The Fast Food Political Party
at 4:59pm on Wednesday, 22nd March 2006
Social and political activism is alive and well, but has nothing to do with political parties or their machinery. The answer, for some, is for political parties to figure out how the single issue campaigns and hugely successful voluntary sector organisations are getting it so right, and then to copy that approach. This feels hugely satisfying as a tactic and leads to a long list on a flipchart of stuff that political parties could do.
But it seems to me that political parties must be more than containers for a collection of modern day consumers seeking the instant satisfaction of getting their issue attended to. As political parties widen their attempts to be that container (by trying to appeal to every interest, every sliver of opinion, every issue), they in turn look fragmented, disconnected and rootless. And all the time their constituencies are shrinking.
What we are seeing is a fragmentation of our social and political concerns into bite-sized chunks appropriate to our poor attention spans and intellectual diet. Such a fragmentation invades our discourse, pollutes our narrative and ends up with lots of really clever people sitting round a table not managing to talk about what political parties are actually for. Call me na�ve, but I thought political parties were about the development and enactment of political ideology (remember that; we used to talk about it a lot in the days before fizzy drinks and fast food).
The reason why people joined political parties (and voted for them) was because parties believed in something: a vision, a worldview, a set of political principles. And when in government we trust them to apply their ideology to the problems we collectively face. We hold them to account on their integrity, not the detail of the action which we were happy to delegate to their judgement. This is why the issue of trust is so central to the health of our political process. Single issue campaigns may have valuable lessons for political parties, but for me at least, they don�t offer a model that can simply be replicated as we try to reverse parties� declining role in our democracy.
Social and political activism is alive and well, but has nothing to do with political parties or their machinery. The answer, for some, is for political parties to figure out how the single issue campaigns and hugely successful voluntary sector organisations are getting it so right, and then to copy that approach. This feels hugely satisfying as a tactic and leads to a long list on a flipchart of stuff that political parties could do.
But it seems to me that political parties must be more than containers for a collection of modern day consumers seeking the instant satisfaction of getting their issue attended to. As political parties widen their attempts to be that container (by trying to appeal to every interest, every sliver of opinion, every issue), they in turn look fragmented, disconnected and rootless. And all the time their constituencies are shrinking.
What we are seeing is a fragmentation of our social and political concerns into bite-sized chunks appropriate to our poor attention spans and intellectual diet. Such a fragmentation invades our discourse, pollutes our narrative and ends up with lots of really clever people sitting round a table not managing to talk about what political parties are actually for. Call me na�ve, but I thought political parties were about the development and enactment of political ideology (remember that; we used to talk about it a lot in the days before fizzy drinks and fast food).
The reason why people joined political parties (and voted for them) was because parties believed in something: a vision, a worldview, a set of political principles. And when in government we trust them to apply their ideology to the problems we collectively face. We hold them to account on their integrity, not the detail of the action which we were happy to delegate to their judgement. This is why the issue of trust is so central to the health of our political process. Single issue campaigns may have valuable lessons for political parties, but for me at least, they don�t offer a model that can simply be replicated as we try to reverse parties� declining role in our democracy.
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