|
|
| |
| |
Date Published: 26/10/2001
Author: David Edwards It’s what big business wants, not voters, that defines elections. Just look at what the papers write, says David Edwards. |
 |
Safe behind the barricades at the recent G8 summit in Genoa, Tony Blair chastised protesters for hindering the work of the ‘free world’. Implicit in his pronouncement was the standard notion that the ‘good guys’ of the West are struggling selflessly to bring the alleged benefits of the modern globalised economy – freedom of expression, association and the right to vote – to the ‘bad guys’ and ‘victims’ of the ‘unfree’ ‘rogue states’, regimes where freedom is but a distant dream glimpsed (and craved) through the portal of Star TV until people, politics and markets are liberated by the munificent West.
These are states such as Cuba, about which historian Jules Benjamin once noted with reference to US arrangements for the country from 1898 onwards: ‘In effect, the Cubans were not to have politics; only elections.’ In their book, Demonstration Elections, Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead describe how elections in the Third World have commonly been employed by colonial and imperialist powers to neutralise opposition, both at home and abroad, ‘by means of a symbolic act’. The logic is simple enough: overwhelming economic and military power ensure that the West is able to employ money, credit, import and export quotas, military intimidation, and other direct or covert interventions, to influence election outcomes.
In the age of global corporate colonialism, however, ‘democratic’ elections in the free world of Bush and Blair increasingly perform a similar ‘demonstration’ function. Today big business uses its vast economic and political leverage to ensure that parties, policies and media coverage conform to the requirements of the globalising corporate agenda. To ensure, in other words, that we do not have politics; only elections.
The first task is to ensure that leading political parties come to represent, in effect, the left and right wings of the one Business Party – thus the convergence of Republicans and Democrats in the United States, and New Labour and Tories in Britain. This destruction of democracy is described by further benign-sounding euphemisms such as ‘modern’ and ‘pragmatic’. (The Independent, for example, explains that these are not ‘times of ideological dispute over the direction of the nation’s affairs. The broad lines of managing a prosperous economy are agreed.’)
The second task is to ensure that debate during the election campaign reflects this stifling of political choice. Thus in the first three weeks of campaigning for the 2001 general election, the communications research centre at Loughborough University found that ‘there has been little sign of real issues’ in media election coverage, where ‘few issues make the news’.
Despite their prominence in the pre-election months, the key topical national issues of rail travel, general transport, BSE and foot and mouth, the environment, defence, local government, housing and employment each comprised fewer than 2 per cent of election themes coded.
Over this same period coverage of the world beyond the UK showed little respect for what really concerned people. Europe was the most covered single issue of all, yet the British public’s apathy on the subject was shown in its damning rejection of the Conservative Party at the polls. However, no time was found to mention New Labour’s ‘ethical foreign policy’ deception, nor to review the non-existent ‘genocide’ used as a pretext for Blair’s bombing of
Serbia, his silence as East Timor burned, nor the suffering inflicted on Iraq. The fact that senior UN diplomats had resigned in September 1998 and
February 2000, describing New Labour’s policy on Iraq ‘genocidal’, was not deemed relevant in judging New Labour’s performance since 1997. What, after all, is the mileage in the two factions of the Business Party discussing human rights issues?
Peter Golding, co-author of the Loughborough University report, argues that the narrow range of representation and debate is standard for modern elections: ‘The pattern in 2001, of very few issues dominating and many areas being largely absent is exactly as it was in 1997 and 1992... Issues such as
social security, housing, the environment and so on are [usually] all but invisible. To explain it you might have to look at news coverage outside election periods, which is also remarkably devoid of regular coverage of many of the issues you list.’
So what does this dramatic denial of meaningful debate mean for the notion that British elections are democratic? ‘Democracy assumes and requires an informed citizenry and I have repeatedly gone on record as saying that in present circumstances the media in the UK fall far short of this.’ In the event, just 52 per cent of the electorate voted, with only 25 per cent voting for New Labour – a result nonetheless described by the media as a ‘landslide’.
Despite the dramatic absence of honest and open debate, the media were of one voice in exhorting voters to take the election seriously, to vote. The Independent dismissed ‘the ballot-spoilers, the miserable anti-democrats’. AC Grayling wrote in the Guardian of the ‘ignorant anti-politics’ promoted by ‘sceptics and idlers’ responsible for ‘betraying the endeavours of history’ – in contradistinction to the idlers and cynics in the press, where there has been ‘little sign of real issues’. Like the Independent, the Guardian assured us ‘There are vitally important issues at stake in this election, and they have been debated in depth.’
While lavishing, on average, 10 times the coverage on the election as on the second most covered story each week, the media found no space to discuss the influence of the growth of corporate power on the modern ‘convergence’ of political parties. Instead it was taken as read that political focus groups meticulously research public opinion so parties can design competing policies to attract the popular vote. The fact that all leading parties regularly fail to offer the public what they want goes unexplained. As Nick Cohen, in a rare departure from the conformist norm, wrote in the Observer:
‘The focus-group organisers’ claim that they are engineers of democracy who objectively record public desire and recommend pragmatic policies which Blair and Hague can sell to the masses. According to the polls the parties are meant to worship, large majorities want the railways renationalised, the state to fund long-term nursing care for the elderly and the private sector to be kept out of the NHS. Yet when the market research tells stories which upset business interests, the populist leaders of the two main parties somehow find the inner strength and sheer bloody guts to be very unpopular indeed.’
Prior to the crucial moment of political change, the 1996 edition of the British Social Attitudes Survey found that contrary to the policies of both major parties, most British people wanted more spending on health, education and social benefits, even if it meant paying more tax. Over 60 per cent favoured ‘tax and spend’. A large proportion of people believed that ‘government should redistribute income from the better-off to the less well-off’. A strong majority believed that ‘big business benefits owners at the expense of workers’. Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times commented that if New Labour were to make ‘even a fraction of the changes in attitude that Tony Blair has promised... UK capitalism will be far more unconstrained than the electorate really desires.’
The implication – that New Labour’s adoption of Tory-style business-friendly policies has effectively disenfranchised much of the electorate, denying what it ‘really desires’ – is all but unmentionable in the press. After decades of a Conservative leaning press, ended by the Murdoch’s Sun transforming into a Labour supporter in 1997, the endorsement in 2001 of New Labour by over 91 per cent of the national daily press went almost without comment. The stifling of debate in the tabloids took the form of diversion, with 77 per cent of front-page leads in the election period in the national tabloids having nothing to do with the election.
Unaware of the irony, journalists mocked the democratic credentials of contemporaneous elections in Iran. Echoing the general derision, Channel 4 declared: ‘The people of Iran are going to the polls today, but as every candidate has had to pledge their allegiance to the Islamic state, there isn’t much choice.’
Of the 35 million Iranians eligible to vote, 83 per cent
did vote, with 77 per cent voting for president Muhammad Khatami – statistics that British politicians would die for.
Speaking of the fact that all Western candidates must, in effect, pledge their allegiance to big business, Gore Vidal nutshells what it means to live in an age of elections without politics: ‘Remember that the country is governed by vast conglomerates, many now so internationalised that there is no way of taxing them, much less punishing them, for buying elections to the Congress so that their lawyers can get them ‘defence’ contracts while exempting them from taxation... When a ruling establishment will not let daylight
in on their workings because they own the media as well as the permanent rental of most of Congress, judiciary and executive, that doesn’t leave much to talk about at election time except sex, the flag, the foetus and, in the good old days, Communism.’
David Edwards is a media analyst and associate director of MediaLens.
|
| |
| Back to articles related to Political |
| |
 |
|
|
|
'contentbuilder is a service provided by etribes Limited - www.communitybuilder.com' |
| |
|
|
