Positive Engagement

On online voting and political engagement...

The House of Commons Speaker John Bercow this week announced plans to investigate the possibility of introducing online voting as a means of boosting engagement in politics here in the UK. His assertion that ‘What we are talking about here is nothing less than a Parliament version 2.0.’ is as cringey as reading the attempts of anyone over the age of 18 to use textspeak, but the sentiment is admirable. Turnout at the last three general elections was 59.4%, 61.4% and 65.1% having remained above 71% for all previous elections back to 1922.¹ Hansard’s 10^th Audit of Political Engagement found that: ‘Just 41% of the public now say that in the event of an immediate general election they would be certain to vote – a decline of seven percentage points in a year and the lowest level in the debate of the Audit. Twenty percent of people say they are certain not to vote.’ Clearly something needs to be done to get people back to the ballot box.

Would the introduction of online voting work? In Estonia, the only country to try it on a large scale, it has been introduced to what appears to be mixed success. The successful part is that people are engaging with this method of voting – the percentage of online votes in relation to total votes cast rose from 1.9% on introduction in the 2005 local elections to a high of 24.3% in the 2011 parliamentary elections. However, while local election turnout did increase by over 10 percentage points, the effect on overall turnout seems small in general elections – 61.9% and 63.5% in the last two.² Personally I feel that it is still worth pursuing though. At the 2010 election here, hundreds of people were unable to vote due to excessive queuing at polling stations (a very British political problem), and surely the introduction of online voting could help reduce the chances of that happening again. Those going along to vote in the late evening and being turned away were likely doing so after work and/or childcare commitments, but if they had been able to cast their vote earlier in the day sitting in their office or at home the problem may never have arisen. While it seems like trivialisation, it could also be argued that with the current culture of TV reality shows in which voting plays a part, millions are in the habit of voting for things from home, so extending this to politics could capture another large market that might not otherwise bother going out to a polling station.

Some might argue that this is quite an age-specific issue; of course it’s true that younger generations are bigger users of technology. In the last Estonian general election there was a 60-40 split in i-voters between those under and over 45, so maybe not as big a gap as might have been expected. But if youngsters are bigger users of technology then giving them the chance to vote online in theory will increase the chances that they will actually participate. Hansard found that in the event of an immediate election ‘just 12% [of young people] are certain to vote, down from 30% two years ago.’ ³ Offering easier methods of voting can only help in reclaiming some of these potentially lost votes, but I think there are wider issues of engagement to be addressed.

The simple fact is that many, many people are massively turned off by politics at the moment, but at least we have recently seen people starting to debate why. One of the key political battles of this year was fought not at the despatch box, but in the pages of the New Statesman, and not by politicians, but by the comedians Russell Brand and Robert Webb. Both had valid points. Brand’s call for revolution was flamboyantly OTT – the more cynical among us might point out that his increasingly vocal right-on messianic posturing in the media this year has been very well timed to coincide with his new Messiah Complex tour and accompanying merchandise – but his assertion that people are completely bored and disenfranchised by the current political order is quite correct. Indeed Hansard back this up, finding that while slightly less people are satisfied with how well politicians are doing their jobs, ‘this has not been accompanied by an increase in dissatisfaction with MPs; more people than ever are simply ambivalent – they express no opinion one way or the other’.³ I share Webb’s view that Brand was wrong to encourage people not to vote. His opinion is that not voting ‘...just gives politicians the green light to neglect the concerns of young people because they’ve been relieved of the responsibility of courting their vote.’ ⁴

So how to engage this increasingly lost generation? I feel there has to be a fairly seismic shift in the way politicians present themselves and how politics in general is presented to us, the voting public. Webb wrote: ‘[Politicians] are not all the same. “They’re all the same” is what reactionaries love to hear. It leaves the status quo serenely untroubled, it cedes the floor to the easy answers of Ukip and the Daily Mail.’⁴ But for me they need to do much more to demonstrate to us that they’re not all the same. Personally speaking, it’s the rancid culture of blame that turns me off the most. When I hear from a politician, I don’t want to hear exclusively about the terrible evils of their opponents, I want to know what they are going to do for me and my country. My abiding memory of the 2010 election was a Q&A session Nick Clegg undertook with university students a couple of days before the ballot in which the LibDem leader answered every question (or at least started every answer) with a condemnation of what the Tories had done or were proposing, not what his party could promise these young voters. We all know what happened a few days later, and students in particular have since seen the value of his promises.

The internet and in particular social media is going to become one of the key battlegrounds in future elections. In recent times I have become a much more active user of Twitter, and I’ve found it’s quite a hotbed of political activity. With the number of MPs and commentators now active users, the usual slanging matches seem to have been brought out of the chamber and onto our screens. The likes of the erudite but combative Owen Jones do great things in stirring the pot. A good proportion of it of course will make you want to hurl your laptop off the nearest tall building, with endless back and forth accusations draining the will to live from anyone seeking actual answers. After I likened a set of stats blaming the Tories for an increase in assaults on NHS staff to Harold Wilson’s tongue-in-cheek observation that England only win the football World Cup under a Labour government, I had a brief discussion with Dr Éoin Clarke, online scourge of the coalition, asking for an explanation of how the number of assaults were the Tories’ fault. His responses just contained more anti-Tory rhetoric, and didn’t really answer my question. Those of a Labour persuasion seeking to constantly identify the “lies” of and dismantle every proclamation from the blue side would do well to remember the negative publicity they suffered as a result of not being able to fully deliver all the promises on their notorious election pledge cards. I absolutely will vote in the next election, and while currently undecided there’s a reasonable chance that I might vote Labour, but petty mudslinging of this nature will only serve to put me off.

All in all, I would say yes, we need technological innovations like online voting to mobilise and re-energise British voters to take interest in and engage with British politics, but an image and attitude change to the system (more than a total change of the system itself) is of paramount importance. The country is not in a good way at the moment, and it’s reached the point where we don’t care whose fault it is, we just want to know how it’s going to be fixed and who is going to fix it. We don’t need more finger pointing, and we don’t need Russell Brand’s revolution, just a genuine and concerted campaign of positive politics.

¹ http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/chartists/contemporarycontext/electionturnout/

² http://vvk.ee/voting-methods-in-estonia/engindex/statistics

³ http://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/audit-of-political-engagement-10/

⁴ http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/10/russell-brand-robert-webb-choosing-vote-most-british-kind-revolution-there

Forgotten Fields

On the melancholic beauty of abandoned football pitches...

What is it that attracts us to decay and dereliction? Urban Exploring, or Urbex, is expanding as an interest and is being well documented by its participants. Think about the quantity of images you see of abandoned and dilapidated buildings and installations relative to new and beautiful things. It’s a popular subject of professional photography, a common setting for music videos, an edgy and visually appealing backdrop. This ratio must be significant to say the least. What do you find more evocative and romantic, a photo of a shiny London skyscraper, or a crumbling Scottish castle? There’s something in that sadness, abandonment, ruin, sad but striking; melancholy can be beauty. 

Freelance photographer Simon Bray recognises the appeal, writing that “...as photographers, it’s up to us to document the world around us. In the case of dereliction, it’s important that we capture it while it is still there, to preserve it in time. In the majority of cases, the location will have seen much better days, so in that case, the point of interest is in how and why it has ended up this way.” I would agree that this is the case – the sight of a broken-down building naturally activates our imagination in a way an operational edifice is unlikely to; what happened there? what was it used for? who was there using it? what sounds and smells were present? why was it deserted and allowed to fall into disrepair? In most cases we don’t know, so we invent. Humans are the most curious of creatures; we have to fill any gaps in knowledge, and if we can’t do that with facts, we create a story for ourselves.

For me, it’s not just buildings that pique my interest, but also open spaces and I refer in particular to football pitches. My love (ok, obsession) with the game is such that while out and about absolutely anything related to the game will attract my attention – a set of floodlights glimpsed over or between buildings, an actual stadium, any kind of sports facility. But it isn’t even required to be a well-maintained and in-use amenity; just that flash of a white, perpendicular structure will do it, with net or without. Football happens there in some form, and that’s what makes my heart jump (yes, really, it often jumps). There is another feeling though which is much harder to define, and that is the feeling provoked when I see an abandoned football pitch, somewhere where football used to happen. There is some fantastic imagery out there documenting ‘dead grounds’ – the terraces hidden amongst the trees of Cathkin Park in Glasgow where Third Lanark once played being a particularly striking example. However, because I am only viewing them second-hand they don’t stimulate in me the same feelings I get when I see a disused pitch for real, and I am talking particularly about ones that were never used at anything close to professional level. 

When I see a set of goalposts emerging from an overgrown field, the beauty of dereliction should be there but somehow it is tempered with sadness: this melancholy is not entirely beautiful. But why? Perhaps because unlike with a lot abandoned buildings, you know what happened here, no imagination is required. People played here; it was a place of fun and recreation, and now nobody comes to enjoy it anymore. Why? What made them stop? Was there a club that closed down? Did the local kids grow up and move on, and not have their places filled by a new generation? Could it even be an indication of some societal change in that people simply don’t want to play as much these days? Whatever the reason the sight is sad, to me at least, because people should want to play and use these facilities.

Considering the purely aesthetic appeal of an abandoned pitch though, it should be said that there is at least something of that derelict beauty there. In his book for youngsters, Keeper, Mal Peet captures a delightful description of a pitch in the middle of a jungle slowly being reclaimed by nature: “The woodwork was a silvery grey, and the grain of the wood was open and rough. Weathered, like the timber of old boats left for years on a beach. It shone slightly. The net had the same colour, like cobweb, and thin green plant tendrils grew up the poles that supported it.” ¹ I used this book with a young student during the time I spent teaching English in Italy, and it seems that Italy is a goldmine for such sights. Perhaps this is not surprising given that two things that Italy is particularly famous for are football and old ruins. Sadly I didn’t capture many photos, as I often passed these places on trains, but the images are still there in my mind – goalposts put up between olive groves, at the bottom of cliffs... anywhere where there is a bit of flat ground Italians will try to play football on it. 
 

 

An improvised pitch that I spotted at the foot of the walls of Città Alta, Bergamo

With such a high number of pitches being created it is not surprising then that many get abandoned as people discover better places to play. Thinking this way, maybe seeing a disused pitch should not be such a vision of sadness, but the initial twinge is always still there. On a journey to Naples I saw several overgrown football fields, and of course your eyes are drawn to the goals as the objects that announce the presence of the former playing area. Creeping plants climb the posts, the net and stanchions if present, assimilating the pitch back into nature. One of the pitches I saw on this particular journey had goals that looked so new as to be possibly unused. The posts were brilliant white and the netting was also conspicuously clean, yet the vegetation had already reached the crossbar. This raised even more intrigue: this was obviously a decent facility fairly recently now discarded. Why had it been abandoned? In Italy it’s probably best not to ask. In this case the sadness was infused with a little anger – what a waste of a good ground. 

Whatever all this says about my personal obsession, it cannot be denied that these sights of abandonment are evocative and emotional on some level, and that should be the case for anybody who sees them. Even if you are not a football or sports fan of any kind, you should be able to appreciate the enjoyment it generates, the social aspect, bringing people together. On this basis the unnecessary loss of any pitch should be a cause for sadness, but we can still appreciate the visual appeal of a ground merging back into the landscape from which it was created. Next time you are on a train and spot a lonely set of goalposts being strangled by shrubs, take a moment to imagine the fun that was undoubtedly had there in times past. I know my emotions will always be tweaked by a glimpse of any place where once skills were grown, but now grow only weeds.

    Photo © Copyright Nigel Davies and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence. Available at http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/1481044

¹ Peet, Mal (2003). Keeper, London: Walker Books