The great deception

The reasons for hanging on to your vote at the general election next month are mounting. But surely the most significant is the fact that the electorate is being kept in the dark by a conspiracy of silence by all the major parties capable of forming a government.

How can people vote for parties that are refusing to say what their immediate post-election plans are in relation to cutting the budget deficit? Despite all the squabbles between New Labour, the Tories and Liberal Democrats over national insurance contributions, no one has admitted the truth: that savage reductions in public spending are on the cards.

Leaving aside for the moment whether the deficit ought to be cut as opposed to repudiated, from a capitalist point of view there is no choice. The deficit is close to 12% of the value of annual output (GDP) and similar in size to that of Greece, which is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

The government is forced to borrow on the bond markets to finance the gap between state spending and income – and the cost of this is rising. Currently, the Treasury is charged about 4% on borrowing and this is expected to rise to 5% this year. Interest payments alone are running at over £40 billion a year – adding to the total debt every day.

Jonathan Loynes, chief European economist at Capital Economics, is typical of City observers in noting after last month’s budget that “the current plans to halve the deficit over the next four years rely both on spending cuts which have not yet been properly detailed, and on almost certainly over-optimistic projections for the economy”.

His view that “the momentous task of tackling the UK's fiscal crisis will get under way after the election – and it's going to hurt" (my emphasis) is self-evidently true. But as that is the case, how can people actually take part in the election? Why should they vote when the major parties are effectively lying about what’s to come?

After all, you wouldn’t buy a car or a fridge or even a pint of milk without making some sort of check, would you? If you knew the milk was off, you wouldn’t buy it. So how can voters be expected to “buy in” to what’s on offer when the information on the label is pure fiction?

The great deception is what this election will be known for, therefore. And it is all part and parcel of the great wipe-out of democracy, where corruption and the big lie have undermined not just the significance of the right to vote but eaten into the very heart of the capitalist political system. Which is another good reason – perhaps the most important of them all – to hang on to your vote.

To those who say we have to use our vote because people died fighting for it, we say that their sacrifice was not made so that we could participate in a charade. The plot of the major parties is actually to steal our votes. Let’s not give them that opportunity.

We have to open a campaign that challenges the right of the political elites to impose the burden of a crisis created by their complicity with financial and economic powers on to the backs of ordinary people. That means withholding our vote, denying them a mandate to make draconian cuts. At the same time we favour building support for People’s Assemblies that would find ways to reorganise the economy and state finances along lines that benefit the majority instead of the privileged few.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

How to make the right to vote count

May Day is international workers’ day, when the labour movement celebrates its social and economic achievements. Winning the right to vote is undoubtedly one of the landmark successes in the history of workers’ struggles against the employing classes and the state. So it is more than a little ironic that May Day in England and Wales coincides with local elections which the majority of the electorate will simply boycott.

There are a number of reasons why voters are increasingly disillusioned with the political process and decline to use their vote, which is a right they rightly cherish alongside the right to vote. In the case of local government elections, the councils involved have little independent power. Where once councils could raise funds locally and decide their own priorities – a principle established in Elizabethan times – today they are tightly constrained by spending and policy decisions made in Whitehall. In effect, they are the agencies of central government. This constitutional change was carried through by the Tories in the 1980s and has been reinforced by New Labour since 1997.

Furthermore, there is little to distinguish the mainstream political parties one from the other. So when it comes to real choice at the ballot box, there is not much on offer. This is reflected in low turnout at elections and a general disdain for politicians and parties, who have generally lost substantial numbers of members and in the case of New Labour hardly exist as a campaigning force. Many voters, understandably, feel disenfranchised by the way the system has evolved into a kind of mush of managerial “politics”, with the parties converging and competing for the privilege of managing the state in favour of corporate and financial interests.

Where new institutions have come into existence like the Mayor in London, they were created in an autocratic style around personalities who exercise enormous power with little oversight or accountability. During the campaign for Mayor, incumbent Ken Livingstone – trying hard not to be seen as the New Labour candidate that he is - and main challenger Boris Johnson, a populist right-wing Tory, spent time stealing each other’s policies and promising everything to everyone, including police officers in every school. It was not a contest to warm the political heart or drive you to the ballot box.

The democratic side of the British parliamentary state has to all intents been “hollowed out”, to borrow an expression used by Al Gore to describe what has happened in America. It is a state that, in any case, is incapable of tackling the major issues like climate change, inequality or even housing supply. As a consequence, the hard-won right to vote has lost what modest power it once had in terms of influencing what happens in public life. The words of the 17th century Leveller Richard Overton, who was on the left-wing of the English Revolution, are worth recalling in this regard. He was a great pamphleteer and in 1646, during the first of two Civil Wars between parliament and the Charles I, issued a warning to those who had failed to represent the people’s interests:

“We are well assured yet cannot forget, that the cause of our choosing you to be Parliament-men was to deliver us from all kind of bondage and to preserve the commonwealth in peace and happiness. For effecting whereof we possessed you with that same power that was in ourselves to have done the same; for we might justly have done it ourselves without you if we had thought it convenient …” (“A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens”).


More than 350 years later, to echo and paraphrase Overton, it is time to justly do it ourselves and sweep away the farce that passes itself off as democracy in favour of genuine people’s power in an entirely new and liberating constitutional settlement. That would give a new, concrete meaning to the right to vote.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor