What the Election isn't About

The topics political parties dare not mention - and the dangerous consequences that follow

The British election campaign, now three long weeks old, is an already-tedious parade of barely distinguishable policy announcements and petty bickering; the staged debates are beyond boring, reminding us only of the sort of superficial point-scoring behaviour we have learned to expect from our political leaders. I have already begun switching off, both literally and figuratively, and I suspect it’s the same for most people. And I’m running for Parliament!

One highlight for me: real people! This weekend I went canvassing in the constituency where I’m standing, Islington South and Finsbury. Our little Green Party team knocked on doors in both run-down council estates and the expensive townhouses of Canonbury. One observation: those who talked to us had a lot to say. They want to be heard. As one man said to me, I just want my representatives to listen.

‘Are you listening?’, he demanded, ‘Then why aren’t you writing it down?’

‘I am!’ I insisted, showing him the notes I had made on my clipboard.

He was very angry. His trust in politicians was rock-bottom, he told me, ‘They’re all liars’. He despised the current government, didn’t think Labour was much better but would vote for them nonetheless in order to ensure the Tories were safely got rid of. Unfortunately for me, he informed me that he would vote Green in every election except the general election.

From a questionnaire pinned to my clipboard, I offered him a menu of policies for him to tell me which were the most important: housing costs, the National Health Service, crime, climate etc.. His answers were predictable. I could tell the list was a turn-off as his eyes started to hunt around. I found the same with other voters I quizzed; some just glazed over. For of course, I was listing the topics that are typically regarded, within ‘the discourse’, as the sort of thing that voters should care about. It’s a short list, and made me wonder what might be missing.

Here are some topics that are un-mentioned in the election campaigns.

The climate emergency - ‘climate’ is a topic, only and rarely mentioned for parties to trumpet their - very similar - policies to get to ‘net zero’. Not one mentions the fact that 60% of climate scientists privately believe that on current trajectories the Earth will warm by 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, within the lifetimes of those being born now. If this happens, billions of people will forced to move in order to escape unsurvivable temperatures. Cities will be inundated. It would be an epic catastrophe.

You would have thought that the possible end of civilisation as we know it would be an important topic for political debate. It is not.

Migration - connected to this is that we can expect unprecedented levels of migration. Global heating is already driving growing flows of refugees. 2023 saw unprecedented numbers of refugees and migrants - 120 million. Over half were climate refugees, according to UNHCR. The massive climate migration is already underway. Rather than talk about this, the main parties focus on their small-bore solutions to the small-bore problem of the few thousand ‘illegal’ migrants crossing the English Channel in little rubber boats (most of whom, by the way, are later assessed as legitimate asylum seekers). They pretend that migration can be limited. In reality, it cannot. The alternative is to let people die in large numbers, a kind of genocide by inaction. Rather than talk about how our society might adapt to such large scale movements of human beings, the political parties talk about how to limit it.

Growth - connected to this is that all the major parties emphasise how their policies will make the economy grow faster. No one mentions that growth is the very cause of the climate emergency. Instead, both major parties hew to the discredited theory of ‘green growth’, that the economy can grow while decarbonising through renewable energy and electric cars, etc. It is in fact not possible to keep growing while reducing carbon emissions to ‘net zero’, so-called ‘absolute decoupling’. The science of this is complicated; I recommend Jason Hickel or Timothée Parrique as your guides. But complicated though it is, there is a simple logic. Unless we completely decarbonise all elements of the supply chain, making material stuff causes carbon emissions as well as consuming ever-diminishing natural resources (a word that implies exploitation, when we should call it nature, or simply forests, oceans, animals). We may emit less carbon per unit of production (‘relative decoupling’) but we are still producing carbon. With current technology, carbon capture is highly unlikely sufficiently to balance those emissions. The answer is to stop growing, or at least to stop the worst carbon-emitting behaviours, like flying, big houses and SUVs (i.e. the emissions of the rich people whose carbon output far outweighs everyone else’s). This is not a marginal or radical position. It is the view of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which represents a consensus of hundreds of climate scientists from around the globe. The IPCC calls this ‘demand reduction’. Jason Hickel calls it ‘degrowth’. I don’t like that term. Kate Raworth, author of ‘Doughnut Economics’, says we should simply stop talking about growth: de-centre growth. I’ll return to this contested topic.

Inequality and Poverty aka human suffering - In Britain, wages are in real terms lower than they were before the financial crash of 2008. 12 million people live in absolute not relative poverty. Neither of the main parties talks about this, primarily I imagine because they don’t intend to do anything about it. Analysis by the Financial Times suggests that indeed the two main parties’ economic plans are more or less identical: no wealth taxes, for instance. In fact, no tax increases at all which, given the state of Britain’s public finances, is the only way to generate funds to mitigate that poverty. Another word you never hear is redistribution. Presumably therefore, but we don’t know because they don’t say, these parties believe in ‘trickle down’ economics, that if we grow the economy, the wealth produced will eventually make its way to the poorest. Evidence shows that this doesn’t in fact happen. As Thomas Piketty demonstrated by looking at data over the last century, wealth redistribution only happens by deliberate government policy, in wartime for instance.

Social decay - loneliness is at an all time high; so are other indicators of social distress. Men have fewer close friends. In 2023, 34% of the population experienced ‘anti-social’ behaviour. Young people - children - are in a crisis of alienation and physical insecurity, demonstrated by the appalling incidence of stabbings of children by other children (today, two 12-year olds were convicted of hacking a young man to death with a machete in Wolverhampton). The Labour Party, which is likely to win the election, says it will ‘crack down’ on anti-social behaviour: this is one of its five ‘pledges’. It doesn’t explain how. There is no discussion of why this behaviour might be occurring. We are left to speculate, for instance that it might, just might, be related to the issue above, or that there may be some deeper explanation for social atomisation and latent violence. Not for discussion.

Political reform - the Labour Party has now said that, if elected, it will not reform the House of Lords in its first term, as it had once promised (it has abandoned many such commitments). The Conservatives do not talk about reform at all. Both selfishly oppose proportional representation because it would threaten their dominant duopoly in British politics. But PR and reform of the House of Lords, a patently illegitimate and ludicrous institution, are in any case paltry steps when compared to the scale of the problem of political disillusionment and non-participation. Membership of political parties is at an all-time low. We can expect that turnout at this election will be less than than two-thirds of those eligible i.e. a little more than half the adult population. The political parties (with some noble exceptions!) offer nothing but more of the same politics, just with a different bunch of politicians. This is claimed to constitute ‘change’. Cynicism is the natural result.

Young people, though often patronised, are not stupid. They see that the fundamental issues that affect - indeed threaten - their future are not being addressed, and that politicians talk at them inauthentically and facilely, partly because they are not addressing those issues, the things that matter most. No one talks about anything transformative or inspiring or exciting. It is therefore little wonder that young people have never been more disillusioned with ‘politics’. Of those eligible, a large proportion do not intend to vote. At the last election, young people voted in fewer numbers than any other age group.

As I say in this just-published interview with The Canary, if there were an anti-politics party, it would probably get the most votes. I would probably vote for it. And this of course is the seam mined by the Far Right, here in Britain personified by Nigel Farage, leader of the so-called Reform Party. He has successfully positioned ‘Reform’ as the anti-establishment party, mainly by claiming that the other parties are avoiding what for him is the most important issue, immigration. But just saying ‘anti-establishment’ is enough to garner support. Brexit (another issue that is barely spoken of) was one consequence of this. In France, young people are turning to Le Pen’s Rassemblement National.

This disenchantment is rising globally, particularly among the young (as shown in this survey). This is nothing less than a crisis in democracy. But it is not to be mentioned in the formulaic tedium of that dismal practice, contemporary politics. Let’s just leave it to the Far Right to talk about and exploit. The consequences are predictable.