Richard Shaw - Out for ‘The Count’

Ilkeston Life article June '21: 'Out for the Count'

This online version of the article has a prologue and an epilogue, the latter looking at how the seeds of the future may be contained in the present. The article as it would have appeared (and may yet appear) in the paper will be just the middle part, headed ‘Out for The Count’.

Prologue: Behavioural Insights

Just before Ilkeston Life went to press, I caught part of ‘The Moral Maze’ programme on Radio Four. This was broadcast on the 26th May. I was shocked. It is just incredible now what people are saying, especially when it comes to areas of ‘moral’ decision making.

As readers will know, I have tried to adopt an even hand on matters to do with ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and the reasons for having or not having the jab. But the view being put out on this programme is that there can be no good reason for not having it. We can delude ourselves but any reasons just fly in afterwards to justify our pre-disposition. They are not good reasons in their own right.

Of course, there is some truth in this. But it applies as much to those calling it out as those unwittingly subject to it. And in the hands of the former it becomes a dangerous tool indeed!

What I heard on the evening of 26th May was just amazing in all the wrong ways. It was in another league of things calling for our concern. Whether we are now totalitarian in our doing, we are increasingly so in our thinking. And this is most apparent amongst the ‘discerning’ - or so they like to see themselves - who arguably don’t think for themselves either. In many cases they are academics who think from the background of their own reading and don’t realise how much this is already influencing their own thinking.

In this respect those within the ‘Behavioural Insights Team’ (also known as ‘The Nudge Unit’) seem to have fallen completely in love with their own brief. Headed by Professor David Halpern, who was one of the ‘witnesses’ providing ‘evidence’ in the programme referred to, they can no longer distinguish between the truth of their message and their responsibility for delivering it. They genuinely believe there can be no good reasons for doing other than what they have been commissioned to get us all doing and those who believe otherwise are simply fooling themselves.

It’s taken us a while to get there, but now we seem to be closer to George Orwell’s ‘1984’ territory than ever before in my lifetime. For Behavioural Insights then read ‘Doublethink’! Where can we go for the democratic antidote to this?

Out for ‘The Count’

If you want to see British democracy at its best, you could do much worse than to attend the Election Count. Not everyone can. Essentially you need to be invited, but it is heartening and reassuring. I get to go on behalf of Ilkeston Life and it’s a place of many positives: a theatre of cherished hope, nursed expectation, diligent application and short lived jubilation at a favourable outcome cut short before it becomes exhibitionism!

It’s a celebration of a very British sort; of the sort you would expect where politics combines just the right measure of theatre and pragmatism. It says much for our gift of turning passion into practicality and being able still to offer the world an example. The Mother of all Parliaments is alive and well in its local halls as well as its national palaces. It is full of character and characters. But questions arise as to whether it is still entirely fit for purpose.

Parliamentary legislation and regulation evolved from the judicial precedent of common law to offer a more democratic form of government, one less prone to judicial caprice whilst still sensitive to changing social contexts. But now there is a feeling in some quarters that it tends to offer something less representative, not more. The possibility of the passing of legislation to more or less end judicial review would be an example.

But back to the elections of May 6th and, credit where it’s due, it was a great night for the Conservatives. In the elections to Derbyshire County Council, they won by a handsome majority in most seats and were way out in front in terms of both the total number of seats won (45 as against 14 for Labour, 4 for the Liberal Democrats and 1 for the Greens - a notable victory for Gez Kinsella in Duffield and Belper South) and the overall share of the vote. As in England as a whole, they consolidated the gains, and extended the momentum, generated at the 2019 General Election to almost literally sweep all before them.

As for the Greens, they improved their standing impressively with a second place in Breaston for Brent Poland, who described as ‘massive’ their overall progress and, apart from the win in Duffield and Belper South, and the second place in Breaston they came a creditable third in pretty much all the other seats. They can also point to a tide flowing in their favour as the public becomes ever more aware of environmental issues. For Labour it was more a night for dignified resignation and the first beginnings of a quiet reflection as they seek to recognise what can take them forward.

They may not need to look far. As one Labour candidate put it ‘the real winners in this election were ‘Mr and Mrs Non voter’! On a turnout of between the upper twenties and the lower forties across all the seats, it was easy to see what he meant.

If Labour can discover what is going on here in this disengaged sector they could be on to something. Even the famous Tory victory in Hartlepool was secured with a turnout of only 42.5%, leading to suggestions that this was more a case of the Labour voters staying at home than the Tory transformation taking another huge step forward. But apart from that what is going on within this disengagement and, allied to that, what is the key to understanding the Tory success?

There has been a suggestion that they are now becoming the national party of England. If so, what are they offering which makes them effectively the best or best available expression of national mood and aspiration at this time? What are the individual dispositions coming to effect in this collective expression?

Reflecting on this immediately after the count, I found myself thinking of celebrity culture and reality TV! This may not be the route to stardom, with its attendant riches (however short lived) for many, but it speaks of a new reality. If you make the right moves and get the right media exposure coupled with a bit of luck you can make it. And you don’t need to be a success in more traditional terms, for example as a lawyer, doctor, teacher or other professional, trades or other small business person; you just have to be get noticed and gain approval! And this possibility is open to everyone, or so it seems. However, those who think their route to success is effectively a lottery ticket may need to think differently when the losing tickets start mount up around them. This may be where the disengaged already are.

But this is the national picture. How much do these national issues, profiles and themes resonate in the local vote? There can be no doubting the hard work, dedication and application of all the candidates. And the results show that individuals do still make an impact. But how much, generally speaking, are local results about local issues? How much effort is now being made towards alerting people of the local issues? What raises our consciousness towards them?

‘Derbyshire Now’ is very informative and deserves to be read much more than it probably is. But even this tells us more about what has been or is being done. An election is more about what now needs to be done going forward.

It may be a sign of the times that the only two pieces of election material I received through my door both came from the Conservative candidate - one asking for my views on local matters and the other, closer to the election, offering me an outline of what his candidacy would bring. There was nothing at all to inform me of the aims, aspirations or hopes of the other candidates. I had to go online to find out anything about them at all.

Maybe this reflects a degree of demoralisation in the Labour camp and limited campaigning resources elsewhere. A notable feature of the last three elections in Erewash has been the robust campaigning by the Labour team but this has not translated into success at the polls. In fact the Conservative majority has grown each time. This must have an eroding effect on morale.

And on the doorstep the responses may not be exactly encouraging. They may also be more reflective of national issues than local ones and inclined to be severely uncomplimentary of politicians in general! According to what I was hearing, the experience could be that when pressed on local issues, some voters would resort to pointing out that in their view politicians are ‘all as bad as each other’ and ‘only in it for themselves’. So that’s not exactly heart-warming.

However you look at it there doesn’t seem to be much engagement with actual local issues. Maybe this is a commendation of sorts: ‘everything is already being done as well as it can be and we are happy with it, or we simply go with our party affiliations and more general concerns’. But at what level is this actually democracy? In what way am I encouraged to get involved?

The first of the two pieces of election material I mentioned above was actually a Residents Survey. I wanted to cooperate with it - I really did. But I found I couldn’t. I was asked specific questions about existing areas of provision and asked to rate them, or score my participation in them. Many of the questions were also about national provision or the local counterpart to this and there were questions about priorities and voting intentions. In a way it was very comprehensive but it was also a box ticking exercise: a questionnaire, in other words. And with these, whilst they consult, the designers of the form are still setting the agenda.

All these issues go much deeper than the tick boxes floating on the surface of them and I was concerned that in answering some of the questions I would be agreeing that some things were more important than others or were alternatives where all would rightly find their place in a fully integrated approach.

If I want a conversation about all these things based on the impressions people have of the measures and services that most impact their lives where do I go for that? Council meetings? Would the agenda there allow for that?

In terms of local democracy, everything is well organised and well run with people giving of their time and doing their best with very often little recognition for it. And yet in some ways much also speaks of disengagement.

A conversation with the disengaged - with Mr and Mrs Non voter - really may then offer the best way forward!

Epilogue: the final reckoning or the future beckoning?

The Tories’ appeal seems to have everything to do with aspiration and retention, of getting wealth and then keeping as much as possible of it for oneself. What does this tell us about the possibility of community provision within a community conversation? And if left entirely to the individual’s charitable intentions, where will this take him - more towards animal charities than human ones?

Of course, by standards elsewhere in the world, our system is hugely democratic and we are indeed privileged to live in such a democracy. Don’t let’s ever lose sight of that. But if we wish to provide an example, and if the Mother of Parliaments is to provide more children to secure the future, we must also be looking for what can make us even more democratic, even more representative, and in a way that sees us responding to that which inside us already senses the emerging future.

No one should be criticised for preserving, protecting and continuing to operate the democratic principles and practices we already have. And neither do I. The Count brings all these things to expression and in a colourful exhibition which is also in many ways (small ‘c’) conservative. That in itself is to be celebrated. But we must also always be looking for what in itself wants to take us forward. It may be lying in the less consciously awake part of us but this is actually also the most aspirational part, the part that senses and reaches towards the future before our minds can catch up. That may also be the part that sees us all equally deserving of riches, or as much as we need to fulfil our dreams, whatever our natural attributes or limitations. That may be the promise that reality TV offers. And if we are all being adequately provided for in this arrangement, then we can each keep more of what we have because the other will already be provided for anyway!

It may be that the tomorrow I am anticipating here is a long way off. But we can begin to take the first steps towards it. And these would possibly see the difference between capitalist and socialist approaches, or dispositions, slowly reconciled, to be opposite sides of the same coin in this new currency.

That is then a reconciliation which overlooks divisions rather than sees the need to perpetuate them in the name of progress. The individual must be allowed to emerge more and more so we all have a greater common wealth. This will less and less need to be fostered by a group in search of power. It will be down, much more, to what sovereign individuals can agree between themselves.

All this requires much more participation across the board, with individuals wanting to be involved in that. That again may not seem like an immediate prospect but to borrow from a current phrase it may be that ‘none of us will be truly rich until we are all rich’!