The ritual humiliations of elections

The hidden self-degradation of running for parliament...and voting

I am running for Parliament for the Green Party in the General Election of 4 July. I didn’t plan to run. I was asked by the Islington Greens (the constituency where I’m running is Islington South). I like the Greens. They stand for things I believe in like equality (and a wealth tax), better housing, improved public services, devolved government and, of course, urgent action on the climate crisis. For the last few years, I’ve also been the Green Party spokesperson for Global Solidarity, which is essentially the foreign policy portfolio, and I’ve been heavily involved in crafting the party’s positions on prominent international issues like Ukraine and, of course, Gaza. I enjoy it and I like my Green colleagues, including the co-leaders. They’ve been commendably robust on Gaza. We were the first party to call for a ceasefire and in demanding action on war crimes.

But there remains a certain discomfort about standing for election. I’ve had to write little blurbs about how well qualified I am and how impressive my life has been. I’m doing some interviews where similar fakery is encouraged. And of course I’ve been active on social media, mostly Twitter/X. Here, I try not to succumb to the temptation to retweet nice things that people have said about me. If I did succumb, I would become something I don’t want to be, a bragger. There is also considerable temptation to respond to the nasty and abusive tweets that I receive. But not only should one not ‘feed the trolls’ but my responses would likely be ruder than I would be in person. There’s something about interaction on-line that encourages unpleasantness and viciousness. I try to assume, but find it hard to, that the abusive are themselves far nastier online than they would be in the flesh (can you imagine accusing someone of ‘blood libel’ in person?).

I am running for election in a constituency which is the 24th safest Labour seat in the country. The Labour candidate, Emily Thornberry, won 56% of the vote in the 2019 election, even though Labour did terribly overall that year. They are expected to win a thumping victory nationally this year. In 2019, the Green candidate won a little over 4% of the vote. So my chances are not high. Nevertheless I ask for votes, not least because if the Greens do well nationally it will strengthen their voice in Parliament though they are likely to have a handful of MPs at most. I find it vaguely humiliating to ask people to vote for me. I have canvassed in elections before, and I didn’t find it difficult to ask voters to choose the candidate I was campaigning for. But asking for people to vote for me is different and, I find, peculiarly uncomfortable.

Online, I could post lots of tweets about how awful the Conservatives and Labour are and how wonderful are the Greens. And some I do. But before I ran for Parliament I, like I suspect most people, found such declarations unappealing if not actually boring and certainly unconvincing. No one really believes politicians anymore so it seems unwise to act like one. But the pressure is there. Like most things that force us into accepting our unwritten political, economic and social rules (aka ‘the system’), these pressures are subtle and unannounced. They make us behave in ways we would not otherwise choose. We - and I - are diminished by that suasion.

Politicians themselves are of course active collaborators in their own humiliation. They’re not stupid, so they cannot actually believe many of the things they say and yet they say them. My opponent, Emily Thornberry, happily advocated for radically different policies when she supported then Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, in whose shadow cabinet she served. With a straight face, she now with equal enthusiasm endorses the policies of his right-wing successor, Sir Kier Starmer, who himself stood for election as leader on a manifesto of policies which he has now pretty much entirely repudiated. (And there, you’ll see, I have myself succumbed to the petty sirens of partisan politics.)

I try to detect the physical signals in dissimulating politicians, their ‘tells’. I’ve spotted that their eyes sometimes go glassy as they are obliged to say things they do not believe. They have little choice but to do so if they are to serve as a contemporary party politician, where blind loyalty is required to their party regardless of the party leader or, indeed, policies. They too are humiliated by the system, even if they are complicit in it.

And of course this self-degradation reaches its peak at election time with the ludicrous manifesto promises, simplistic lists of ‘pledges’ and prime ministers pretending to slap mortar on bricks in staged ‘photo ops’ and, for his part, the Labour leader literally rolling up his shirt sleeves for the cameras. But at least these two might actually govern. Unless a politician becomes either PM or one of the tiny few with sway over him or her, they are all but powerless too, whether to enact any law let alone ‘change the system’.

But the greatest humiliation is reserved not for the politician but for the voter who is obliged to vote for them. It is the voter who is required to enact the absurdity of placing a single ‘x’ in a box on a ballot paper as their sole act of political participation. This fleeting moment is all they are permitted to have any sway over who rules over them, and that only once every five years. Consider the contrast between the powers government has over you and those you have over them. As Jean-Pierre Proudhon put it,

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished…”

This quote from one of the fathers of anarchism may sound a little extreme, but it is all more or less accurate. One could go further: in its power to wage war, government has power over our very lives and deaths: only government has the right to kill. Meanwhile, our own power over government is a single paltry vote every five years and, let’s be honest, that power is basically nil. If you don’t exercise your vote, it won’t make any difference to the way you are treated by authority. In every election I have voted in, the party I chose did not win. So I have never given my consent to the government. Governing parties in Britain are typically elected by no more than forty percent of voters, who themsleves comprise only two-thirds of the adult population. That makes a fairly small proportion of the total populace (a little over a quarter of all adults in fact).

But your and my consent is assumed as part of the so-called contract with government: that in return for security, we consent to give up our freedoms and abide by government’s laws. This contract is very rarely stated explicitly. I don’t remember ever being asked if I agreed to that contract. In fact, and this reality is barely noted, you are signed up to that contract when your parents are obliged by law to register your birth with the authorities within days of your birth. That’s the extent of your consent.

It is astonishing that this gross restriction on our basic human freedom is so easily assumed. There is no resistance to government’s myriad constraints upon our agency, save occasionally like the anti-vax campaigners who resisted COVID jabs and lock-down (and I am not an anti-vaxxer, sympathetic as I am to those who wish to protect sovereignty over their own bodies). The general election is one symbol of this fundamental powerlessness. And though this motive is only rarely acknowledged, I suspect it lies behind the widespread disillusionment with ‘politics’ and with democracy itself, a rising disenchantment that has been tracked by all sorts of credible indices.

Then add to that the economic constraints that so dominate our lives. When you factor in house prices and the financial pressure of daily existence, combined with the routine humiliations of the contemporary workplace, our bonds are ever tighter. This awesome lack of control over our own circumstances is a subterranean ignominy that we are forced, silently, to bear.

And what happens when people are humiliated? They get angry. In Britain, one outlet for that anger was the otherwise idiotic vote for Brexit: ‘take back control’ as the Brexiteers dishonestly promised (for control only passed from Brussels to Westminster, which is not renowned for its accountability or transparency). One working-class-identifying commentator described the anti-EU vote to me as ‘a big two fingers at the ruling classes’ (that’s one finger for Americans). In the US, Trump and so on and so forth. And in all ‘democratic’ countries, people increasingly hate politicians. I have experienced this myself as I tout for votes. I feel sorry for politicians, for especially female and black politicians are subjected to heinous abuse and threats. Those threats seem to be getting worse, as demonstrated for instance by the murders of British MPs Jo Cox in 2016 (killed by a white supremacist) and Sir David Amess in 2021 (by a religious extremist). Other European countries have witnessed similar. The anger is rising.

When the lack of agency is explicit and unadorned and suffered every day, that anger turns very ugly indeed. I saw this for myself in Kosovo in 2004. The province was at that time governed by the UN, ineptly, despite the fact that Kosovo’s people had elected their own government. Kosovo was in a kind of international limbo as, no longer controlled by Serbia, it was nevertheless not yet a state and no one would say when it might be. When deadly riots swept the province, triggered by the death of some children allegedly at the hands of a Serb (an allegation later disproven), outside journalists and diplomats depicted the violence as another cycle of the ‘ethnic hatred’ that so benights the Balkans. But to those of us who lived through the riots, where eighteen people died, the denial of democratic agency to the people of Kosovo was undoubtedly a major if not the most important factor. Denying agency = violence.

All of this comes to a head at election time and I think explains the discomfort I feel at running for election. I do not like the current political or economic system; I think it denies us our freedom, impoverishes us and is destroying the planet. It punishes the most vulnerable - the poor, the disabled - worst of all. It has made our society ugly. I am not endorsing the system by seeking election. Indeed, the primary reason I’m running is to draw attention to the system’s deficits and point to possible solutions (which I will come to in later posts).

You can sense that something is very wrong. Young people in particular poll as very disenchanted by ‘politics’ and the system: they don’t want to vote for anyone. With impossible housing costs, unaffordable student debt and climate catastrophe, I do not blame them. Indeed, I do not blame anyone for feeling disillusioned. I feel that way myself. But hating politicians does not seem to me to be enough. After all, who is more to blame for this farrago? Them for perpetuating it or us for going along with it?

There will be further posts about my electoral journey.