Could I sell my right to vote?

Image: Meiling

After more than fifty years, I have come to the conclusion that voting makes very little real difference.  The result of every election that I have ever voted in (and yes, I have voted in every one) has been the election of a neoliberal government that favoured tax cuts for the wealthy, privatisation of public services, authoritarian social policy and economic deregulation.  Throughout those fifty-odd years, I have watched the impact of those policies on the vast majority of ordinary people.

On the day I left school, I walked across the road to a nearby building site and asked for a job.  I started work the following day.  On the wages I was paid for doing that job, I had enough money to save for the deposit on a house, and to buy a motorbike for commuting.  Today, if someone followed the same course, they would be unlikely to earn enough money to rent a bedsit.  They would most probably need tax credits to supplement their income.  I escaped the ravages of Thatcherism by going back to college and earning a first class degree in social science.  That was back in the days when our country believed education was important enough to pay for it.  The year I finished university was the year they introduced student loans.  Had I returned to college today, I could expect to leave with debts of more than £50,000 (tuition fees and living costs) that would have to be paid back (with interest) out of an average graduate salary of £24,000.  Where a single wage earner could afford a family life in the late 1970s, today even a two-salary couple are likely to end up living in a parent’s house.

What has this to do with voting?  Well at every election over that period, the various campaigns were all about how much better off we were going to be if we voted for them, and how much worse off we were going to be if we voted for the other lot.  And the truth is that the majority of us ended up worse off anyway – and worse off by a long way.

Since being better off is clearly central to voting intentions, and since politicians of all parties are singularly incapable of delivering rising living standards, I believe I would be better off if I simply sold my right to vote back to the state.  It would be easy enough to do.  The state could offer students a cancellation of their student debt in exchange for their right to vote.  Older people could have their mortgages and other debts written off through a kind of “people’s quantitative easing”.  Those without debts could be provided with an enhanced tax-free pension that they could take after their 55^th birthday.  This would guarantee that we would really be better off.  This would be cash in hand rather than the empty promissory notes of political parties. And we would all benefit by not being subjected to any more tedious “project fear” election campaigns.

What sort of government could we have?  I propose that we go to something akin to the early Victorian system of government in which the majority of us did not have the right to vote.  The unelected Monarch and House of Lords would have primacy.  If we had to have an elected chamber, it would have a largely advisory role with no real powers either to propose or amend legislation.  I would update the system for modern times, of course.  I would not have a hereditary system.  Rather, I would have government by technocrats – the best educated people from the whole range of disciplines; those best placed to decide what policies are best for, frankly, a population that lacks the education to make the correct decisions for ourselves.  This technocratic commission would have the sole right to propose legislation.  This commission would also elect a president from among its ranks to take the role played by monarchs in days gone by.

I would, of course, safeguard some basic human rights in the constitution of this government.  I would give primacy to the rights of private corporations.  I would establish customs rules so that all corporations enjoyed equal access to the marketplace.  In order to do this, I would need to guarantee some basic workers’ rights (such as free movement, basic healthcare, maximum working times and maternity leave) just to ensure that corporations do not engage in a race to the bottom.  I would also enshrine privatisation and flat-rate taxes as an inalienable operating principle of the marketplace.  It would be impossible to nationalise or subsidise industries or businesses even if these are considered essential.  I would also enshrine austerity policies in the constitution so that, in the event of an economic crisis, the default policy will be cuts in wages, benefits and pensions, and public services for ordinary people; together with tax cuts and generous handouts to the rich.

More perceptive readers will have realised at this point that I am proposing that I should be allowed to sell my right to vote in exchange for accepting the system of government in the European Union as it is currently constituted.  My cynical – I would say realistic – point is that the only way your vote is going to make you better off is if you are allowed to sell it.  It doesn’t matter which way you cast a vote – you will be no better off and will most probably end up worse off.  Believing otherwise is merely the triumph of hope over experience.

The current EU referendum campaign is being run by two wings of the Tory party – Project Fear and Project Xenophobe  - both have sold you the lie that the only question to consider is whether you are going to be better off (hint – you are going to be worse off whichever way you vote).  Both campaigns are peddling bullshit.  You are certainly not going to be better off if you vote to leave, whatever UKIP and the Tory right tell you.  But you are not going to be better off if you vote to stay in either – not least because by having the referendum the UK government has given up the negotiating lever that has kept us out of the most disastrous parts of the EU – Schengen and the Eurozone.  If we vote to stay in, it will be much harder to secure any opt-out on these in future.

Just consider for a moment if the UK had taken the advice of institutions like the IMF and OECD and the World Bank, who are now telling us that we have to stay in this EU, when they told us how much better off we would be from joining the Euro.  In 2008, Britain’s debts were far worse than those of Spain, Portugal or Greece.  But because we still had the Pound, first Labour, and then the Coalition, were able to print money and borrow on world markets to avoid an economic catastrophe.  The people of states like Spain and Greece that gave up their currencies have fared very badly.  They have experienced real, full-blown austerity, not the lukewarm “public spending lite” served up to us by George Osborne.

Much of the pro-EU sentiment has focused on how much better off we are going to be and on how the EU protects us in various ways.  But this sentiment tends to come from people in the managerial/salaried class, who really should get out more.  Before you tell anyone how the EU protects our environment, go breathe the air in central London.  Before you tell anyone about how the EU protects workers’ rights, go look at the £1,200 that a dismissed worker has to pay to bring a case at the Employment Tribunal.  Before you tell anyone that the EU has protected you from the right wing nutjobs who the English persistently elect, just consider that the unelected House of Lords has done more to protect you.  And for those Labour supporters who make this case, just consider what is going to happen if that nice Mr Corbyn gets elected on a mandate to re-nationalise the railways, reverse the stealth privatisation of the NHS, save the steel industry and attempt to undo the flat-rate taxes imposed by various Tory chancellors - all of these policies are illegal in EU law… what stops a democratically elected Tory government (we can have a separate discussion about our corrupt electoral system) will equally prevent a democratically elected Labour government from introducing its policies.  Just in case you think the EU would not overturn the policies of an elected government; go look at what they did to Greece after they voted for an anti-austerity government and voted against austerity in a referendum… they got austerity anyway; just as we will get neoliberalism anyway.

Voting to stay in this EU is to sell your right to vote – you are accepting the rule of a state little different to the early Victorian monarchy.  You are doing so solely on the promise of economists (the people who famously exist solely to make astrologers look good) who claim you will be better off.  For my part I would prefer cash in hand.  Voting to leave this EU means accepting that you are going to be worse off – you are making a sacrifice to safeguard your democracy. 

There is no business as usual in this referendum.  We are neither voting for a Britain governed by the current posh boys, nor an EU as it currently operates.  Just as nobody who voted in the 1975 referendum would recognise today’s EU; nobody voting in this referendum will recognise the EU of 2057 (assuming it still exists).  I have written elsewhere about why I believe a combination of environmental, energy and debt crises pretty much guarantee that we are all going to be worse off financially in future irrespective of how we vote.  So for me, the question is which system is best suited for managing economic decline – a parliamentary democracy or an EU technocracy.

I believe there is a very good pro-democracy Lexit (left exit) case to be made.  I am also pretty sure that if Corbyn wasn't surrounded by a Parliamentary Labour Party that wants to depose him, he would be making the case.  But the whole campaign has been hijacked by bullshit Tory/Blairite nonsense on both sides.  In the end, democracy (for all its faults) is the loser.