Though Cowards Flinch

Negotiations on ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement continue today in South Korea. There are other net outlets which sum up the elements considered for inclusion in the agreement better than I can, and their potential ramifications for internet users, particularly utilizers of open-source technology and file-sharers. People should take note, because the repercussions could be heavy for the man-in-the-street.

What I wanted to focus on was how this particular issue demonstrates the problems confronting people who take an interest in politics when the three major parties (not to mention a host of the smaller ones) are unflinchingly pro-business. By now few people can be unaware that Lord Mandelson has decided to bin the Digital Britain recommendation that people shouldn’t be banned from the internet for ‘copyright infringement’.

This is despite the following conclusion (.pdf) of the All-Party Parliamentary Communications group:

We conclude that much of the problem with illegal sharing of copyrighted material has been caused by the rightsholders, and the music industry in particular, being far too slow in getting their act together and making popular legal alternatives available. We do not believe that disconnecting end users is in the slightest bit consistent with policies that attempt to promote eGovernment, and we recommend that this approach to dealing with illegal file-sharing should not be further considered.

Liberal Democrat leadership tries to have their cake and eat it, by demanding that ISPs do all the leg work in restraining file-sharing so that parliament doesn’t have to cave to the demands of the rights-holders. Only ISPs do. Despite Jeremy Hunt’s opportunistic use of the issue, Tories like John Whittingdale demonstrate precisely where Tory sentiment lies, with business.  And their media counterparts seem to think that being ‘pro’ file sharing means being ‘left wing’ and is synonymous with shop lifting.

So where do people turn to, if they don’t like the idea of data being shared between government departments without those departments informing you, much less if they don’t like the idea of data being shared between national digital copyright enforcement arms proposed in negotiations on ACTA? Sure, there are ‘libertarian’ elements within all three parties which are prepared to stand up and be counted – but as with almost any issue, from parliamentary reform to the war in Iraq, these groups are in a minority.

Instead, people turn to pressure groups, which will lobby the parliamentarians. Which is great; it demonstrates political engagement and might get things done, though this works on the basis that the majority are open to convincing, or the media open to a particular proposed editorial slant. Neither of those things are necessarily true, as the Iraq War demonstrated. Even pressure groups like the Stop the War Coalition, which had the backing of millions, could not sway parliament. This illuminates the deficiencies in the ‘pressure group’ approach.

These deficiencies hold true whether the group is million-strong or merely a body of professional activists, employed by charities or NGOs, to run web and traditional media awareness campaigns, or parliamentary lobbies. In the case of the second group, of course, as I have been arguing elsewhere, I’d say the deficiencies are particularly acute.

Additionally, the issue at stake, and how easily it can be reconciled with the pre-existing interests of MPs (and, one might tentatively venture, the infinitely better paid, better organised corporate process of hosting and seducing parliamentarins). So, for example, approval for the Iraq War on the part of the Conservatives was always assured. Priding themselves on patriotism and a pro-active British foreign policy (which, totally coincidentally, is often in the interests of British capitalism), no amount of lobbying would have secured a Tory no vote.

Anti-war campaigners were hamstrung, as regards parliamentary democracy, because they could not throw their weight to a given party. The issue transcended party lines in that the usual ‘least worst’ option of the Left, the Labour Party, were utterly complicit in going to war.

One solution would be to create a new electoral slate, which is what RESPECT tried to do, on the back of the anti-war movement, but that is never a simple task. Certain parties in parliament will always play their populist card when they can, such as the Lib-Dems over Iraq or the Tories over top-up fees, complicating matters. The problems of RESPECT itself are more complex than this, but the effect of political opportunism on the part of the current political class always tends to undermines moves towards long-term political realignment.

RESPECT failed at its major test; to transform the shock election victory of a rag-tag into a party that could successfully intervene in and address the many issues facing its constituency, which was supposed to be the working class. Other parties haven’t even gotten that far, comprising as they do many contradictions that prevent them from appealing to any single body of  ‘objective’ interests – like the PPUK. Some parties have got a little further before being caught between their own continual populism and their pro-business reality, such as UKIP.

Despite these problems, I think it’s clear that the creation of a long-term, mass political vehicle is the only real way to see change embedded deeply.

Some pressure groups have been lucky in that they have found a pre-existing vehicle, in the way that Charter 88 had the Labour Party, as it swept to an unprecedented majority in 1997. Other groups stand too far outside the pale of ‘mainstream’ debate for this to be their route. And there is where some complications arise; members may have a common stance on a given issue, but have radically different conceptions of wider politics. Where those can’t be contained within a common framework, as perhaps in the Green Party, the new party is unlikely to get off the ground.

If we link this back to ACTA, the consensus of British politicians seems to be that rights-holders are in the right. There is some room for manoeuvre on exactly how to protext copyright, over whether or not people should be ‘cut off’ from the internet, for example. Civil liberties may have to battle corporate demands there, though the ISPs may well be on the side of the former, at least for a while, if it looks like they’ll get saddled with the responsibility for protecting copyright and monitoring and enforcing restrictions on file sharing.

Simple lobbying will not disrupt the consensus, and may not even win the specific debate on civil liberties. I don’t mean this to sound defeatist, and, on the other hand, lobbying may even win in this instance. Yet we stand at something of an impasse, with mass disillusionment in politics, that pressure groups can’t solve, even the minority of pressure groups which push themselves out to engage a mass audience in political participation through demonstration and other showy activities. This is not a viable long term strategy.

Speaking of the long term, there is zero potential for a Digital Rights For All party ever to play a meaningful role in British politics – supporters of digital rights include people like me, a socialist, and my opposites – conservatives, libertarians and so on. For us, digital rights will never be the decisive issue in our politics, and probably never to voters either. So the onus is then on us, the individuals, having decided whereabouts our broader political allegiances lie, having sought to render our views into an intelligible and consistent picture, to join the party of best fit and to campaign within it for the smaller issues.

In turn, even in smaller parties outside the mainstream, this attitude pushes us to be more active on a greater range of issues. It can give us access to a much wider selection of tools than the average pressure group. Or at least it used to. Parliamentary selections, resolutions to branch, CLP, regional and national conferences, access to resources from the communal pool of the wider group and so on. The decline of these tools, the increasing lack of democracy within the three major parties, has pushed people away from this road. Indeed, members of the main political parties seem to be treated as consumers of leadership product, rather than stakeholders in the production process.

This pacification of political activism pushes people towards alternative means of political engagement, but it does not change that these ‘alternative’ means a) cannot have the same effect as what they replace and b) serve, in some ways, to mask the problem of displacement of people from political parties, because, after all, the masters of these pressure groups draw their living from their pursuits as part of the pressure group. I’m grateful that pressure groups continue to keep alive some form of engagement, but equally I think it’s time to supersede them once more.