Does anyone else feel like they’re living through a simulation of democracy? All the apparatus of democracy has been laid out before us today. The polling booths, the ballot papers, the boxes to stuff them in. But the stuff of democracy, the substance of it, feels oddly, sadly absent. We’re being canvassed, but not engaged. We’re being asked to vote, but not to think. Not really.
This imitation of democracy is unsustainable
The whole thing has felt like a phantom election. Not to get too Baudrillard about it, but is an election even taking place? It must be because they’ve been talking about it on television. You might have seen them while idly browsing the channels in between Euros matches. But in the real world where the rest of us live, the election has been notable by its absence. I have not overheard one conversation about it. Anywhere. And I’m an instinctual eavesdropper.
I haven’t seen any election posters in people’s windows. Though, to be fair, we’ve been bemoaning the disappearance of campaign posters for years. ‘Where have all the posters gone?’, asked a BBC News headline back in 2001. I haven’t had anyone knock on my door to plead for my vote. Which is probably just as well given my first question for canvassers would have been ‘What is a woman?’ – a stickler that is kryptonite to political people.
None of my WhatsApp groups have lit up with election snark or even election memes. Liz Truss’s bowing out from Downing Street excited more WhatsApping than this supposedly once-in-a-generation vote. Say the words Sunak, Starmer, Rayner, Davey or ‘supermajority’ in a pub and watch people’s eyes glaze over. My acquaintances, at least, are far more interested in who’s going to replace lame duck Gareth Southgate than lame duck Rishi Sunak.
It’s like the anti-Brexit. Back then, in 2016, the country was abuzz with political chatter. Turnout shot up. People felt truly invested in the referendum. We were all Leavers or Remainers. Who now calls themselves a ‘Starmerite’, aside from a few tragic members of the upper middle class, perhaps, who think having a barrister running the country will be blessed relief after these scary years of populist agitation? As for ‘Sunakite’ – is that even a word? I doubt even Sunak is a Sunakite.
The cynic in me thinks the reason some latte liberals are enjoying this election – the only ones who are – is precisely because it is so bloodless. Precisely because the irritating passions and beliefs of the little people have been shoved off stage this time. Unlike the 2016 referendum, this election feels like a business deal more than a debate. It feels like a simple transition of power from one square technocrat to another. It’s a done deal, isn’t it, and our lowly role is just to rubber stamp it all with an X on a bit of paper.
Witness the reasons people are giving for voting Labour. According to YouGov, 48 per cent of Labour voters say they just want the Tories out. Thirteen per cent think ‘the country needs a change’. And a measly five per cent are voting Labour because ‘I agree with their policies’. Five per cent! It’s entirely negative voting. It’s a vote not for something, but against something. A vote not for a new vision for Britain, but against the ancien regime. It feels sad, no?
We are going through the motions of democracy, but the point of democracy – to think, to choose, to decide – is nowhere to be seen. Today we will witness the power of democracy but we will not see the purpose of democracy. What I mean is that we will witness a people pushing a party out of office – and that is true power – but we will not witness a people making a positive, deep, happy choice about the future direction of their country.
It feels like we have been reduced to spectators of a coronation rather than being treated as free, enfranchised citizens who should enjoy a real choice over the constitutional, political and moral direction of the nation.
This imitation of democracy is unsustainable. Without ideas, without a real clash of visions, without those hot passions that so horrified the observing classes in the 2016 referendum, democracy withers. A choice between two shades of technocracy is no choice at all. It leaves us technically enfranchised but politically disenfranchised.
That people are begrudgingly trudging to the polling booths today to say little more than ‘Bye Tories’, or are staying home and saying nothing at all, is not down to the masses’ apathy – it’s down to the lethargy of a political elite that has offered us nothing to get excited about. And maybe they prefer it this way, with the plebs neutered of their fury and turned into the stage cheerleaders of the new technocrat in town. When people died for our right to vote, I’m pretty sure they didn’t mean this.
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