As befits a comedian, Russell Brand has always seemed to me essentially a joke figure. Surprisingly, other people seem to be taking his ideas seriously. He's been on Question Time, been interviewed by Paxo on Newsnight, guest-edited an edition of the New Statesman and now has been given a full page article in the Grauniad.
Essentially Brand's argument is that the main political parties don't represent the views of ordinary people. They are in hock to the City and in any event are run by the pusillanimous and the corrupt. Democracy isn't working. We need to send a signal to politicians, and we can start by refusing to vote.
So far so sixth-form. But is he right about any of it?
First of all Brand is wrong to say that parties don't represent ordinary people. Actually a whole industry has grown up to inform politicians what ordinary people are thinking. Polling gurus read the runes and tell the parties what the man in the street is concerned about. The parties may be slow to react, but react they do.
For example, the number one issue which concerns the British - rightly or wrongly - is immigration. Poll after poll shows this to be true. For years both parties - but particularly Labour - ignored the issue, hence the apparently irresistible rise of the EDL and UKIP. The main parties have now responded; there isn't much they can do about the issue (our right to control our own borders has been largely ceded to the EU) but their policies have changed in so far as it is within their power to do so.
That's the way that two-party politics works. Labour and Conservative may be superficially the same old parties, but they do alter over time. The Labour party of Michael Foot was a different beast from the same party under Kinnock; it changed again under Tony Blair, and it's changing again under man-of-principle Ed Miliband. The same is true for the Tories.
So Brand's contention that the parties don't represent ordinary people seems unlikely to be true, because if there was something British voter were desperately concerned about the focus groups would be telling the pollsters, and the pollsters would be telling their political paymasters.
I think what Russell Brand means is that the parties don't represent him. That seems inevitable given that he has been given space in the press precisely because his views aren't mainstream.
Democracy's flaw is that to work well electorates should be intelligent and well informed. Ours isn't, and no-one exemplifies this better than Brand himself. I'm willing to believe he's an intelligent guy - he writes beautifully - but like many people who have other things to preoccupy them than the tedious detail of politics and economics, he doesn't actually know very much. Judging from his article in the Guardian today, his knowledge of what caused the financial crash and continues to impede economic growth is absolutely minimal.
I wonder whether, if you asked him, he would be able to tell you, without looking it up, what our debt to GDP ratio was currently, what Britain's current deficit was, how many years out of the last 50 we have run a surplus, when that was and why it happened, what activity the bankers were engaged in which enabled them to make so much money, how many jobs the City of London supports, how much tax revenue and foreign investment it brings in, why Alastair Darling had no choice but to bail out the banks, what the Glass Steagall Act was and why it was repealed, or what was distinctive about the period 1993 to 2008.
My guess would be that Brand would know no more than one or two of these things at most. And yet he thinks he knows better than everyone else what's wrong with our economy. That's democracy in a nutshell. It gives people who know next to nothing the same electoral influence as those who take an obsessive interest in politics. And that's as it should be. You can't have enfranchisement tests.
Ah, Brand might say, but hardly anyone else knows these things either; and he'd be right. And that's why we are wrong to complain about our politicians - they are the product of our own apathy and ignorance.
As for not voting, Brand is welcome to it. The fewer people vote, the more my vote counts for. His brand of Trustafarianism sounds to the outsider like the whining of a disappointed narcissist. I was going to suggest that he take a good look at himself in the mirror. But he's probably doing that anyway.
P.S. It occurred to me after writing this that the most plausible argument that our society needs sweeping away and starting anew is that so many people in it think Brand's arguments warrant attention. I guess I'm as guilty as anyone.
