While it may not translate into an immediate electoral impact on May 8th, British politics just changed forever. We had our first ever televised election debates in 2010, but this time around it wasn’t just an extended episode of Prime Minister’s Questions – we got to see three anti-austerity parties finally turn up the heat on their cozy consensus. It’s fair to say that putting the leaders of not two or three but seven political parties on an equal footing, for two hours, in front of 7 million voters, has been a cleaner hit of democracy than mainstream debate here has seen in a very long time.
The usual Westminster old boys’ club has never before been forced into an even fight with three parties that challenge their neoliberal narrative, and the three main parties struggled to deal with the sheer impudence of having the frothing insanity of their austerity project questioned in public. Nigel Farage’s supporters are not, of course, going to be convinced with reason, so we can consider them more or less an unpleasant irrelevance of post-colonial history – like a minefield from an old war, an establishment relic that the establishment would not personally like to walk on.
Channel 4’s economics editor, Paul Mason, tweeted “electorate much more exposed to anti-austerity economics than ever before via SNP-PC-Greens – new ideas to many”. Giving those ideas the same amount of airtime as the Establishment ‘economy-is-like-a-household’ bullshit may have repercussions that will, in time, change the narrow economic conversation of debt-riddled Europe. The self-sabotaging madness of the Westminster parties is reaching a point of no return, and if this does not translate into immediate electoral success for the minority parties, a blow has been struck to the neoliberal consensus whose effects will unroll subtly, over time.
The opening statements were already a breath of fresh air to anyone who, like me, has spent years watching Question Time or PMQs and swearing at the telly for the sheer narrowness of the echo chamber. Natalie Bennett, having apparently been coached a bit since some of the horrifyingly weak interviews she’s given recently, started the Green Party pitch with the NHS rather than the climate, and made sure to hold to her position on taking markets out of healthcare throughout the rest of the debate. Leanne Wood’s offering of Plaid Cymru was at least honest – she started as she meant to go on, repeatedly saying “Wales” and “community” and not once citing Westminster, making it perfectly clear that she was not going to be swayed from thinking about Wales. She is a Welsh nationalist, after all.
Nicola Sturgeon, on the other hand, pitched Scottish nationalism as a “chance to save Westminster”, presenting herself as an outside saviour to English voters whose First Past the Post electoral prison allows no anti-austerity argument for no nobler reason than a century of Establishment gerrymandering. “My message is one of friendship”, she explained, citing the hated bedroom tax and the huge cost of Britain’s nuclear weapons systems as reasons Westminster needs a kindly outsider to cross the border and sort them all out.
The reason the UK has no left front like other European nations – say, France’s Front de Gauche, Greece’s Syriza or Spain’s Podemos – is not because the British are anaesthetised against system change, but because they are getting wise to the idea that their broken electoral system is up to the job unless it emphasises regional autonomy. The warmth that many English voters feel towards the SNP and Plaid is mystifying to Tory commentators and Labour loyalists both, because to think about it too hard would be to recognise that English voters, too, are aware that they could get a better deal if it weren’t for the entrenched cronyism of Westminster.
Farage said some tedious bollocks about immigration and how the other parties are all the same.
The Westminster gang, meanwhile, went and proved Farage’s point about, at least, the three of them. Clegg basically reminded viewers that in the closest electoral race in modern history there was no getting rid of him – if you ignore the fact that he’s in danger of losing his Sheffield seat – and gave the cameras the sad, hopeful smile of a yapper-type dog that doesn’t know it’s about to get drop-kicked off a very tall bridge. Miliband, too, instantly came across as slightly creepy, starting with perhaps the most non-committal sounding “here’s what I believe” ever drawled, and said something about hiring nurses and the cost of living. Cameron, at least, seemed to believe more genuinely in the faux-meritocracy he oozed, as if to say that perhaps, if you’re lucky, one day your grandkids could be as smugly entitled as me.
The first question was asked by Tory Boy reincarnate, a well-heeled 17 year old who wanted to know how parties planned to cut the deficit. Clegg’s opening was an angry assault on Cameron, strategically because he needed to distance himself from the Tories for the ballot box, but there also seemed to be a hint of relieved glee in his eye as he finally got to turn on the school prefect whose shoes he’d been spit-polishing since third form. Clegg’s attack on Tory education policy appeared genuine, particularly given the scraps he’d had with Michael Gove in cabinet, and set him up to try and pitch himself as an opponent of ideological austerity. Because apparently there’s such thing as non-ideological austerity. Clegg’s pitch appears to be ‘I am the perfect technocrat – if you are not bored from what I say then you are a foolish zealot’.
Cameron informed the audience that “our plan is working” (sadly without the white cat and accompanying “muahahaha”, because he is still a PR man). He decided to absorb Clegg’s blow and attack Miliband instead, blaming the previous Labour government for all the bad things, while carefully making sure not to say the words ‘global’, ‘financial’ or ‘crash’ and upset his hedge fund chums watching at home. He promised at this point to close a £5 billion tax avoidance gap – the real gap is estimated to be at least £25 billion – half-heartedly rummaging for the economic zeitgeist like a teenage boy fumbles for the clitoris. Finding it is irrelevant to Cameron; the point was only ever to screw someone.
It got interesting when the minority parties got to speak. Leanne Wood got straight to the point and said that austerity had failed, not just on grounds of basic human dignity but also on its own terms, that the Coalition was formed on a mandate to get rid of the deficit. Bennett expanded on this with a classical Keynesian line on investment and growth, offering an explanation of how austerity depresses communities with a story that will be comfortably familiar to anyone who has read our restaurant kitchen analogy, but ruining it somewhat with a slightly teacherly “let’s think about what austerity really means”. It was gratifying, however, that at least someone has been thinking about it. Once again Sturgeon wore the same boots but with a good lick of polish, committing the SNP to modest spending increases and shutting Cameron and Miliband back in the same stable for both parties’ repeated votes in favour of failed austerity policies.
Farage made his one helpful contribution at this point, that the Coalition was responsible for more government debt after 5 years than Labour was after 13. Of course, Farage follows the libertarian principle, that the problem of austerity is that you have to destroy everything all at once and just let it all hang out man otherwise it doesn’t work properly and why won’t people just believe me, etc. This is ideal territory for UKIP, as with all of their counterparts throughout history: attack the Establishment from the left whilst in secret fuelling up the Luftwaffe on behalf of the capitalist class. He seemed to take great pleasure in attacking right wing austerity without ever offering anything except to make it worse.
The NHS question was fairly predictably handled. The Westminster boys mostly attacked each other in arguments you will have heard hundreds of times already; the NHS is being destroyed by private interests, but neither Labour nor the Conservatives were innocent of one another’s charge of being hooked to donors in the healthcare industry. Farage brought up the non-issue of “health tourism”, conveniently ignoring the fact that the NHS budget is propped up by immigration. Sturgeon, Bennett and Wood kept up their united front with helpful arguments that cutting the care and welfare budgets would place more financial strain on the health service. Clegg smugly cited mental health with noises of faux-sympathy, as if his party’s assistance was not crucial in the gutting of the mental healthcare budget, or forcing disabled people on benefits to the point of suicide by voting in support of Ian Duncan Smith’s arbeit-macht-frei welfare experiments.
Natalie Bennett cited Labour’s stupidly expensive PFI schemes as the path to the privatisation currently being carried out. It led pretty much all the candidates to attack PFI, except, weirdly, for Ed Miliband, whose bizarre sense of triangulation caused him to point out that his two sons were born in a PFI hospital, as if anyone gives a shit. It made me wonder which constituency Miliband thought he was talking to.
Farage thought his answer was ignored by the other because of “political correctness”, discounting the possibility that it’s simply because he’s a fucking idiot. He brought up one of his nastiest tricks to date, claiming (falsely) that 60% of HIV sufferers in the UK are foreign. At this point the camera shot switched very briefly to the face of Terry, the NHS worker who initially asked the question, seething with rage at Farage’s point. Farage’s not-even-innuendo was, in short, that we should just let the dirty foreigners die and not spend money on them because they’re icky and probably not even white. Leanne Wood got the first cheer of the night, 54 minutes in, by telling him that he should be ashamed of himself.
The third question was more or less just ‘immigration and Europe, question mark?’ The answers were even more predictable than the previous round, with Farage naturally leading the way. He seemed desperate to overplay his hand here, coming across as unusually nerdy with his repeated McCarthyite reminder that the EU got really bad when ten “communist countries” joined. He blames the housing crisis on immigration, calling it a “supply and demand problem” as if the UK’s 5 million Europe-based citizens or the million unoccupied houses in the UK weren’t related to either supply or demand.
There was no decent left-wing critique of the European Union; Farage was left unchallenged in painting it as a purely social democratic institution beloved of mythic ‘lefty’ foes. The SNP wants Scotland to be an EU member, so Sturgeon couldn’t take up the baton. Plaid doesn’t really care about anything much outside of Wales.
Depressingly, the best Natalie Bennett could muster was to refer vaguely to Europe’s ‘problems’ and to support a referendum (which at least made her better than Miliband and Clegg, who can only be patronising and nervous in a conversation about Europe) because she wanted a bigger mandate for Britain’s membership of the EU. Someone with Bennett’s politics, and with the unprecedented position of being able to challenge the elite on stage, should have said something about the anti-democratic wrongdoing of the troika, of the bullying by Germany of all the southern Euro economies, of the fact that the EU’s monstrous lack of accountability and its servitude to the unfettered movement of capital is partly responsible for the sharp rise in Islamophobic and anti-semitic parties across Europe.
The final question was about the future of, and hopes for, young people. It focused almost exclusively on three points: jobs, housing and student debt. Farage picked the classic Mosley gambit of saying “some young people are just fine – the rich!” and laying into wealthy young men from private schools, as if he were a self-made everyman instead of a Dulwich-educated former banker. I have never experienced Nigel Farage as quite so irrelevant, as if after two hours he was simply too exhausted pretending he was an anti-establishment figure and picked some alter-ego fresh from the Four Yorkshiremen sketch. He launched a forgettable rearguard action on behalf of grammar schools, citing some old British instinct of fair play, and then seemed to shrink away from the rest of the debate. Things like ‘hope’ and ‘young people’ aren’t on his campaign radar.
Meanwhile Ed Miliband pretty much exemplified why so many people can’t stand him when he bragged that he would reduce the tuition fees from £9k to £6k, stating proudly “I don’t want young people drowning in debt” – just swimming in it, presumably. When he and Cameron sank into the usual PMQ’s sparring of the last five years, Nicola Sturgeon managed to make the strongest case yet for an SNP vote – that the old boys network was not going to change itself and that we’d “better hope that that there’re some SNP MPs in the House of Commons keeping [Miliband] honest!”
Cameron managed to get out of that scrap the same way as he did in 2010 – by letting Nick Clegg stumble idiotically onto the firing range and, despite his personal history of utterly betraying his voters and pursuing office at the expense of power, little Nick decided that he was the man to take Miliband on the subject of tuition fees. It was predictably bizarre in how out-of-touch it was, and predictably sad that neither Clegg nor Miliband seemed to notice this fact.
Poor Clegg. There is probably no worse conversation for him to take part in than one about the hopes of young people. It must be rather like if you asked Mitt Romney for tips on how to come across as folksy and warm.
He thinks that he embodies ‘the realities of government’. Technically he would be right in thinking that, but appears to miss the fact that this is not a good thing, that the realities of government have little crossover with the realities of poverty, of structural racism, of rape culture. Where in the ‘realities of government’ is there time to fully investigate the Westminster paedophile ring? Or is having top security officials cover up for child abuse by MPs just another ‘reality of government’ that we have to just get on with?
Clegg clearly believes his own shtick about the financial crash being caused by Labour – he went back to it several times, firmly nailing his economics to the Tory mast in some of his strongest yet declarations of loyalty to the financial sector by his choice of narrative, all the while claiming that he is virtuous because he is not ideological. Clegg is one of so many little Neville Chamberlains of our age, ignorant of the evil he feeds by choosing to do nothing with a self-congratulatory “peace in our time” attitude. He forgets that we reserve our deepest revulsion not for Voldemort, who is only the baddie after all, but for Wormtail, who is also pathetic.
The rest of the debate was quite boring, except for the woman who heckled Cameron about homelessness. His tepid response that ‘we should do more’ for armed forces charities was the last pathetic wheeze of his long-forgotten Big Society, which might have been something if it had ever been more than a lame excuse to hand out favours to personal friends whose wealth depends on institutionalised tax avoidance.
In her closing statement, Natalie Bennett was at her weakest. She said: “if you want change, you have to vote for it.”
I disagree utterly.
While these debates blew the closed ideology echo chamber wide open, at least relative to what it’s been since Thatcher came to power, they missed a lot of important issues – the lack of real critical handling of the EU; the fact that an all-white panel couldn’t muster any discussions about the rise in racism; foreign policy; national security and the creeping intrusion of the surveillance state. I could go on. What matters, firstly, is that things were missed. There was a time limit, the format restricted things we could feasibly cover, yes, there is a reasonable explanation for this lack.
And that’s why the other thing that matters is that at no point was there any admission that change does not happen on your behalf because you vote for it. Rather, manifestos are written on your behalf because you fought for it. We tell ourselves that the beloved welfare states of the post-war Keynesian consensus were these brilliant systems created by Great Men, by Roosevelt and Atlee. We tell ourselves that it was democracy wot did all that.
But we forget, for instance, that Roosevelt was a fiscal conservative for most of his life. He didn’t bring about the New Deal because he suddenly decided he was a nice guy. There was a movement, of workers, of families, of unions, of anarchists, who built a network all across America of people who were desperate for things to change, desperate for the fascists in Wall Street to stop squeezing them to death. And this movement scared the living shit out of Roosevelt and the capitalist class; the New Deal came about because they were scared to death that if it didn’t, their gentle voices would be drowned out by the sound of sharpening pitchforks.
Do we also forget that the British government did not change its policy on apartheid until organised boycotts and resistance took place? Is anyone deluded into thinking that we can vote to support Palestinian freedom? Was Oswald Mosley beaten in the ballot box, or was he beaten in the face? Is our role to just wait for the right bit of voting reform to come along so that some nice social democrats can tinker around the edges; or is our job instead to squeeze them, to hound them, to make them squirm?
All changes under capitalism that ever helped workers, that brought about rights, that secured civil liberties, were decided long before someone came along and asked for them to be ratified in elections. The offers being made to us now by the minority parties, these, too, did not just fall out of a historical vacuum; some poor bastard, who was probably a bit crazy and a bit weird, fought for that to get into the manifesto, and the politician just gets the credit for saying it to a bigger audience.
Here’s what the anti-austerity parties didn’t tell you. Whatever outcome we get on May 8th; on May 9th, you are still an agent of political power.
