Daniel Blythe - X Marks the Box

Published in the UK in 2010 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

3941 North Road, London N7 9DP

email:

www.iconbooks.co.uk

This electronic edition published in 2010 by Icon Books

ISBN: 978-1-84831-180-0 (ePub format)

ISBN: 978-1-84831-191-6 (Adobe ebook format)

Printed edition (ISBN: 978-1-84831-051-3)

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Printed edition published in Australia in 2010

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Text copyright 2010 Daniel Blythe

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any

means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Marie Doherty

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Ernest Benn (18751954)

About the Author

Daniel Blythe is a graduate of St Johns College, Oxford. He is the author of several other books including the novels The Cut and This is the Day as well as the acclaimed Encyclopaedia of Classic 80s Pop. As well as writing, he leads creative writing workshops for adults, young people and children.

Authors Note

I would like to acknowledge the support given to me by a generous grant from the Authors Foundation, without which this book could not have been completed. The Authors Foundation is administered by the Society of Authors and more information can be found at the Societys website, www.societyofauthors.org.

Particular thanks go to: my agent Caroline Montgomery as ever, all the Icon editorial, publicity and sales team, and the many correspondents well-versed in the idiom of politics who were able to point me on the right path but especially Steve Goddard, Iain Dale, Gisela Stuart, Jo-Anne Nadler, Peter Tatchell, Emma Jones and Angela Smith, who gave the most useful and considered answers to my niggling questions. Of course, any dissatisfaction with what follows should be laid entirely at my door!

Parliamentary material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO on behalf of Parliament, and all quotes that are otherwise unattributed are from personal correspondence with the author.

Am I Bovvered? Politics for the disenchanted

The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

Plato (born c. 423 BC)

We are told that more people voted in the 2005 series of Big Brother than voted in the 2005 general election. Bearing in mind that old adage 85 per cent of statistics are made up, we should perhaps treat this piece of information with the scepticism it deserves. Many of the voters in Big Brother will have been teenage girls with their fingers permanently glued to the redial key on their mobiles and, however imperfect British democracy may be, we havent yet found any way of improving on the putting a cross in the box with a pencil method. Furthermore, no matter how dumbed-down people may accuse politics and the media of being, we have not yet sunk to the level of putting the candidates up for a Saturday night premium rate phone call challenge, with the decision between the final two remaining contenders being made by a bored Andrew Lloyd Webber or a merciless Simon Cowell.

Winston Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. This seems an elegant summation. You give people the chance to choose their own government at least, to choose their own local Member of Parliament and many of them cant be bothered. Actually, 39 per cent of them thats the proportion who didnt bother to vote in 2005. Turnout dropped dramatically in the first decade of the new millennium with the 2001 and 2005 elections providing the smallest turnouts since the Second World War.

Now, we are being told politics is interesting again, and not just because of the credit crisis. But when the likes of Big Brother and The X Factor attract more young voters than the general election, something is clearly up. The British should be shamed by the electoral turnout in places like South Africa and Sierra Leone, where queues stretch round the block, and people need to bring water and small picnics to sustain them through the hours of waiting, and where voters, in between joining the queue and marking their cross, have been known to get married and divorced and give birth to children. (Not all of the above may be strictly true.)

So why are we so averse to politics? Later on in this book well examine some amusing attempts to sex up politics, but for now we need to have a think about why people are so turned off it. Is it because we dont understand it? Is it because the polling booth is a half-mile walk away and EastEnders is on? Or, to misquote poet Adrian Mitchell, do most people ignore most politics because most politics ignores most people?

Some argue that the battle over the centre ground is just not interesting enough, with successive parties watering down their traditional policies in order to make themselves palatable to the electorate. Those who remember the 1980s will know that it was a fiery period for politics in the ThatcherKinnock years, the Left and Right had hardly ever been more polarised. Now that the first decade of the twenty-first century has drawn to a close, though, those old distinctions start to look as if they are no longer applicable, with the two main parties agreeing on so much that the Liberal Democrats seem quite justified in claiming that, in many respects, they offer the radical alternative. Paradoxically, this comes at a time when the media have picked up the baton of a two-party debate again, and so the Lib Dems, with their ratings in the polls looking a little shaky under Nick Clegg, could find themselves squeezed out of the media narrative.

There is also some disengagement between what people vote for and what they get. Nobody actually voted for Tony Blair or for Margaret Thatcher, apart from the few thousand constituents in Sedgefield and Finchley respectively. We all vote for the Member of Parliament who will represent our little corner of the country.

There are 646 constituencies, occasionally messed about with by order of the Boundary Commission, and at a general election or a by-election you go to vote for the member you want to speak up for your area, in theory. The party which gains the most Members is the largest in Parliament and is invited to form a government. Usually (although not always), the party forming the government will have an overall majority, meaning all their MPs add up to more than everybody elses put together.

The atmosphere in the House of Commons, especially during Prime Ministers Questions, is very much like that of the hubbub in a school assembly hall when the headmaster cant keep control. (You are not allowed to call anybody a liar in the House of Commons, but you can get away with almost anything else well have a look at that later on.) The 1980s satire of the Spitting Image sketches, in which unruly MPs threw paper darts and apple cores, sometimes dont seem a huge exaggeration. So the ordinary voter could be forgiven for watching all this and wondering just what effect his or her cross in the box had. If you voted for the person who came second, it does not matter whether they lost by one single vote or 10,000 it seems to count for nothing.