Chapter 6 Promoting genuine democracy
What’s the problem and what needs to change? There has been a long history of initiatives to export British democracy, from the days of Empire through to more recent imperialist ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Back home in Britain, however, there seems to have been rather less confidence in the fabric of British democracy, of late, as politicians have been increasingly concerned with the so-called ‘ democratic deficit’ . The recent referendum on AV was to have provided a technical fix, to revitalise our democratic institutions. But as the results demonstrated, only too clearly, voter turn-out is symptomatic of far more fundamental problems. Why bother to vote for any of the main political parties if they are each offering variations on the neo-liberal theme? Or vote in local elections, if local powers have been stripped away by successive governments? Despite the rhetoric of decentralisation, localism and democratic participation, successive governments have effectively undermined our democratic gains, won in the past through progressive popular struggles. Economic decision-making has been increasingly evidently subjected to the requirements of international finance, from the City of London to the IMF and other multilateral agencies. And far from being helpless spectators, as some writers on the impact of globalisation have argued, (the ‘ There is No Alternative’ syndrome) successive national governments actively promoted this agenda. They have pursued a range of policies that have hollowed out democratic institutions and handed power to unelected bodies, including centralising domestic policies, controlling local authority and NHS expenditure on public services, forcing through privatisation programmes and replacing local democratic accountability - with strengthened accountability to the interests of the private market.60 David Cameron’ s repeatedly re-launched - but still evidently
60 See for example, Peter Latham, The State and Local Government: Towards a new basis for 'local democracy' and the defeat of big business control, (Manifesto Press, 2011); Dexter Whitfield, ‘The Dynamics of Public Sector Transformation’, Soundings, Winter 2010, Issue 46, pp. 99-111.
56 | Building an economy for the people