IT’S received wisdom that, since the Island’s only formal political party failed outside its heartland areas, the election results can be taken as a rejection by the electorate of party politics itself. I’m unconvinced.
Just because most voters rejected Reform Jersey’s specific vision of bigger government, higher taxes and greater wealth redistribution, to extrapolate that rejection into a wider assumption that any other political party, even if advancing the exact opposite of it, would be similarly rebuffed, risks appearing complacent.
There are several reasons why that wider assumption is flawed. As the independent election observers noted, turnout remained low, despite, significantly, most candidates declaring no party affiliation at all.
It’s arguable that having no clear choice between two or three distinct, competing visions for Jersey’s future is just as much a disincentive to non-voters as those other elements of Jersey’s democratic deficit which the observers also criticised.
The Senatorial hustings in particular could have been deliberately designed to worsen the difficulty of choosing between candidates standing as independents. Dissatisfaction was widely expressed with the unwieldy format, especially with 17 candidates meaning that, in some cases, only a few audience questions were possible.
How much more informed and better-equipped to make choices voters could be if most candidates stood on one of two or three party manifestos advocating discrete policies, rather than individuals’ statements of preferences whose likelihood of actually being implemented if elected they can in no way guarantee and voters can only guess at.
Choosing between candidates essentially selling themselves is made harder by the sheer, cliché-ridden blandness of much campaign literature: the worst recent example of which in particular appeared to have been commissioned with the express purpose of including as many feel-good platitudes as possible, while promising as few specifics as possible, and saying as little as possible that anyone might disagree with.
Political parties are by definition coalitions of individuals whose views, while not identical, are nevertheless sufficiently compatible to let them unite under one banner. We already have a declared one, and an undeclared one. Let’s stop pretending we don’t. It will improve our politics.
