Alternative Editorial: New Parties Are A Tricky Solution
By Pat Kane
Strange to be in the battleground of this UK General Election, while holding an essential scepticism about the current culture and structure of party politics. The best this stance can afford is some lateral insights, gleaned from readings or observations found beyond the central contest.
For instance, despite all the Punch and Judy of the electoral stage, a continuous sucking sound can be heard underneath - which is the accelerating loss of voters’ trust in official politics and politicians.
The doyen of pollsters, the University of Strathclyde’s John Curtice, recently reported from the latest British Social Attitudes survey.
On the question of believing that “British governments of any party…put the needs of the country above the interests of their own political party”—which has been asked for the last 30 years—the current percentage of “almost never” is 45%. That’s the highest ever, up sharply from 34% in 2019.
These findings no doubt explain the Labour Party’s current slogan, “Country first, party second”. Another consequence seems to be a renewed appetite for constitutional change. Curtice writes:
A record 53% say that we should change the voting system used to elect the House of Commons so that smaller political parties “get a fair share of MPs”.
Just under half (49%), more than at any point in the last 25 years, now support some form of devolution for England, either through regional assemblies or an English parliament. In both cases, support is markedly higher among those with low levels of trust and confidence.
Add to that our blog this week covering the Reuters Journalism Institute’s most recent report, in which “almost four in 10 (39%) people worldwide said they sometimes or often actively avoid the news, compared with 29% in 2017.”
Their key responses were that the news was “depressing, relentless and boring”. The report’s author Nic Newman made a wise point: “Those choosing to selectively avoid the news often do so because they feel powerless… These are people who feel they have no agency over massive things that are happening in the world.”
In a year where nearly half of the global population is participating in elections, let’s come back to those trust numbers in 2025’s Reuters report. But in any case, the sight of populaces significantly distrusting both political representatives, and the news media that convey their message and missions, opens up both possibilities and dangers.
One opening is, predictably, for new “anti-political” political parties. They perpetually indict the failures of the existing establishment, and promise a “clean sweep” of their sclerosis or even corruption.
Their promise to do things differently needn’t mean more participation. Reform UK—currently matching the Tory party for poll numbers and thus ensuring their oblivion—is in fact a private limited company, and not a democratically-structured organisation. It explains the ease whereby Farage, as a significant shareholder in the Reform company, was able to assume its leadership recently.
Ex-Tory advisor Dominic Cummings, who has been publicly musing about his “Start-Up Party” for nearly a year now, believes it needs to be “a coalition between a new elite [technologists, entrepreneurs and public servants] and a subset of normal voters”.
But again, like Reform, the party is more of an “enterprise” meticulously planned by Cummings and his strategists, than any kind of organic or emergent movement. Its popular drivers are intended to be frustration or resentment with the coming Starmer era. Political entrepreneurship is the lens through which change is pursued.
Yet it’s not so easy to stamp this as some looming populist right-wing project, fuelled by dark money forces and supporting significant advances in the recent European elections.
In Germany, I have been tracking the fortunes of BSW (Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht). The party only formed itself on 8th January 2024, and achieved 6% of the vote in the European Parliament elections. (In some eastern German states, which are strongholds of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), the BSW took a comfortable third place on as much as 15%.).
Wagenknecht used to be the super-articulate leader of Die Linke (the Left), but left the party to set up a vehicle that seeks to restore German neutrality in matters of war (seeking negotiations with Putin over Ukraine); accord with popular anxieties around immigration; and restore the strength of the country’s mittelstand (small business sector).
Her interview in the current New Left Review displays Wagenknecht to be a classic political entrepreneur. She sees that there is a constituency of Germans who don’t want to support the intolerance or vindictive tone of the Alternative for Germany party—but who do want their insecurities about the increasing turbulence of their lives to be assuaged.
However, is the creation of a new political party the right way to answer such elemental anxieties about one’s basic security in an accelerating world?
Formally, BSW is pretty conventional: the charismatic leader, the battle of slogans in the media space, the canvassing efforts and delegate structures… Are these really the delivery mechanisms for strengthening popular agency and purpose, in today’s world? When there is so much recorded and rising ennui about their effectiveness?
We recently ran a piece from anarchist Carne Ross, who is standing as a parliamentary candidate in Islington South for the Green Party. His awkwardness in the position is hugely illuminating.
“I do not like the current political or economic system; I think it denies us our freedom, impoverishes us and is destroying the planet”, Ross writes.
“It punishes the most vulnerable - the poor, the disabled - worst of all. It has made our society ugly. I am not endorsing the system by seeking election. Indeed, the primary reason I’m running is to draw attention to the system’s deficits and point to possible solutions.”
The sheer perversity of Westminster’s first-past-the-post electoral system makes Ross’s endeavour seem much more like an opportunity for educating voters about social anarchism, than a credible political bid.
And no matter the size of the coming Labour electoral majority, it’s extremely unlikely they’ll countenance any move towards proportional representation and electoral reform. Political regimes rarely give up that kind of executive power.
Yet occasionally, they do - and it happened on these islands. it was fascinating to hear, last week, about the cultural and social preconditions that led to proportional voting systems being adopted for the Scottish Parliament.
This stems from research being done by a long-standing political advisor to the SNP and other independence-supporting organisations, Stephen Noon, for his PhD at Edinburgh University’s School of Divinity. As he puts it, Noon is “looking at the hope/expectation of a ‘new politics’ in Scotland that came with devolution”.
On his Substack site, he tells us the Canadian Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan is his intellectual compass:
For Lonergan, societal progress is more likely when we are attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible – open to the range of questions and perspectives that will bring new insights and open up new horizons”, Noon writes. “Decline comes if we are tribal, short-term in our outlook, and avoid the difficult questions.”
It is my belief that the more consensual politics that was the hope of devolution is more likely to lead to progress than an either/or, them/us politics (whether that politics manifests itself in the binary of Westminster or aspects of the binary that is the current Scottish constitutional debate).
In Noon’s version of events, the spirit that animated the Scottish Constitutional Convention (a civic initiative which prepared the way for 1997’s vote on devolution for Scotland) was about “relationships, self-transcendence, and transformation”.
How else, he argues, could a Labour Party allow the end of its own dominance in Scottish political life, by endorsing PR and opening up the possibility of coalition, or other governments?
Noon muses:
I am struck by the way the processes that were adopted for decision and deliberation [by those in the Convention]– the consensual, respectful, all-of-us-together approach and attitude – became so important to the participants understanding of what it was they wished to achieve with devolution.
They wanted the same sort of politics they had experienced in the Convention to be part of the way the new parliament worked and they state this explicitly. They had experienced something significant and life giving, even if sometimes messy or imperfect, and they wanted to share it, to see it grow. That, for me, is exactly the fruitfulness that suggests the presence of love.
Shock horror - the L word! And made relevant to a convening of the usual suspects! But as party zombies stagger around our public landscape at the moment, we would do well to remember that it’s possible for different emotions and motivations to found our politics (other than, that is, fear, anger and anxiety).
We run the categories “Socio-Politics”, “Democratic Innovation”, and “Yes We CAN” on this site, because the components of a much better political system (indeed, a parallel polis) are everywhere visible and actual.
Hands in front of your face, as we head for July 4th? Understandable. But move a few fingers, and a new reality of power and agency is discernable.