THE METAPHOR BARELY needs spelling out. British parliamentary democracy is itself in a state of malodorous and increasingly alarming over-ripeness. The stench that makes headlines comes from sexual and financial abuses, all the more pungent for having festered for years in shadows. The long-term hazard is a political decay whose symptoms include: party machines with no goal beyond their own survival; donors and lobbyists whose interests trump the nation’s; a disillusioned electorate; and an over-mighty executive (rarely elected by more than a third of eligible voters) whose patronage has become the main driving force of parliamentary politics. These rots have mixed to breed a caste of career politician, more concerned with serving patrons than constituents – and, as a result, increasingly incapable of even feigning sincerity when interacting with the public. There are decent MPs too: selfless public servants who deserve our gratitude. But decay dominates. Government and opposition alike keep their principles close to their chests, and all but their hard-core party loyalists mistrust them for it.
We’ve known all this for years. We’ve known, too, with the apathy of adulthood, that there’s nothing we can do about it – beyond refusing to vote. Yet in that, at least, we were wrong.
In the past decade, a new generation’s digital revolution has gradually given a voice to the hitherto unheard masses. In far-flung tyrannies, old and young have used new technologies to clamour for freedom, with humbling courage and terrifying consequences. In the elderly democracies of the West, empowerment by social media has taken a subtler form. Its long-term effects may be no less far-reaching. Seizing on communication channels that their supposed elders and betters still struggle to master, the ‘nobodies’ who make up most of any Western electorate have gate-crashed their nations’ big discussions. Their contribution to political discourse, once limited to the occasional ‘X’ on a ballot paper, has been rude, vigorous, anarchic – and, recently, spectacularly influential.
We had a taste of it in 2014, when a fire-storm of social media nationalism blew the Scottish independence referendum out of the parliamentary Establishment’s control. By the eve of the vote, shell-shocked leaders of the main parties were reduced to standing shoulder to sagging shoulder, desperately promising the unruly populace whatever it wanted.
That tide turned. Those that followed were not for turning. Their effects included: the slump in support for the big parties in the 2015 general election; the rejection of mainstream candidates in subsequent Labour leadership contests; the roar of pent-up rage against the Brussels-friendly elite that led to the Brexit vote of June 2016; and, not least, the seemingly crazed elevation of Donald Trump – braggart, groper, buffoon, barefaced liar and serial screwer of the little people – to become, seven months later, the most powerful man in the world.
By the time Jeremy Corbyn’s radically populist version of the Labour Party had surged to an unexpectedly respectable 55-seat defeat in the 2017 general election, we had begun to expect electoral cataclysms. (I can easily imagine Corbyn, Leader of the Opposition as I write this, being Prime Minister by the time you read it.) For many of us, though, those first great batterings of the status quo were particularly shocking – and bewildering. The world seemed to be changing too quickly for the eye to follow. We snatched at explanations, barely pausing to examine them. Discomfited commentators pointed to socio-economic causes to which we – that is, they – had paid insufficient attention. It became fashionable to talk of the ‘left-behinds’, or of a gulf between locally rooted ‘somewheres’ and cosmopolitan ‘anywheres’. There was talk, too, of a new post-ra
