We Are All Congress Now

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a human face impotently shouting at another human face, forever. It is said that where America goes, Britain will follow, and looking forward to the next parliament, it might be true. Americans by now are numb to the rather scary fact that they've just endured two of the least effective Congresses in history in a row. Were I a US citizen, I feel I'd be a little perturbed that the central organ of my democracy had just ceased to operate. I'd be more perturbed still that with a Clinton presidency on the horizon and Republican dominance of Congress all but locked in for the next decade, the prospects of any major legislation being passed before I'm well into my thirties are near zero.

The drafters of the Constitution planned on checks and balances, not paralysis. They didn't have a plan for when two equal power blocks became capable of vetoing each other into submission for generations at a time. The last time that happened they had to fight a war, because the best-laid plans of mice and men oft lead to complete slaughter. The British constitution, by virtue of being whatever people decided it was at the time, shouldn't have this problem. It should at least be able to deliver commanding majorities that allow the process of government to go forward - and it has more or less done that since the Second World War.

That's not to say there haven't been minority or simply weak governments before. But in 1929 Labour was on the rise and the Liberals on the decline; it was an accident of timing that at some point there would have to be a three-way split in the vote. In 1974, the only other time before 2010 our system failed to deliver a majority, the weakness of the main parties was due to a moment that combined poor economic times with a briefly resurgent Liberal party, and it was temporarily resolved with another election later the same year, and more satisfactorily resolved with the appearance of Thatcher's winning coalition at the end of that decade.

There is no Thatcher on the horizon for us today, however. Assuming Scotland remains part of the UK, Tony Blair is probably going to be the last person to put together a winning coalition for decades. If the Tories couldn't manage after a massive recession against an unpopular Labour leader with an agreeable-enough leader themselves and the press on their side, when can they? And Labour has nothing to offer to the swing voters who made Blair Prime Minister, either. The Left is hobbled by not quite knowing what it's meant to be doing these days, and infighting, an infinite conveyor belt of career politicians and grassroots despair at capitalism's dominance will hobble its chances in the long term.

That leaves us with the possibility of a long succession of anti's draining votes from these two: anti EU for UKIP, anti UK from the SNP, anti-mainstream from the Greens, anti-the-other-two from the Liberals. The days when either of the two larger parties could attract those voters back to their column are almost certainly now gone. In an era of trade unions and Women's Institutes, there were the kind of large community groupings that could solidify a country around two political poles; in an era of Cold War, there was the sense of a larger ideological battle to pick a side of. Now we live in an era of endless choice and endless individuality. What future can Labour offer us? "Responsible Capitalism?" What the hell is that? And where are the Tories going to find the kind of numbers they'd need to rebuild Thatcher's coalitions?

I don't know if anyone has worked out how they're going to up the numbers voting for them in the long term. The problem is that no one has enough to offer: there's no socialist paradise and very few people actually want the kind of free-market country at the end of the Tory rainbow. This isn't the seventies - we don't need post-imperial resurgence, we don't need to tamp down the unions, we don't need to modernise our economy. What we need is a thousand things, and everyone has their own opinion on them, and the democratic result ends up being shouty incoherence. Even within the big parties there is so much ideological messiness that getting a small majority might end up as a slightly more painful form of paralysis.

So perhaps we are all Congress now. While the Americans suffer from two-party dominance allowing for total gridlock, we are going to suffer total gridlock from multi-party lack of dominance. The end result will be the same. A lost generation with nothing getting done. Nobody passing bold legislation because even a majority government would have to take too big a risk.

Is a lack of bold governance tolerable? We're in a better position than the US - we have a working healthcare system that only has to be funded to continue, and at least gridlock would prevent it from being dismantled. We have a growing inequality problem, as ever, but I don't know how much legislation can do more than tinker at the edges of that. So how about the UK just muddles on for the next couple of decades without its parliament having a great effect on the country it purports to govern?

and on and on and on and

It may be, after all, that by neutralising the power of its democratic representation through not agreeing enough the UK public has given itself some breathing space. We can go home on Thursday knowing that no one can do anything too radical. Apparently this is the most important election in a generation (funny, I remember the last one being that too- generations go so fast these days). But if nothing much is going to change because no one can muster the numbers, then it may be the least. We may not see an important election again for many years. We may just watch as politicians shout at each other, promise to do everything in their power to stop their opponents doing what they propose, and to their great surprise, always succeed.

That would give us a chance to go away and think up some new ways of achieving change. And if we do that, by the time the next winning coalition has been formed, it might look very different, and have community building skills and goals and attitude we haven't yet seen. The power of the people might get its greatest boost from the impotence of its politics.