One of the conclusions in my previous post here is that political activism is a waste of time. It’s counter-productive. It is a tacit agreement to fight a battle on turf that no-one can win on, unless they are a member of a small, wealthy purposeful group. It’s like playing against twelve men, on an away ground knowing that the referee has been bribed and that your opponent’s squad cost £billions to assemble.

What follows are relatively new arguments. They wouldn’t have made sense ten years ago (though some of us were warning about all of this).

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Most of the left are now united around a belief that that the state has been ‘captured’, and is significantly under the control of …. something. That ‘something’ is something other than the will of the people. This development has been given a number of names (Neoliberalism or Post-Democracy among others—the latter being my preference).

Broadly, this idea rests on an understanding that purposeful groups (who are able to put enough resources into political activity) have gradually redesigned democracy to suit their purposes and they are now able to direct how our taxes are spent while doing the things that Liberal Democracies are supposed to do in a less socially efficient way. By the time we realise that they’re not doing any of these things properly, it may be too late.

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There’s a lot to agree with in Kenan Malik’s short essay on how ‘Liberalism is suffering but democracy is doing just fine’. However, I believe that he is making a couple of very important mistakes here.

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I’d like you to tell me if I’ve missed any snags in this fictional and imaginary scenario?

Read the whole thing here.

A large portion of the people who were in the Labour Party will not be in it shortly.

Some will just leave and drift out of direct participation in political parties.

Some may join the Lib-Dems.

Some MPs may resign the whip and form a new group in parliament?—one which may even mutate into a political party with an infrastructure of its own. If this happens, it’s possible that it would reach some kind of accommodation with the Lib-Dems. This would be an SDP MkII without the fanfare. Or the big hitters.

Who knows?
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It is time to start taking this democratic reformation seriously and understanding it as a permanent feature of our politics. It is also time to look for alternatives to the crude versions of direct democracy that political entrepreneurs are foolishly offering.

Read the whole thing here.

…maybe we need to find a new word for the things that we keep referring to as ‘democracy’. They usually look a lot more like ‘politics’ to me, and politics has been around for thousands of years in which ‘democracy’ was a dirty word.

Maybe its time that we stopped hiding behind the pretence that ‘democracy’ is a contested word and started deciding whether we really want to live in one or not?

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Labour MPs will have to make a calculation; They either accept defeat and walk away, handing all of the assets and the incumbency to their biggest political rivals, or they may decide that they’re not leaving without the sort of fight that will make the surviving party useless to anyone who wanted to use it once they have gone.

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What an awful week this is turning out to be. For perhaps the first time in my life, I’m dreading news bulletins as much as I’ve always dreaded opinion-TV.

Where the BBC’s Question Time has always caused me to snatch up the remote control, now ordinary reportage has the same effect, coloured by this wretched polarising referendum and a wider revolt of the political fanatics from all over Europe and in the US against a more measured and deliberative democracy.

The question that appears to need settling is this: which of the following will lead to a certain catastrophe?

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