity to bring about change.

In Britain it's almost blasphemous to express doubt about voting. Voting is the mark of a respectable member of society, a duty that must be fulfilled if you aren't to diminish the efforts of the Suffragettes or the sacrifice of those who fought to save the country from Hitler.

This time around, the perennial cry 'You Must Vote' carries more than a note of desperation. Many are now so disillusioned they no longer feel it's worth taking part in a political process which is going to lead to more of the same. Voting advocates react to this with evangelical fervour: they don't care how you vote as long as you vote; it's the voting that matters. The picture below says a lot about that mindset`: the urging, the showing, the insistence on inclusiveness.

The desperation is pushing away an uncomfortable thought, one that has to do with the conditions for democracy. What makes democracy real? What gives this massive handover of power and resources legitimacy? And – the darkest of thoughts – what if now, voting achieves nothing except possibly mandate more wrongdoing? These are some of the thoughts circulating in the national psyche in the run-up to the first election since 2020.

Discussion of such ideas is just beginning in Britain. On social media and in personal conversations the 'there's no point in voting' view is voiced by a wide range of people, from formerly committed voters to confirmed anarchists. The more politically-minded have a reasoned analysis for their position, while others are operating from a deep, if inchoate, sense of the wrongness of things.

The calling of the election has brought the absence of meaningful choice to the fore. Both Britain's main parties supported the lockdowns largely responsible for getting us where we are, and MPs across all parties support the WHO Pandemic Treaty and amended International Health Regulations that would make such shutdowns and restrictions a permanent possibility. Will you vote for The Lockdown Party or The More Lockdown Party?

Meanwhile, neither seems to have any real ideas about how to address the rapid deterioration of the country manifest in the ubiquitous potholes, the unavailability of doctors and dentists, and the boarded-up shops.

'Uniparty' is the name commonly given to the amorphous political entity Britain's parliamentary system now offers the electorate. It comprises, as Mary Harrington cogently puts it, 'every mainstream political representative of the zombie-liberal consensus' and makes for a country which 'has no culture, no people, nothing to offer other than tourist tat, a flaccid trading zone, and some services that may be obtained on a gym-membership basis by just showing up.'

I think of the Uniparty as Yellow – no offence to the actual colour, which I love – and the choices it offers in terms of shades: which shade of yellow would you like: bright or lurid?

On the day the election was called, I turned on the tap and … nothing came out. Having the water cut off without prior notice – common in second world countries – is something I've never experienced in Britain before.

What democracy is

Here's the political theory bit.

Britain is the cradle of liberal democracy. It's the country which birthed a tradition of thinkers who articulated the popular feeling that the rule of the many by the one was antithetical to a civilised society. In seventeenth-century England, the philosopher Hobbes attempted a last-ditch defence of the monarchy: since ordinary people were unable to protect themselves from life's ineradicable difficulties, they readily consented to being governed by a strong ruler.

But the idea at the heart of social contract theory – consent – was out of the bag. It gave conceptual form to the sense that humans’ inherent dignity and practical need for autonomy must be protected from domination by others if they are to live full lives. The rights tradition established by John Locke laid out the terms for the transfer of political authority: it was contingent on respect for freedom of speech, thought and belief, freedom of association. From the rights of the person sprung the right to property, freedom of movement and freedom from medical interference.

In a Western democracy, you don't have to know the names of the philosophers or the political theories they developed to have an understanding of these rights and their associated values. They were deeply embedded in the Britain in which I grew up: I remember my parents explaining that freedom of speech prevailed whether you agreed with what was being said or not.

Later, as a postgraduate student, I came across the work of John Rawls, the modern philosophical exponent of liberal democracy. Rawls' theory of justice attempted to establish a theoretical framework for liberalism that accommodated contemporary concerns about equality and fairness. He proposed a thought experiment to justify the basic structure of society called the Original Position: a kind of neutral starting point from which people would agree the rules by which to live. Crucially, citizens chose those rules – the principles of justice – from behind a 'veil of ignorance' which prevented them knowing their financial circumstances, social status or personal qualities such as intelligence, physical strength or psychological resilience.

I found Rawls' thought elegant and compelling. It had both purity and practicality, recognising humans' need to make decisions in accordance with their own interests and the importance of creating just conditions. It erected the basis for a reasoning that combined the two things necessary in a healthy society: the 'what is best for me' with 'what is best for society'

Political theory is an extremely argumentative area, and Rawls’ work was subject to criticism from Left and Right and one critique in particular stood out: his theory assumed too much rationality, since humans were emotional creatures who made choices on a non-rational grounds. To me, as a twenty-something living in a reasonable society, it didn’t make much sense.

Since 2020 I have understood that critique of Rawls in a deep, visceral way. Under lockdown, I saw endless examples of what I call 'the argument from me': justifications for restrictions on others that were no more than expressions of people's own immediate desires. One neighbour described lockdown as 'brilliant' because it meant he didn't have to travel for work; another young couple said they hoped restrictions would go on as long as possible so they could stay at home with their child.

Attitudes like this were expressed widely, sometimes extending into a kind of faux policymaking: 'almost everyone can work from home from now on', and sometimes the vehicle for a rage against others whose needs differed from their own: 'why do people need to go outside to exercise?' One of the most blatant examples came from Welsh First Minister Mark Drakeford. Banning the sale of 'non-essential' items, he told a radio interviewer: 'I don't need any new clothes and I don't see why anyone else would'.

What I was witnessing was a long way from the consequential reasoning of Rawls’ rational subject: short-term emotional thinking on a mass scale. Didn't the parents foresee that a poorer society might affect their child later on? And did a man who led millions really lack the imagination to envisage circumstances requiring some new socks, a babygrow or a fleece for a teenager?

Of course, such responses were engendered by the heightened emotions of that time, notably fear. But 'the argument from me' hasn't gone away. These days I hear it frequently from those calling for restrictions on the movement of vehicles. They tend to belong to a certain demographic: fit, able-bodied and with work that gives them control over their time. When it's pointed out that others may need to travel by car because they are frail, pressed for time, or have people and things to transport, they respond robotically: 'They can cycle, like I do.'

Why is the thinking that allows us to view a situation holistically and understand other possibilities on the decline? It has to do with a change in underlying attitudes about our capabilities and responsibilities. In other words, a kind of social and political dumbing down has taken place. Matthew Crawford argues that the past three decades have seen a shift from the Lockean view of the rational subject to a Hobbesian one which 'needs us to think of ourselves as vulnerable, so that the state can play a role in saving us. It underwrites a technocratic, progressive form of politics.'

A British woman I knew in Portugal had personal experience of the Covid vaccine in 2021 when her father had adverse reactions to both injections. Nonetheless, she took the shot herself in order to be allowed to travel. My mention of informed consent drew a blank. While the government tried to make the injections mandatory for NHS staff, a friend asserted that she believed in informed consent - but not for NHS workers. A neighbour carelessly defended the shutting down of a podcaster's bank account because he’d hosted Joe Rogan. 'Don't we believe in freedom of speech any more?' I asked. He looked at me as if he didn't know what I was talking about.

All this ignorance and confusion suggests our democratic values were shallow-rooted, swept away in a tide of top-down coercion and social pressure. Without deep roots such values can't hold. What we have in their absence are the signs and symptoms of a technical democracy in which you can only vote any shade of … Yellow.

What democracy isn't

Listening to the radio the day after the local elections in May, I was struck forcibly by a new-old insight; it's all a game.

The BBC was buzzing with numbers and updates on impending wins and loses. There was almost no reference to policy, which was mentioned only in relation to a seat lost or gained by one of the major parties.

Elections conducted in this way are an exercise in 'your tribe against the other tribe'. Tribal affiliation and labels have replaced principles and foundational values and discussions of what people actually want. The labels serve as the equipment in this game of Us Vs Them, shorthand for the virtues of your tribe vs the vices of the enemy. Words for complex, multi-layered issues – how we collectively care for our health and the many people moving about an unequal world such as 'NHS', 'Immigration' – are lobbed about like grenades. This is a zero-sum game in which the only outcome is the triumph or defeat of your tribe.

'So you won't be voting.' The Labour Party canvasser on the doorstep has heard my response to her question about whether I have any 'concerns' and put me down as A Waste of Time. She looks blank when I say that MPs are failing to consider the implications of the WHO's Pandemic Treaty and my reference to ULEZ draws a pitying look – can't I afford a new vehicle? She's off down the street while I'm still explaining that the issue is much broader than that. I'm not a recruit to her army.

I understand this part of the game all too well. In 1997 I was door knocking in Islington with other members of the Labour Party. My membership ended in 2001 when the Labour government bombed Afghanistan and was contemplating invading Iraq, both on pretexts that turned out to be lies. The letter that outlined my reasons for resigning – entirely to do with foreign policy – received a three-page reply about domestic policy. Years later, I told another Labour canvasser why I could never vote Labour again. She was sympathetic. Ah, she sighed, Headquarters just wasn't good at communication.

To believe that a communications strategy can persuade people to accept any policy, no matter how murderous or destructive, is to make a deal with the devil. For such a compact to translate into electoral success, both sides of the voting equation, the elected and the electing must be complicit in the politics of the surface. The politicians provide certain words as justifications for their actions – 'health', 'climate', or whatever – and the people take them at face value.

At election time, voters have to believe there's a real possibility of change despite evidence to the contrary. In a two-party system, the politics of the pendulum is swung by hope, not the existence of any real alternative. Psychologists call the belief that things will turn out a certain way just because we want them to magical thinking.

Magical thinking as a way of conducting democracy has been okayish when there was an underlying consensus about the kind of society we wanted, one in which basic freedoms were respected. But now that the West has taken an authoritarian turn, The Game has become a lot less fun. The recognition that both the main parties can put an end to our way of life or ruin us all in the trying provides the emotional energy behind much of the current desperation. Electoral evangelicals advocate tactical voting as a way of keeping the other party out while openly acknowledging the party they support is a bad 'un. Reluctant Tory supporters talk about 'saving' the country from Labour while their Labour counterparts claim 'The Tories' will be even worse.

It's as if we're playing for time, time to figure out how to protect ourselves against the machinations of Uniparty. What's not happening amid all this drama is any meaningful discussion of the choices being made. There's no assessment of lockdown or the abandonment of informed consent, nor of the implications of repeating such policies in future. Rights are being eroded on all fronts, and levels of censorship and surveillance by government or third parties is increasing. As this list of people being threatened or punished for exercising free speech compiled by Ed West shows, Britain isn’t a free country any more.

So here we are, at a time when elections have become a kind of sport or entertainment. Meanwhile, the real business of allocating power and resources goes on in the background.

Rudolf Steiner had it in his 1917 lecture 'The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness' 14:

'Concepts are taken for reality, and as a result illusion may take the place of reality where human life is concerned by lulling people to sleep with concepts. They believe the fruits of their endeavours will be that every individual will be able to express their will in the different democratic institutions, and they fail to see that these institutions are such that it is always just a few people who pull the wires, whilst the rest are pulled along. They are persuaded, however, that they are part of democracy and so they do not notice they are being pulled and that some individuals are pulling the strings.'

The illusion of democracy

Who benefits from this illusion? What does the illusion mask? Enable?

The answer is simple and yet hard-to-hear.

We can approach it via a salient, widely-acknowledged fact: the Covid crisis facilitated a huge transfer of wealth and power, one in which a tiny number of super-rich individuals profited from the impoverishment of millions.

Far from being a one-off event, that transfer of wealth is part of a trend that’s been developing for decades. According to the World Inequality Report of 2022, the top 1% have taken 38% of the wealth accumulated since the mid-1990s, whereas the bottom 50% got just 2%. In the twenty-first century, global wealth inequalities are steadily widening, and are now close to those of the early twentieth century.

Widen the lens further, and a deliberate attempt to commandeer the world's resources comes into view. In The Great Taking, David Webb chronicles the behind-the-scenes changes enacted by Western legislators and financial institutions to eradicate individual property rights. A former financier, Webb claims that US property ownership has been de-coupled from securities and put into pools controlled by privately owned central banks and that similar changes are being made in Europe. The appearance of ownership remains, but in the event of bankruptcies triggered by a financial collapse, the biggest banks will be entitled to take the assets.

'The old fashioned way was through indebtedness so you could take their stuff,' says Webb in this interview. 'This is a new innovation which is using unreal things to take real things.' It's all part, he goes on, of a system which aims to gradually extract more and more from ordinary people.

It seems to me that the British government is engaged in other forms of The Great Taking. We are all paying through inflation for the money printing used to fund the Covid shutdown while government benefits from lower debt in real terms. Taxation is at World War II levels while services are being cut. The UK's commitment to Net Zero entails public spending of eye-watering proportions which will translate into ongoing tax rises.

The UK’s extractive system also works through utilities such as energy and water. Since returning from Portugal a year ago, I haven't been able to drive more than ten minutes in any direction without being stopped by a Thames Water roadblock. All over the capital, lanes and roads are closed so that the failing network can be patched up. Sometimes the works, such as the causing queues at two nearby junctions, go on for months; at others the plastic fencing and 'road closed' signs pop up and disappear again within a few days. Often, as in the next street to me now, there is sign of work being carried out no indication of how long the closure will last.

Thames Water was privatised in 1989 and is owned by a group of pension and state investment funds based in countries such as Canada and China. Between 1990 and 2022 it paid investors £7 billion in dividends. Since 2020, it has also tipped 72 billion litres of untreated sewage into the Thames. Last week it put a 'do not drink order' on water coming from hundreds of homes in Surrey. The company is heavily in debt and wants to put the prices it charges the consumer (on top of a recent hike) up by a further 59% over the next five years.

Rothschild, the investment bank which advised on the privatisation of Thames Water in 1989, is advising the company on its finances.

This is a wealth transfer operation based on control of the stuff of life. And what are the parties proposing to govern the country doing? Standing by while the regulator proposes a lighter regulatory regime which would allow more leaks and more pollution of rivers.

Few seem to be aware of what’s happening. The three people examining the huge hole in the next street believed the council was 'fixing' the road until we saw 'TW' painted in the corporate blue. It was owned by the government, said one.

British voters tend to misinterpret high living costs and poor services as evidence of the Enemy Tribe's incompetence and call for yet more taxation. Higher taxes will save the NHS, fully fund social care and reverse the decline in local services.

Last year, Birmingham City Council went bankrupt (technically: a local authority cannot go out of business). It announced council tax rises of 21 per cent over two years, along with £300 million of service cuts, including the end of funding for all cultural institutions. Birmingham is home to many major institutions such as the Birmingham Royal Opera, Royal Ballet and Symphony Orchestra. Arts Twitter went mad, begging politicians to reverse the cuts.

I was bemused by this surprise and outrage: in 2020 and 2021 all the arts were shut down, many without compensation, and I didn’t hear a single objection. The silence had sent politicians a clear message: didn’t arts lovers see something like this coming? Post-Covid, the new raft of policies limiting the movement of vehicles had grievous implications for the arts. (Birmingham City Council also plans to abolish cars.) Wasn't it obvious that old-school cries of 'more funding' were going to fall on deaf ears? In a conversation with one of the campaigners, I suggested it might be wise to look at the bigger picture.

Her response was to post a gif of a muppet shrugging helplessly. It was intended as a humorous way of saying 'what else can we do?' But what struck me was how the limbs of the plaything were being pulled by strings held by someone outside the picture. The campaigners are still going, exhausting themselves pleading with politicians who have no intention of listening. Their desperation keeps them busy while the high-ups get on with a course of action that was decided some time ago.

An inability to see a situation as it is allows you to become a muppet, with your strings pulled by others. It’s a state that requires a degree of self-deception.

Deception is key to the election game. In Britain, people decide how to vote on the basis of manifestoes, a series of promises which are in no way binding. In the past, such promises were underwritten by honour on the part of politicians and expectations on the part of the electorate.

But we are now on very different territory. During the Covid crisis, promises were repeatedly made and broken. A three-week lockdown became eighteen months and, according to insiders, almost continued into 2022. Both the first and the second lockdowns were based on inaccurate modelling, details of which were published widely in the mainstream media. Then, if the figures weren't enough, Partygate demonstrated beyond any doubt that politicians had practised a huge act of deception on the public. WhatsApp messages revealed health secretary Matt Hancock conspiring to 'deploy the new variant' to 'frighten the pants off' the population.

In times not-so-long-ago, behaviour of this kind would have brought down the government. But there hasn't even been an apology and the public doesn't seem bothered. Partygate is now a movie. Most of Britain has agreed not to mention the matter and, in the run-up to the election appears to believe those same politicians will behave differently next time.

In a gesture which all-but shouted 'we'd do it all again in a heartbeat', the Conservative Party has given Hancock (who has decided not to stand) the whip back. It's almost as if The Universe is thrusting ever-bigger outrages into people's faces to see how much more they will tolerate.

In his 1910 book La Democratie et les Financiers – a kind of French precursor to The Great Taking quoted by Steiner – Francis Delaisi argued that democracy was a tool used by financiers to exploit the population; it provided a screen to hide their nefarious intentions. The reality of the situation could only be seen once people saw 'the voting machine' in the context in which it operated. In future, 'something quite different' would 'come into human evolution'. In the meantime, 'these parliaments will continue to vote for quite some time, but all real life will have departed from them.'

Where we’re headed

Whether we recognise it or not, our current system is in the process of dissolution. This is the no man's land that lies between the failure of the old system and the birth of a new way of doing things (the latter being the more uplifting subject I'd planned for this month's Substack before the election was called).

Disillusion is a key stage in this process.

The thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, while applying to the narrower realm of Christian community, is helpful here: 'The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community, the better for both.'

Disillusion, Bonhoeffer argues, shatters the dream of a perfect community, an unhealthy emotional state of 'rapturous experiences' and 'lofty moods'. It presents the disillusioned with the opportunity to become a genuine community. But the passage through this process is difficult and chaotic and the disillusioned person blames others, indulges in blanket cynicism and, finally, does some self-examination:

'When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first an accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself.'

'DisIllusion' has a negative connotation, but its meaning is straightforwardly positive. To be 'dis-illusioned' means to be free of illusion, a state of being able to see the truth.

Disillusion is why lots of people, including firm believers in democracy, won't be voting this time around. A bit further down the line, disillusion also awaits many of those who vote in the next Labour government, indulging in the magical thinking that Things Can Only Get Better. D-Ream's founding members, by the way, have said they are disillusioned with politics and would not allow their songs to be used by Labour again: 'I don't see this as an election,' said Peter Cunnah. 'It's just a change of guard, someone handing the baton on.'

When the Labour government continues the Uniparty programme and a wider process of disillusion gets underway, interesting questions about democracy will emerge. With fewer and fewer people voting in subsequent elections, is there a point where the mandate becomes so small that the elected government loses legitimacy? If so, where might that point be – less than twenty per cent of the electorate? Ten?

These are technical questions to do with the mechanisms of democracy. Much more important are those that concern power, engagement and responsibility: the psycho-social conditions for genuine self-governance.

Another Christian thinker provides a fuller illustration of what's at stake. A few centuries ago, John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress was the most-read English book after the Bible. The allegory tells the story of an ordinary man, the challenges he faces and choices he makes on his journey through life. They're decisions that determine what kind of person he becomes and, in a psycho-spiritual sense, his survival.

These days allegories have all-but fallen out of fashion, with Animal Farm the only one that remains current in the public mind. But allegories are extraordinarily useful tools for seeing. They give us distance and perspective and, in this case, the seventeenth-century text has things to say about what lies beyond disillusion.

Christian encounters many trials and temptations, as well as a lot of help, on his journey from his home, the City of Destruction, to the Celestial City. It's a journey he has to undertake alone, as his family refuse to accompany him. Along the way, he falls into the Slough of Despond, walks through Valley of Death and is imprisoned by the Giant Despair. His escape from the prison turns on an inner shift, a realisation that he holds the power to leave within himself: 'What a fool am I, thus to lie in a stinking dungeon when I may as well walk at liberty. I have a key in my bosom called Promise which will (I am persuaded) open any lock in Doubting Castle.'

Other pilgrims trying to reach the Celestial City are overcome by their own weakness. The picture below is from a 1903 edition of The Pilgrim's Progress that belonged to my great-grandfather, a non-conformist minister. Little-Faith has been robbed by Faintheart, Mistrust and Guilt, having taken a nap in Dead Man's Lane. The place was well known for crime: all the warning signs were there.

Applied to our current situation, this means freeing ourselves from disabling qualities and self-defeating behaviours. A key one is the contradiction which rules that, while respectable folk have an obligation to vote, it's rude to discuss politics. 'I'm not interested in politics,' is often said in a way that implies the virtue of the speaker.

Well, as my great-aunt Ethel never said, politics is very interested in YOU. Politics is interested in your labour and energy, your money and property and, increasingly during this, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it's interested in your data, your movements, your biometrics, your body, your mind – and those of your children and your children's children. A failure to engage with that reality leaves you, and everything you value, there for The Taking.

The better path also means letting go of another version of apathy: the idea that the existing system is all there is and ever could be. In contemporary Britain this is a difficult shift to make, so hard have we fallen for the idea that we've arrived at the ultimate form of political development. We've forgotten that social and political change is natural and necessary; challenge and struggle is how we got democracy and universal suffrage in the first place. And despite the efforts of Oswald Spengler, most Westerners find the idea that our civilisation, like every other human culture, might be reaching the end of its life unthinkable. Personally, I find a brief sortie into civilisational collapse - see the podcasts of Paul Cooper - help to put this hubris into perspective.

What might the next stage – whether it evolves into a renaissance of Western democracy or some other system – involve? The first step starts with seeing things as they are, and being able to be honest with oneself and others about what you see. It means refusing the politics of appearance and insisting on what's real.

It means being able to say, quite clearly: I don’t want Yellow.

Then it involves going on to start the process of envision what kind of society you would like: what kind of education, what sort of healthcare, what food systems?

And after that, starting to put that into practice. Divesting your time, money and energy from things you don't like (mine include Amazon, television, card-only establishments and supermarkets) and putting your resources into things you do like. When you vote with your feet, every day is an election. Done on a mass scale, this could form the beginnings of the kind of self-governance humanity has been striving for throughout recorded history.

Some spiritual and religious references have made their way into this piece quite unintentionally. But I'm not surprised at their appearance. In a political culture that has becoming empty and despairing, they serve as wayshowers, pointing to the fact that while the upcoming election provides no meaningful choice, plenty of meaningful choices remain.

To vote or not to vote? Perhaps voting is neither here nor there. You can vote for one of the main parties sincerely or tactically. You can spoil your ballot paper – an Argentinian friend tell me her people do it by attaching pieces of ham – or you can vote for a minority candidate. Such actions express your membership of a (technical) democracy and perhaps your faith in democracy as a political system. If you're lucky enough to have a candidate with integrity, your vote may still be an authentic expression of your values. But in our current situation voting alone will do nothing to bring about change Out There.

So what can you do as well, or instead? That's the real question, and one I'll address in future Substacks.

As Hannah Arendt said: 'Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.'