How the average person killed politics

The ‘moderate centre’ is where almost all politicians think elections are won, yet new research shows that no-one wants moderate parties. The gap between is exactly where democracy has been dying.

Let me tell you a story about a tenants’ association. The close and stairwell that serves 12 flats needs to be repainted, so the tenant association has a vote to decide the colour. When the ballots are counted, six want the close to be painted blue, six want it to be painted yellow. The factor therefore compromises down the middle and paints it green, the perfect solution.

Now let me tell you the story again. A flat on the Southside of Glasgow in the direction of Ibrox is about to be repainted. Half of the crowd are staunch Rangers supporters who want blue. The other half are worried that having such a blatantly football-themed colour scheme that is close to Ibrox will harm their property values. They want an uplifting, football-neutral colour.

The one thing above all that absolutely no one in that crowd wants is green. Half of them are horrified that it is green because of their football allegiance, half of them hate it because they believe the only thing worse for house prices than a football-themed colour scheme on the outskirts of Ibrox is a Celtic-themed colour scheme.

On paper, the factor has come up with the perfect compromise. In the real world, he has produced the absolutely worst possible outcome. The quantitative data and the qualitative data contradicted each other, and the qualitative data was ignored.

Now let me tell you another story – this one is quite fantastical, and you won't believe me. But of those in the US who identify themselves as being personally moderate, only eight per cent of them want a moderate political party. So that's among the moderates. Weirdly, the number is about the same for those who identify as left, liberal and conservative.

There is no category of political identification in this piece of research which wants a moderate centrist party at rates of more than one in ten. That moderates don't want moderate parties is surely remarkable.

What do they want then? Well, how it was tested was via a five-option identification spread. First, you picked how you saw yourself (left, liberal, moderate, conservative), and then you picked what kind of party you wanted. Those had a left, right and centre option, but also two framed not ideologically – an 'affordability' party and an 'anti-system' party.

Here it just gets weirder. There are more than twice as many moderates who want an anti-system party as want a moderate party. Yet anti-system is the absolute opposite of moderate. In fact, 'moderate' is often taken to mean 'small-c conservative', yet if you look at the totals, 73 per cent of moderates want a left, affordability or anti-system party. Only one in five want a conservative party.

A final takeaway from this research – overall (including all voters), just over two out of three want a left, affordability or anti-system party. Fewer than one in three want a conservative or moderate party.

I hope you can see the point in all of this. Humans, like all living things, are creatures of context. Where you want to go and what you want to happen depends not on where (in the abstract) you think a defined position can be found (as in 'I'm a moderate, so it must be in the dead centre') but where you feel your desired destination is from here.

If you are a conservative-minded voter in an authoritarian country, you might well favour a liberal party which you see as a 'corrective'. In your head, you might be saying, 'then once things are righted again, I can vote conservative. Or you could be saying, 'the conservatives have gone too far, we need something else for a while'. Or you might have a totally different story ('now that I've seen...').

So that's what this looks like from down here where we are. What does it look like from up there where they are? They can see 30 per cent to the left, 25 per cent to the right, and another 38 per cent in a category they can't typify. So they paint the close green. (Actually, they paint it mid-grey because they were always going to paint it mid-grey; they just needed a reason.)

I can't get this across enough: what killed politics was data without context interpreted by elites. Why? Because, like most people, elites approach any question with their minds largely made up. Above all, elites do not want an anti-system party, so they drop those from the frame. Those are put down as 'angry non-voters'.

But what about the 21 per cent affordability people? Here, the elites are sorted because they've already got a track record of defining affordability according to their own interests. Remember, this is a group of people who think 'affordable housing' is five times average salary rather than six, and that 'smaller' and 'more affordable' mean the same thing.

Elites have created a system of political science that is designed to always return the result they want, no matter what. So when they see the data above, they conclude, 'Great, so a moderate party that is focused on affordability only needs one in eight conservative voters, and we win. At that point, they believe most of the left have no option but that everyone will be broadly happy.

“We’ve broken democracy by the people, for the people and replaced it with democracy by an elite for an abstract average citizen who doesn’t exist”

Modern political strategy appears capable of averaging any group of people into any predetermined outcome they want, precisely because you can't actually ordinary people. The reality of politics is that politicians are in an extended dialogue with the interests of wealth, and the interests of wealth have become very adept at persuading politicians that their interests and the interests of the public coincide.

No industry is worse for working people than the gambling industry, yet because Labour is intensely close to the gambling lobbyists and was heavily funded by them, Lisa Nandy is reading out propaganda for gambling companies – while pretending she is doing it for working people. In Scotland, John Swinney is talking about helping young people with homes, but what he is actually doing is handing public money straight over to wealthy people and big business.

Quantitative data, which creates abstractions of humanity, can always be averaged out to produce any outcome you want. The politicians believe they are serving 'the average person' when actually they're serving the interests of wealth. To balance it, you need qualitative data. Politics needs to deal not only with abstraction but with the real world.

So how do we get qualitative information into politics? Once again, this may seem odd, but the system used to work quite well. Why? Because politics was represented by mass participation, political parties had something like internal democracy. If politics is by and for ordinary people who happen to join political parties, their experience is qualitative information which helps the party be relevant. Trade unions brought something similar.

If you look at the issues which dominated elections up until the 1990s, you'll find that they were mostly directly relevant to ordinary people. They were about jobs and prices, housing, and public services. Ordinary people were setting the agenda.

Now see if you can remember what Starmer's priorities were when he was getting elected. Need some help? The six 'milestones' were highest sustained growth in the G7, fast-tracking giant infrastructure projects, having nine out of ten patients waiting three months for treatment, more police, more renewable energy and just in case that all made too much sense, three out of four five-year-olds will be 'ready to learn'. (OK, those were actually milestones set out during his first relaunch. The ‘missions’ from his manifesto are even more dreary. But no one can remember any of this stuff anyway.)

I mean, seriously, WFT does any of that really have to do with my day-to-day life? I see how things like 'growth at all costs' and 'fast track planning' are brilliant for big business. But elections didn't used to be about meeting the needs of big business. GDP increases look great from one vantage point, but not if your if yours is getting a motorway through your garden or getting family members addicted to a gambling app.

But for politicians like Starmer, gambling addiction or sharp reductions of quality of life will average out to be a minority issue affecting a few problematic people, and so not a problem they created, but one to get to eventually, not a failure in democracy, a failure to protect, a failure to put people first. But do it enough times on enough issues, and we all turn into ‘problem people’ eventually.

This process of averaging everyone into a middle ground, which almost no one except big commercial interests want is exactly why the direction of travel, even for a moderate, is away from moderation. There is far too much talk of 'polarisation' and not enough focus on how awful centrism has been.

Politics is much, much more broken than even many of those who recognise politics is broken realise. It's not a failure emerging from a system; it's a system which itself is a failure. We've broken democracy by the people, for the people and replaced it with democracy by an elite for an abstract average citizen who doesn't exist (and happens to be very pro-corporation...).

Now, the one thing moderates no longer want is moderation. It is literally their least favourite option, their own 'green close'. Yet literally every warning sign that things are bad turns out to be yet another reason for doing the thing that people hate. The worse things get, the more we're told we need technocrats, the same people who made it worse.

The Scottish Election has been dreadful for the same reason the Starmer administration is dreadful for the same reason Holyrood has been poor for the same reason as France can't keep a prime minister for ten minutes for the same reason that the US is in democratic meltdown.

It is all because real people have been turned into nodes of data in a soup of formulas which have been devised by the very rich and their enablers to make sure that every question gets the same answer all the time – yet looks to gullible politicians like it represents the public. The public keeps pressing different buttons trying to get it to change, but the more they do, the more it all stays the same.

No one wants moderates. It's a weird fringe position held by a small fraction of the public, but is dominant among the elite and most of the politicians, so it is all we get. A crisis in democracy? Is that even democracy any more?