Everyone says that people have lost faith in politics. Have they? No. Politics has never been more interesting. Politics between 2016 and 2026 has been fascinating. I defy anyone to find a decade of more interest since the 1820s.
The point is not that we have lost faith in politics. The point is that we keep hearing that people have lost faith in politics. And a culture has emerged perpetuating the apparent belief that politics is no good.
But it is false.
The truth is that the British educated elite has lost its faith in (its own) administration and government. It has lost its faith in the system perpetuated since 1945: lost its faith that the system is working to tie the people up in knots in the usual accepted way.
Politics is doing very well nowadays. Everyone laments the seven Prime Ministers since Cameron. I do not. The rapid succession Cameron – May – Johnson – Truss – Sunak – Starmer – Burnham is a sign of good politics. It might, for the ruling class, be a sign of bad administration, bad government, bad gatekeeping or bad management. It is certainly not the sort of thing tyrants like: they like to rule for decades. But it is a sign of good, even great, politics.
Brexit was good for politics.
COVID-19, at first, was very bad for politics. Everyone fell into a slough of manufactured unity. But, in the longer term, it was very good for politics, as everyone realised that the politicians had betrayed
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“Everyone says that people have lost faith in politics. Have they? No. Politics has never been more interesting.”
Electoral Reform Society: This General Election saw the second lowest voter turnout since the universal suffrage in 1928 with only 59.9% of people turning out to vote.
Age groups: 18-24 37% voted, 65+ 73% voted. Labour “landslide” with just 33.7 % of the national vote and 20% of registered voters; it ended up with 411 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons, roughly 63 % of the seats, enough to make Sultan Erdoğan proud.
“Politics between 2016 and 2026 has been fascinating. I defy anyone to find a decade of more interest since the 1820s.”
Definitely not a hard one, 2nd May 1997 to 27th June 2007, when Tony Blair replaced a 1000yr hierarchy based on land, loyalty and duty with a Whitehall Politburo, run by an unelected bunch of Mandarins, Judges, Police Chiefs and quangos.
“The truth is that the British educated elite has lost its faith in (its own) administration and government. It has lost its faith in the system perpetuated since 1945”. Classic generalisation error – “the elites”. The elites of the 40s to 80s are aeons apart from our… Read more »
At the moment the landyard class and their chosen lackeys in Westminster are busily trying to hand power to supranational corporations and bodies including NGOs whilst ensuring they get their kickbacks. They are all running around pretending, or even the very stupid ones thinking, that the future will look much the same as the past. It cannot continue as internal and external social, economic and military pressure builds. I am not sure any current political grouping will survive when it blows up in their faces and who knows what will come after.
Whilst your duly elected Prime Minister takes a well earned two week holiday, the country will be left in the hands of a very capable 39 year old fraudster.
Can’t see how anyone can have a problem with that….
Certainly lost faith in politicians.
Politics is the process and practice of making collective decisions for a society typically involving the exercise, competition for, and distribution of power, authority, and resources.
We don’t have that anymore.
We just have edicts from the ruling elite which we must obey. When was mass immigration, multiculturalism, multi-ethnicity, Net Zero, not actually leaving the EU except technically, same-sex marriage, men “identifying as women”, Covid lockdowns the matter of collective decisions?
Any attempt to join in collective decision-making = Shut up! Far Right! Go to gaol.
Where is power distributed, except exclusively at the top, leaving the demos with none?
Where’s the competition for power, authority, and resources when we have Uniparty and any newcomer like Reform UK must be hounded out of existence and not compete?
We haven’t lost faith in politics, it just isn’t there anymore. We have autocracy, technocratic, Statism.
Your list of issues upon which the electorate was not consulted is really important. It includes those which are arguably having the greatest effect on the UK at the moment but, as you say, we were never consulted, never presented with the alternatives at the ballot box, and never given the opportunity to voice our opinion through a democratic vote. It gives the impression of a system that has been deliberately and surreptitiously rigged to take influence away from the governed and concentrate it in the hands of those who govern (and that’s not just the Government of the day). The people just have to accept being impoverished financially, culturally and in terms of citizens’ rights.
A political system that ignores the will of the people is no longer a democracy, and under those circumstances any political process is mere circus entertainment. Give us a Government with the courage to empower the electorate and maybe politics will be restored.
My first observation is the British educated elite has lost its faith in the people. It happened years ago. They have never forgiven us.
Secondly, I do not agree that greater political anxiety or more opinions demonstrates an un token system. A system which allows so many changes of PM (and therefore political priorities and policies) in such a short number of years and all without a General Election, that is broken.
A system that gave the Labour Party dominance based on the votes of 20% of the electorate is not healthy. A PM who can pack the HoL with cronies is not healthy.
Most significantly, a system that allows government agencies to release confidential information about its opponents to media friends is broken. When governments can use tax payer funds to run psy ops against the people, well that is a broken system.
Effdctive democracy and government do not depend on revolving doors for the self regarding elites but on voter choice and accountability. We had that system but it is broken.
Are the WEF, the EU commission, the Soros dynasty, Bloomberg, Rockefeller, the Gates Foundation “good politics”? Because that’s who’s pulling the strings. Sounds like you’ve been in a coma for the past 20 years.
You’re absolutely right, but, question: how did it happen and how does one reverse it?
I’m not precisely sure. Sustained fearmongering campaigns on the climate (note not actual environmental problems) and disease, pandemics, vaccines etc. The redefining of words as violence. The all encompassing obsession with race & identity – all designed to mobilise & propagandise the ‘feel good’ drones who think & act exclusively on emotion and all designed to achieve power grabs by increments. Our globalist billionaires funding politics though NGOs and various other crooked pathways then pretending they’re the saintly good guys and not the malignant super-rich plutocratic looters they are is the greatest trick they ever pulled off.
It’s been an entertaining season, though some of the actors don’t seem to realise they’re playing a part.
The Uni-Party CONsensus is broken.
The Tory “Broad Church” is broken.
To a significant extent the grip of the MSM propagandists has been broken (but not enough).
Politics isn’t broken. But the country is.
We need “a different politics” to stand a chance of fixing it. The “different politics” is in the process of being created.
The best politics is the kind that doesn’t matter all that much because the politicians don’t really have that much power over too many areas of our lives.
And the worst is when it matters enormously because, like in the world we have today, the state is present in every nook and cranny of our lives, mandating, dictating, providing “guidance”.
I know I’m like a broken record, but can’t we just shrink the state, for all our sakes.
One would need another god to occupy the space.
You can make an argument that the value of politics is a method of judging between competing social claims.
You can also conclude that recent politics did not consider the broad alternative social claims but produced a predictable answer, merely badged blue or red.
And now other social claims are beginning to be available again… Perhaps politics is not broken as a method – it just takes more time than we have been led to expect.
If the entire political system can be, and is, gamed, then it’s broken. End of. No amount of fancy analysis will change that I’m afraid.