My contention is that we need a policy forum type of political system which will engage all who are interested and that the present sort of mass-voting, politician-showman type of democracy is on its way out. It will certainly reach the end of the road when the present 18 - 30-year old generation reaches middle age and is then followed by another alienated cohort. This decline is likely to stabilise only when the middle-middle and upper-middle classes bother to vote�20-25% of the electorate?�in order to keep their privileges going. This is given support by recent BBC research. (Greg Dyke, below, is the fairly recently appointed Director General of the BBC.)
Here's an extract from an article from today's Daily Telegraph: <<<< CYNICISM IS TURNING OFF THE VIEWERS by Rachel Sylvester Greg Dyke yesterday addressed BBC staff on a television link that was broadcast in the corporation's offices all over Britain. "There is a whole generation which is not engaged in politics," he told them. "The bad election turnout was not an aberration. And our research shows that people think the BBC is as bad as the politicians�it is seen as part of the problem." According to the BBC's research, three times as many 18- to 24-year olds voted in "Pop Idol" as in the general election. Nearly 40% of the television audience switches off as soon as a political programme appears on the box. An overwhelming majority of the population�65%�feels powerless, unable to make a difference to the world they live in and unrepresented by the political process. One anlysis is that Britain has turned into a political land of lotus eaters, full of apathetic sloths with their heads in the clouds. But, in fact, all the evidence points to people being interested as they always were in political issues. They take to the streets to protest about fueld prices, globalisation or Third World debt. They fill their local newspapers about their school and hospital. The problem is with the way in which politics is discussed both by the media and the politicians themselves. The British Social Attitudes Survey has found consistently over the past 15 years that about 30% of the population express a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of interest in politics. The proportion is not huge�but, crucially, it is not diminishing. A recent report on young people�supposedly the most negative group of all�by the Institute for Public Policy Research concluded that they were neither "apathetic" nor "disengaged" from political questions. "Young people are not switched off from the issues, but they are less than enamoured with the way we 'do' politics." Political parties still inhabit an old-fashioned world, in which people go to public meetings, submit motions and need an annual conference as an excuse to go to the seaside. They are like traditional airlines which try to rebrand themselves by painting a few tailfins in ethnic colours, when they need to think of a whole new way of operating�as Ryanair or Easyjet have done. The political media, meanwhile, is caught in a rut of stories about sleaze, personality and spin which makes no real differences to people's lives. . . . . This matters, because research shows that the main problem facing politics is the lack of trust that voters feel for politicians. The current scares over the MMR vaccine [triple-dose innoculation against mumps, measles and rabies] derive mainly from the fact that so many no longer believe what the Government tells them. . . . . >>>> Keith Hudson P.S. To Arthur: The mention of Ryanair and Easyjet above reminds me that after 11 September when they cut airfares to very low levels ($5 or thereabouts!), you expressed an interest as to whether they were going to bankrupt themselves. I have to report that they have now returned to 'normal' pricing�that is, at about 1/3rd of the seat prices of British Airways (still imbued with its old state-owned culture)�and are now buying dozens of new Boeings. BA, in contrast, is in deep trouble. It cannot yet work out how each of its pilots happens to be carrying four times the number of staff and management on his/her head compared with those of R or E. K __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
