My local rugby club recently held a dinner to celebrate it’s 50th anniversary. Had we felt mischievous, we could have all joined the Scottish Greens for a laugh that night. If we’d done that and coordinated our votes for leadership, the co-leaders of the Scottish Greens would currently be novelty candidates from a small local rugby club. We would own the Scottish Greens outright.
Any 650 people in Scotland who coordinated would now have complete control of the party. The minimum to take control would have been a one month membership at £3 for each of them. Complete ownership of the Scottish Greens is worth under £2k. I know people whose television cost more than that.
My estimate remains that you could also have selected every single candidate standing in every single seat for the SNP with say about 3,000 people. Since SNP membership can be had for £1, that would only be £3k to have bought all the MSPs. We spent more on our summer holidays than that.
There is one thing all political parties do which stretches way beyond ideology – they lie about their membership. They all do. Mass membership of political parties is half of what is supposed to give those parties legitimacy, votes being the other. They claim large memberships for the reason of credibility. They all fiddle the figures.
And all of this really, really matters. I am giving you this only to show how fragile participatory politics is in Scotland just now. Putting this all together, in theory I could purchase a parliamentary majority for want of under 4,000 people and spending under £5k. Tell me that isn’t fucked up.
We have been on a long, slow path from the principles that underpin the western system of democracy to the global binfire that we have now. Throughout this, at every stage, the professional political-watchers have missed what is going on. They are obsessed about the court politics of their parliamentary bubbles – the wider democratic situation remains hidden and opaque to them.
In fact they simply don’t value that part of the democratic process. I have lost count of the number of establishment commentators who have dismissed party membership on the basis that the people who join political parties are atypical of the ‘average voter’ and so should be set aside in consideration of what the country needs.
This, for example, was Polly Toynbee’s given reason for why rigging the Labour Party against supporters of Corbyn was a national duty. Britons need saved from people who believe in economic redistribution and it is Keir Starmer who is in touch with the people.
This is a system of government of the people, by the elite, for the elite
So when 800,000 people sign up to support a party led by Corbyn that doesn’t even have a name (which is not much less than three times the membership of the Labour Party under Starmer), that just proves that no-one should vote for them, because it therefore proves that they’re all out of touch with an electorate which the commentators know precisely in every detail.
And every detail tells them that the electorate want Starmer because it is Starmer who really represents what they believe. Well, every detail except for evidence.
This path has been a long and winding one. It’s main staging post was basically the 1990s. I don’t have time to go into this thesis here but in the ‘end of history’ era the idea was that the old era when politics was a contested question was over and so ordinary people could just give up on politics altogether and simply pick the best ‘national manager’ every five years.
It’s biggest advocate was Blair. Thanks for your votes, now off you go and we’ll see you in five years. In fact when Blair lost three million votes between 1997 and 2001 and then another million between 2001 and 2005, his team spun this as a success, as evidence that people were so content which his government they didn’t need to vote for it any more.
This is part of an overwhelming rule in every square inch of UK politics – you must never, ever mention that more people voter for Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 (10,269,051) than voter for Keir Starmer in 2024 (9,708,716). It was the unprecedented collapse in the Tories (who lost more than seven million votes in one electoral cycle) which defined that election, not centrist Labour.
But (and I really want you to dwell on this), in modern politics people do not matter. Politics is wholly transactional. That is how it is meant to work. One group of professional politicians do a trawl of vested interest groups to produce a wish-list of corporate asks and media talking points. The other group does the same. They put that together as a manifesto and then the people can chose.
This is a system of government of the people, by the elite, for the elite. And this is what political commentators have claimed endlessly is the way a democracy should be run. But that is not in any sense the fundamental principle of western democracy but the opposite. Democracy is there not to serve power but to balance power.
If you have money you have power. If you don’t have money you have no power other than democracy. Democracy isn’t meant to work in the interests of money but to balance the interests of the vast majority of the public who don’t have any (not real money, not proper money). That is democracy’s purpose.
But that only works if there is some sort of input from the people of a democracy into the offering that is made through that democracy, and that is not what has happened. Not at all.
That the public feels contempt for politicians is hardly surprising because it’s the only thing left that we’re allowed to feel
In the SNP the leadership is never far away from a briefing with a journalist explaining that its continuing and strenuous efforts to ignore absolutely everything the party membership votes for or believes in is the source of its credibility. It claims that not being democratic is why it is legitimate – again, because ‘activists are mad’.
Likewise in Labour where Blair stripped out democracy, Corbyn tried to put it back so Starmer came and ended it pretty well for good. The Tories don’t listen to their members, they listen to the members of another political party (Reform) – until they get power then they do what they want.
And the Greens? Democratic, but only for those signed up to Patrick Harvie’s interpretation of gender ideology. The number of people forced out of the Greens for not signing up exactly to that ideology is substantial, not because of any democratic vote but because of bullying.
None of this is what is supposed to underpin the whole idea of western democracy. At what point is it supposed to reflect the views of ordinary people? They can’t join a party and have any influence, the parties ignore campaigners unless they’re backed by the Daily Mail and so that’s a waste of time for political influence, and by the time you get to vote it has very little to do with you at all.
So where are the people in our democracy? They’re controlled, excluded, caged, kettled, manipulated, provided misinformation, set against each other, told what is off the agenda before it can ever be on the agenda. We live in a democracy where issues that are highly popular (collective control of energy, land reform, cheaper housing) never, ever, ever get onto the political agenda.
Which is how this death spiral gets going. They exclude us, we get the the message and walk away, they lie that we’re still supporting them and they’re still working for us, we know we’re not and they’re not so we’re turning and throwing things at them from a distance, so they’re finding ways to insulate themselves from us more and more.
And what you end up with is a parliament with a budget of £60bn can be wholly purchased for £5k. That the public feels contempt for politicians is hardly surprising because it’s the only thing left that we’re allowed to feel. We certainly don’t get to feel hope or trust or confidence.
This is going to fall apart – or it already has. At this point in 2025 it is hard to tell if things can get worse or not. But I’m almost certain they can and I’m almost certain that the consequences of this have not fully dawned on our leaders.
After all, they’re now in a two-way conversation with a few hundred people and they’re calling that a democracy. It isn’t, it never was and it will not be again unless we change our politics.