Though Cowards Flinch

I was approached yesterday on twitter and asked whether or not I had heard of the Give Your Vote campaign. I hadn’t. So I looked into it, and apparently both Time and our own Liberal Conspiracy have covered it. The concept is fairly simple: people in the UK should sign up to pass their vote to someone in one of thee third world countries. They then get texted on election day as to how they should vote and vote accordingly.

As a result of nation-states not having an equal say in global affairs, the democracies of America, Britain, etc are infinitely more powerful than the countries that GYV is attempting to pass our vote to: Ghana, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, symbolic, I suppose, of poverty, climate change and war. One on level, it’s a fair point; our elected officials make decisions that affect people who don’t vote for them – no taxation without representation and all that.

I don’t buy it though, and the reasons for this are as complex and multifarious as the reasons people have got involved with the project. Below, as an attempt to contribute to and publicise a debate I didn’t even know was ongoing, I’ve detailed why I’m not convinced – though I remain open to argument.

If the idea is that we surrender our votes to others, regardless of how they vote, then that contradicts a mission statement of Give Your Vote, which is supposed to be a way of ‘taking action against…global political inequality’, even if they acknowledge that their method of engagement won’t solve such problems. Except that people voting for the Conservatives, Lib-Dems or Labour isn’t necessarily taking action against global political inequality.

In their own ways, these three main parties have furthered that inequality. Moreover, they’re all paid up members of the capitalist club, so regardless of how nice their manifestos sound, they’re actively contributing to that inequality. In order for me to believe that, by surrendering my vote to someone in a foreign country, who will vote for one of these parties, I’m taking action against global political inequality, I have to suspend my own political views.

Obviously I’m not willing to do that, and GYV quite rightly say people who feel they want to vote for their own idea should do so. But the point is, it’s only from the point of view of people who think the three parties represent solutions to global poverty, climate change and war rather than support for the status quo that the whole GYV initiative makes sense. The organisation has political bias built into its method.

This isn’t corrected by including more than three parties either. If anyone votes Tory, for example, it’s still doesn’t count as taking action against global political inequality.

Second, there’s the question of who this sort of politics appeals to, who it is inclusive of.

As the Time article puts it,

“For residents of the U.K., dealing with climate change means accepting a higher price on everything from gasoline to electricity. In crowded, low-lying Bangladesh, it means trying to avoid catastrophic flooding.”

There are two nations; they have divergent interests. By surrendering our vote, we graciously acknowledge the interests of the other nation by sacrificing our own. I contend that this will appeal to well-off liberals who can afford to sacrifice their own interest but not to those of us who can’t.

Just because Brits aren’t facing catastrophic flooding doesn’t mean we have no immediate concerns that are important to our survival and well-being. Most of us have to pay attention to such material concerns.

Most of us will vote on the basis of who is likely to tax us less, or who is more trusted to provide the sort of public services we rely on and so forth. This is a stronger set of motivations than sympathy with the Third World – but the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive, if the correct (anti-capitalist) political interpretations are drawn.

Absent from the GYV set-up is the realisation that the problem goes deeper than a democratic deficit between nations; it goes to the heart of the global economic system and the distribution of wealth within and between nations. Instead GYV permits the ambiguity and potential contradiction between the interests of ‘people’ in the West and people elsewhere, which should actually be aligned by socialist ideas.

In any case, a national election will not fix matters, regardless of what sporadic engagement or attention can be garnered on the part of third world populations or the western media.

It’s also concerning that large swathes of people in the chosen nations will inevitably be excluded. The least enfranchised in Ghana, Afghanistan and Bangladesh are excluded because they are unlikely to own mobile phones. On the other hand, the most apathetic and disengaged in the UK are also not going to be brought into the fold because they’ll never hear about GYV and, if they do, won’t really care.

It might influence some who are disposed to sympathy with the Third World, but who aren’t ‘political’ enough to have made up their own minds or are young enough to be caught up in an idealistic enthusiasm about empowering others. The sort of people who wear Make Poverty History bracelets and think Bono is a hero, worthy of emulation, and that our leaders aren’t just bastards but really did have the interests of the world at heart in their G8 announcements.

I’m sure this is a caricature – and probably an unfair one at that – but on the other hand, having spent time on knocking on doors for a political party, people who when asked say they don’t vote are either very cynical or just don’t care, for whatever reason. It’s a different world to university campuses and coffee shops full of young professionals – and it’s a world that Give Your Vote is unlikely to reach.

Say it did, however. Say it reached as many people as the Make Poverty History campaign. What then? What’s the next step? There isn’t one – and that’s objection number three.

A lot of political commentators from the last fifteen years like to see the era of party politics as being over. Parties can be influenced from outwith by campaign groups that combine the maximum of visibility in the press with a ‘mass’ support – demonstrated by petitions, one-off marches and concerts. It would be easy to see Give Your Vote as part of this trend, since it does not pin its colours to any particular mast.

This is more a commentary on the sad and emaciated state of formerly mass parties than on the potential for pressure groups and single issue politics. My contention is that we’ll get no satisfactory solutions to problems like global inequality until we reverse the decline of mass politics and the consistent engagement of millions of people with organisations that have their hands directly on the levers of power: the trade unions and a workers’ party.

Laurie Penny, in her write up at Liberal Conspiracy, dismisses this objection in the following manner:

Give Your Vote’s impact will remain small, and they will doubtless be dismissed by everyone as a bunch of idealistic, utopian, lunatic do-gooders, which is precisely what they are. But so were the first suffragettes; so were the early civil rights activists; so were the Diggers, the Levellers, and all the weirdos and fringe gangs in this country and elsewhere who dared to dream of a freer, fairer world.

Suffragettes are an excellent example to compare Give Your Vote to: based on stunts with no consistent form of political engagement, the suffragettes were a spectacular political failure. They didn’t exist in a vacuum and there were achievements for women whilst suffragettes campaigned on the issue, but the period was also one in which the entire political order was being contested. So attributing the right to vote to the suffragettes is a bit disingenuous.

In fact, the Labour Party had already gone further in demands for universal suffrage than the WSPU by 1908. By 1917, through the very madness inspired by being a tiny pressure group, controlled by an unelected clique with bright ideas and no accountability, the WSPU destroyed themselves and what meaningfully survived were groups advocating mass engagement through the Labour Party and the Communist Party.

Civil rights activists, on the other hand, were part of a mass organisation that in many instances acted like a political party – regular and mass meetings, a clear political programme from a definite point of view, with well-known legislative demands. They may have started out as isolated kooks, but their relationship to the mass organisations of labour, to the Democratic Party mechanisms and their attitude to organising made them much more than that.

That they didn’t take this to its conclusion is part of the reason the movement fell apart.

These are attitudes nowhere evident in Give Your Vote, nor in many of the other pressure groups that have crossed our paths. For my part, I don’t see a future for this beyond the odd newspaper headline from a gushing columnist or two, infatuated with the thought of a vote beind had by a tiny proportion of the starving millions and reassured that they themselves aren’t being called on to do or advocate anything terribly radical.