Following the general election on May 6 we will have a new government, and a substantially new parliament. A large proportion of MPs are not standing again. Therefore much of the business of government, the cross-party working which, un-newsworthy though it is, constitutes the bulk of parliamentary business, the careful examination of new legislation in committee, will be in the hands of new people with little experience of working together. The effect this will have on the quality of legislation will be enormous. I for one wouldn't know how to predict it, except to say that a lot of mistakes will be made at the outset. What I can imagine is that there will be a number of wild imaginative ideas making it onto the statute books. This could be the best thing for British politics in years—or the worst. The British National Party may win far more seats than it merits. The Young Turks of the Conservatives may find that they are in sufficient numbers to mount an attack on the existing structures of society, as happened under Thatcher. The National Health Service is, as Winston Churchill described London during the Second World War, a tethered cow at the mercy of predators.
A lot of young people will be voting who haven't voted before. I hope they realise that at this election they will command as much power for beneficial ends as they may ever enjoy again in their lives. But maybe they see Parliament as an outmoded institution, as fit for scorn as last year's cell phone. They have at their hands new electronic structures of mass communication which nobody has properly exploited yet, with the possible exception of the Chinese honker unions or Avaaz.org.
The Conservatives have adopted as their slogan: vote for change. That is something they could indeed deliver—though nobody is saying (least of all themselves) that it would be change for the better. The mood of disillusion in the country resembles that in 1963, when the government of Harold Macmillan stood discredited by the personal behaviour of its members. I'm referring to the Profumo affair, in which the then Minister of Defence compromised himself by his philandering habits, revealing state secrets of the most critical nature to the Russians and possibly precipitating the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis. Within months the hippies had moved centrestage from the periphery of public affairs, and within a year or two an era of openness, bizarre spirituality and sexual liberation had totally transformed society. It would be rash to say that this change has been permanent. Quite likely it is only set to last a generation, and we're now into the next generation.
So we may be on the brink of a social revolution, but of quite a different nature to the Swinging Sixties. Society may actually see the passing era of tolerance as having bred the very abuses over which a quarter of the present Parliament are standing down. What might happen instead is that public acceptance, toleration of minorities, reason rather than prejudice governing public affairs, a person's right to live how they choose within the law, all these things could become unfashionable. Instead draconian legislation plus government controls of the most far-reaching nature could become the norm. We could be on the brink of another cold war reign of terror, in which we judge everybody who is not with us to be against us, whatever their actual attitude to us, and active searches will get underway for scapegoats of whatever hue or flavour, the only necessary ingredient being that they must not excite too much sympathy in too many people. Or more precisely, too many people who matter, or who can't be cowed into acquiescence with rampant injustice by real or implied threats.
In the current atmosphere one must therefore applaud Avaaz.org for its excellent attempts at worldwide peacemaking and sweet reason. But how many people will listen?
© 1992, 2009, Clark Nida.
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