When the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834, crowds on the other bank of the Thames cheered and jeered as the flames flared. That spirit of popular rejection and irreverence toward the political elite lives on today (June–July 2009). As taxi drivers now pass the House of Commons, its reputation in tatters because of the MPs’ expenses scandal, they shout out to booted and suited types entering the Palace, “Pay it all back, mate.”
In his history of British electioneering, Jon Lawrence has tracked the ebbs and flows of rejection and irreverence by voters and nonvoters toward British politicians and their ways since the middle of the eighteenth century. His tracking does not show a mighty river of democracy flowing on uninterruptedly to greater public participation; rather, its waters snag up against sandbanks and swirl into crosscurrents. In the modern period, Lawrence demonstrates that since the 1960s, the meeting of voters in any significant numbers with politicians during an election has depended on the outcome of turf wars between parties and broadcasters. The parties want the risk-free delivery of favorable publicity; the broadcasters seek critical coverage of topical issues so as to make politicians “accountable.” He argues that the broadcasters set the agenda for the 1966 and 1970 UK general elections and that by the 1990s, with the withering of local campaigning, the broadcasters had the politicians talking to voters in their homes from studios or via direct feeds from outside locations. On their side, politicians sought favorable publicity via private negotiations with broadcasters over control of who is in the studio audience, preagreement on questions, street walkabouts and canvassing surrounded by party faithful, and planted questions and hecklers, all planned and policed by party spin doctors. But while acknowledging their contributions to public participation, Lawrence points out that British broadcasters’ democracy-friendly behavior is on their terms: voters have got to be “newsworthy,” articulate, and diverse by ethnicity and gender; get past vetting by telephonists; ask short questions rather than make arguments; and be subject to time delays in their contributions during phone-ins to weed out those who want to contribute otherwise. In this critique of broadcasters, he is refreshing by pointing to the motes in the eyes of media types who claim to hold the powerful to account in the name of the people. Yet he still gives pole position to them rather than to the people or politicians when it comes to securing “the future of our democracy” (254).
But this is still too much faith in broadcasters. Lawrence has called the “vision” of British public service broadcasters a “strongly paternalist” one (245), and he queries whether even now they “possess sufficient commitment to public participation” in elections (251). Further, if he means “broadcasters” in the narrow sense of program executives, he is cutting out broadcasting journalists. If he is including them, he is squeezing out print journalists. Is he counting in the political bloggers, the citizen journalists? Moreover, broadcasters are paid professionals who, in Britain, either execute the preferences of their commercial masters or enact the interpretation of the public service remit in ways decided by their editors in chief. Lawrence's case is arguable, but if we lived in Berlusconi's Italy, I think we would hesitate to put any faith at all in broadcasters to secure our democracy.
Electing Our Masters starts with the eighteenth-century hustings, when rival candidates stood high up on platforms before voters and nonvoters in towns and country, whipping up support for nomination by a show of hands before voters passed on to openly cast their votes. It was a rough-and-tumble business, rowdy and drunken, with music and marches keeping the gladiatorial atmosphere pumped up. The town of Horsham, Sussex, was reported to be “awash with drink” for the six weeks preceding the election of 1847, and in Beverley, Yorkshire, poll day in 1868 saw “continual fighting in the streets” (31).
Generations of Britons have known about this behavior because they have enjoyed The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens (1837; repr., Oxford, 1988) and, in it, his account of the fictional Eatanswill election, boisterous rather than drunken and violent like both Horsham and Beverley (142–59). They remember the hapless Mr. Potts, toady to his Blue betters; editor of one of the town's two partisan newspapers; and gusher of vacuous, pompous propaganda all over the rotten borough. The townspeople got their public participation in the election by a small minority doing the voting, and the majority enjoying the roughhouse of bands, banter, beer, and bribery. It was not, however, by listening to that early media type Potts that the electoral Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 got through a reluctant Commons. It was Britons’ rejection of and irreverence toward their “betters” at the hustings and in civil campaigns that did the heavy lifting for an expanding franchise. Likewise, it will be voters, probably through interactive media, who break up private, unaccountable deals between politicians and broadcasters to become masters and mistresses of their own electoral participation. Lawrence has written his full, revealing, and very readable history of British electioneering before those Westminster taxi drivers put up two fingers to their “betters” in the Commons. The MPs’ expenses scandal has made British voters more jeering and rejecting of their political class now than at any other time in living memory. Those are very strong emotions to make people vote, independently of whatever access to politicians broadcasters negotiate.
