Britain's Election: Welcome to No Choice Democracy

British voters go to the polls on Thursday in a general election that promises to be historic – for all the wrong reasons. Firstly, voter turnout threatens to hit a post-Second World War record low. Over the past six decades, the percentage of eligible Britons casting their vote has steadily fallen from 80-70 per cent to around 60 per cent. With public apathy and antipathy towards the three main political parties – the incumbent Labour government, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats – running at all-time highs, there is a real prospect that the British general election of 2010 will see as many citizens forfeiting their democratic right to vote. 

Nick Clegg  Lib.Democratic Leader

Part of the collapse in democratic participation in Britain (as elsewhere) is due to growing public realization that the main parties are “out of touch” in terms of putting forward solutions to address the severe problems facing British society: mounting social misery, unemployment, poverty and debt, both individually and nationally. The budget deficit is estimated to be around £163 billion, which, some commentators say, puts Britain on a par with Greece in terms of its gravity.

This brings us to the second most notable characteristic of the 2010 British election: there is now patently no political choice on offer to voters. The putative essence of western-style parliamentary democracy is that “the people” exercise a choice in selecting a political party based on manifestos of differing ideas and policies. he British non-election of 2010 marks the nadir in western so-called liberal democracy in which “we the people” have pointedly no choice in how our societies are to be run. Because we are all Third Worlders now. Bankrupt politics in hand with bankrupt economics.

One indirect benefit, however, could the widening realization among ordinary people – whether in Britain, the US, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Latvia etc – that a solution to the crisis in the capitalist political economy cannot be found in the present dead-end framework of mainstream parties.

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