Young people are losing faith in democracy.
What a surprise!
Power has been taken out of the hands of ordinary people,
for many, many years by many, many governments
and sucked up to the very top.
Most people rightly feel that they don't have any influence
over the major decisions that affect their lives.
Too often our society seems like it's
more like an oligarchy then a democracy.
A place where billionaires, big businesses and media moguls
can lobotomise politicians to get every whim that they have
turned into policy.
The people in positions of power throughout our society
simply don't care about the voices of ordinary people.
They are quite content to run the country as they have been
for centuries not paying any attention to the lives
of the people over whom they govern.
We've seen this with the way that they've treated
the allegations against them made over the PartyGate scandal.
We've seen the way that Rishi Sunak thinks that he's able to be
chancellor of the exchequer whilst having a green card
and being on track to becoming an American citizen.
And with a wife who is a non-dom who is not paying tax in the UK.
The Conservative attitude towards democracy
is really one in which they hold the people
in some level of contempt.
Whilst also trying to manipulate people,
trying to manipulate the media,
in order to ensure that they're able to hold onto power.
So we've just seen a study that has shown that young British adults have lost faith in democracy
now the headlines about this are all about the way that the right of the tory party has undermined
democracy by doing things like pro-roguing parliament not taking parliamentary conventions
seriously and those things are obviously important and do feed into this problem but this actually
dates back much much longer one of the ways that we can measure people's enthusiasm about democracy
is by looking at statistics around turnout and if you look at voter turnout in elections across
the last kind of several decades you see a really significant trend starting in 1997 because after
that point working-class voters drop out of the electorate at every election more and more
working-class people just decide it's not worth voting why is that well there's a pretty obvious
cause here it's that parties of the left that were supposed to represent working people decided that
it wasn't really up to them to represent the working classes anymore and as they did that
more and more people looked to our political leaders looked to the people who were supposed
to represent them and saw people who were out of touch people who really didn't listen to their
concerns and you just really took their votes for granted and that kind of response of what
has labor ever done for me is something that you see up and down the country and particularly in
those red wall seats that labor has lost and it's something that's repeated over and over again by
young people who don't see their views on climate on housing on inequality represented anywhere in
the political spectrum and the one brief moment when they were there was this onslaught from the
media designed to completely destroy the person who was promoting those ideas so all of these
questions about democracy they are a little bit about institutions but much much more than that
they are about a corrosion in our political discourse they are about the destruction of
the link between political parties and the people that they are supposed to represent
and they are about the complete exclusion of many many people's voices views opinions ideas
from political debate the report also mentioned that one of the reasons people have lost trust
in democracy is that they see private interests as being able to really strongly influence policy
through things like political donations and lobbying the ironic thing is is that up until
recently we had a mass political party one of the first in several decades that was funded
entirely by the contributions of the hundreds of thousands of people who signed up to be part
of that movement the fact that they were so worried about ordinary people being able to
influence the policy process more than lobbying groups vested interests and private businesses
shows that this stuff is really important and shapes what happens within politics more broadly
we saw this over the course of the pandemic when several very senior business leaders were able to
have conversations with senior politicians to lobby for support for their businesses
and the reason that they were able to do this was because they had the ears of the politicians
who were making the decisions the idea that those politicians would have to listen to
ordinary people rather than just big businesses and actually the people that they went to school
and university with is something that the establishment simply won't tolerate what
the establishment was really worried about when jeremy corbyn became leader of the labour party
wasn't actually corbyn himself it was the movement that he championed and represented
they were worried about the fact that jeremy corbyn was accountable to ordinary people that
there are actually there was a point in british history where the average person who was engaged
in a social movement or the labor movement would be able to influence what was going on
within the labour party and therefore within the british state that is not something that
has ever really happened before because working people have been really shut out from most of the
institutions of the state throughout most of its history there was obviously a brief period after
the second world war when the labor movement had a more significant role in shaping state policy
but then with the neoliberal revolution even that avenue was shut down the whole neoliberal shift
that took place in our politics first pushed by thatcher and then taken on enthusiastically by
politicians like tony blair involved really isolating a lot of institutions of the state from
any democratic accountability it involves giving independence to the bank of england to creating
very technocratic ways of organizing society to outsourcing which took a lot of public services
out of the democratic sphere and place them in the hands of private corporations
and now over the last few years we've seen these same politicians say to the electorate over the
vote to leave the european union not we understand why you feel as though you haven't benefited from
integration with europe or why you feel as though politicians haven't listened to you but actually
you were wrong to vote in this way and often just you're stupid which is something that a sentiment
that has been reinforced by many of these liberal politicians when speaking to voters who voted to
leave the european union there's no attempt to actually engage with the way in which liberalism
has created the crisis in which we find ourselves by eclipsing alternatives to the status quo people
want change they know that things aren't working the way they are they want to be able to see real
substantive transformation of society and liberals by kind of foreclosing any alternatives to the way
things work right now have actually forced people to adopting very kind of extreme positions that
advocate a big significant change in society but generally one that aligns with the interest of
the far right and this is a lesson that we have to take from history is that given the choice
between deep rooted socialist transformation of our society that would create general prosperity
that would save the environment and that would make everyone better off or fascism that would
protect capital liberals will always side with the latter kirstarma is by no means immune from
any of these criticisms if you remember the point immediately after when jeremy corbyn was elected
the mainstream media was just ablaze with coverage of how he was going to do kind of stalinist purges
against people on the right of the labour party and corbyn actually ended up being
very conciliatory to other elements of the party who didn't agree with him and who made his life
very very difficult now we have kierstama who is actively pursuing a campaign of trying to crush
the left a purge if we've ever seen it we're seeing tons and tons of amazing activists being
pushed out of the labour party many more leaving in disgust and there is absolutely no coverage of
this in the mainstream media whatsoever completely gone our concerns about stalinist purges when
they are actually being prosecuted by sirkirstama himself against hundreds of thousands of extremely
passionate members who joined the labour party in order to fight for a better society so kirstama's
self-image and the image that he puts out to the media as this just fair lawyer who kind of stands
above the fray is absolutely not true but we aren't getting that picture because the media just
doesn't want to cover the fact that kierstarma is basically on a mission to destroy the left
why is that because the mainstream media wants to see the left destroyed too one thing that
the left and socialists don't struggle with is convincing people that their policies are good the
vast majority of people want to see things like public broadband they want to see the railways
nationalised they want to see massive action on climate breakdown they want to see measures taken
to reduce inequality they want higher taxes on the rich they want more redistribution
all of these policies are incredibly popular as polls have repeatedly shown over and over and over
again so why are the people who put these policies forward consistently vilified by the media well of
course it's because the people in power are deeply threatened by those policies even though they're
popular among the vast majority of people ever since we've had a real functioning democracy where
everyone has been able to vote the ruling classes have used a number of different strategies to try
and disperse working people and prevent them from coming together and presenting a coherent and
collective voice that might actually challenge the institutions that underpin the status quo
at the moment the most powerful tool they have at their disposal is a media that is largely devoid
of left-wing voices and that is controlled by the powerful now i as someone who frequently
goes on the media i'm well aware of the challenges that left-wingers face when we do this
which is why it's so important as well to make sure we're building up alternative media that
can project our message out to the vast majority of people who when that is presented favorably
do actually agree with it the people in positions of power in our society do not care about you they
do not care about the struggles that are being faced by working people that's why we have to
make them care we need to rebuild democracy from the ground up politicians and those at
the top of society are not going to do it for us the most powerful weapon that the
powerful have is making us believe that change is not possible as long as we don't think that
things could be any different it doesn't matter how many amazing policies we have or how many
protests we have the powerful will always be able to dominate discussion because as soon as we bring
a challenge forward they'll just say well that's impossible nice in theory doesn't work in practice
we need to get out there and start showing that our ideas work in practice that means
engaging with communities and starting to build alternatives to capitalism at the grassroots it
means working within the labour movement to bring democracy to those institutions and to challenge
bosses in the workplace we're even seeing these tactics work in the united states the center
of the capitalist world system where workers at starbucks and amazon are after a long long
struggle on the ground finally successfully organizing to hold their employers to account
if they can do it so can we the media is culpable in the war against democracy that's
taking place in this country and deliberately exclude critical issues from discussion and
from coverage that's why it's so important that we support institutions like double down news
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