By Matthew Flinders
The earthquake has happened, the tremors have been felt, party leaders are dealing with the aftershocks and a number of fault-lines in contemporary British and European politics have been exposed. Or have they? Were last month’s European elections really as momentous as many social and political commentators seem to believe?
‘Failure’ is a glib and glum word. Its association with all things ‘political’ has become the dominant narrative of recent decades. Indeed, possibly the only surprising element of the success of the anti-European Union and protest parties last month was that they had not achieved success earlier. The share of the anti-EU and protest parties increased from 164 to 229 seats in the European Parliament (21.4% to 30.5%) and there is no doubt that European politics is set to become more fragile and unpredictable as a result. But surely this phenomenon represents not the failure of politics but the success of politics in the sense that widespread public frustration and concern has led to significant change. Put slightly differently, public opinion has changed the balance of power within the political architecture but without the shedding of blood.
Forgive me for daring to make such an unfashionable argument but there is a second issue relating to the subsequent post-earthquake political ‘settling’ – that is that the fallout needs to remember the turnout. This is a critical point. In many ways the people have not spoken as most of them stayed at home or simply had more interesting things to do with their time. Across Europe the average turnout was 43% and in the United Kingdom this figure was down to 34.2%. The highest was Belgium with 90% turnout with its non-enforced system of compulsory voting. Slovakia was at the bottom of the turnout charts with just 13%, but this fact is in itself critical when placed against the danger that mainstream political parties will over-react towards the vocal minority.
To make such an argument is not in any way undermine the need for the established political parties to listen and change. The rise of UKIP in the UK, the Danish People’s Party in Denmark, the Front National in France, and the Freedom Party in Austria — not to mention the far-left wing parties in the form of SYRIZA in Greece or the Five Star Movement in Italy — signals strong social currants that need to be channeled. The fluidity and energy of this current is reflected in Spain’s new leftist party Podemos [We Can]. This party did not even exist eight weeks ago and yet it now has five seats in the European parliament. Change has undoubtedly occurred but the turnout was low and these parties do not represent a coherent political group, ranging from parties with experience of government through to fringe groups and neo-fascists. They are generally a collection of ‘None-of-the-above’ parties.
Enmity from the post-millennium global economic crisis has catapulted these ‘None-of-the-above’ parties into office. The failure of the economic system created its own political fallout and the reverberations were felt in the recent European elections. If democracy works then the mainstream groups in the European Parliament may well demonstrate that reform is possible and respond to voters; if democracy fails then we’ll be left with a terrible choice between more Europe or no Europe that populist and nationalistic parties will exploit in favor of the latter.
Such gloomy predictions lead me – almost inevitably – to a word about Nigel Farage: the King of the ‘none-of-the-above-party’. My holiday reading last week (Cromer, North Norfolk, very nice due to the town being trapped in a time warp) was Sigmund Freud’s The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious (1905). This is not a funny book but when reading it I could not help but think of King Nigel. He is a joker and for him ‘every pub is a parliament’ but this is both the asset and the problem. His jokes and banter are accessible to everyone and provide a sense of relief or release by opening-up issues that were previously off-limits. For Freud this is the social role and deeper meaning of jokes and humor but the problem for Farage is that he is generally regarded comically rather than seriously. He is a Spitting Image character that does not need a puppet. Although many people may vote for him and his party in what they mistakenly believe to be ‘secondary’ or ‘minor’ elections – they might even do so at the Newark By-election next week – they are far less likely to do so at next year’s General Election.
Matthew Flinders is Founding Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield and also Visiting Distinguished Professor in Governance and Public Policy at Murdoch University, Western Australia. He is the author of Defending Politics (2012).
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By Nigel Young
Following the funeral, the British radio waves are full of Amy Winehouse music. Those of us who learned as teenagers about great women blues and soul singers from listening to the voices of Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith, had no such contemporary singers of our own “Beatles” generation, white or black. The emergence of great new talents in this genre was something remarkable.
What does Simon Blackburn have to say about morality? What does A.C. Grayling think about atheism? Alain de Botton about the aesthetics of architecture? Adrian Moore about infinity? Will Kymlicka about minority rights? For the last three years, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton have challenged some of the world’s leading philosophers to hold forth on their favourite topics for the highly successful Philosophy Bites podcast. Now 25 of these entertaining, personal, and illuminating conversations are presented in print for the first time.
Sticking with the podcast theme, David Edmunds interviewed Nigel Warburton about the book and the podcast, as well as what it’s like to speak to all of these fantastic philosophers. You can hear the interview in the below podcast.
We will also be running a very exciting Twitter competition in conjunction with Waterstone’s around the time of the book’s UK publication, 9 August. Keep an eye on Waterstone’s Twitter feed for further details.
David Edmonds is an award-winning documentary maker for the BBC World Service, and is the author of Wittgenstein’s Poker (with John Eidinow), Bobby Fischer Goes to War, and Rousseau’s Dog. He is currently a Research Associate at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford University and a Contributing Editor for Prospect Magazine.
Nigel Warburton is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the Open University and author of bestselling books Philosophy: The Basics and Philosophy: The Classics. He also recently wrote Free Speech: A Very Short Introduction. He regularly teaches courses on aesthetics at Tate Modern and writes a monthly column ‘Everyday Philosophy’ for Prospect Magazine. He runs several blogs including Virtual Philosopher and Art and Allusion.
Nigel Bradley is a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Westminster in London. This year we published the second edition of his textbook: Marketing Research: Tools and Techniques. This edition explained the value of sample surveys, Audience Response Systems and Word Clouds – three techniques being used to monitor progress in the run up to the election. In the below original post Nigel explains how such techniques are being used.
In this pre-election period television plays a big role. On Sky News, at the bottom of the screen, you will see four colours: red, blue, yellow and grey. These represent Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and other. There are numbers in each colour and these represent the latest survey results of voting intention. Watch carefully and the percentages change. The numbers change because they show results according to Mori, then YouGov, then ICM, then ComRes, then Populus. The results are not “true” because they are samples – the only true result would be a full count. They also differ by agency because the method differs, some are face to face, some by phone and the Internet is also used. Moreover “secret” formulae are used to arrive at a result. Let us just take three results for the Lib Dems: these were 27% for ComRes, 30% for ICM and 32% for Mori. Not a big difference but Mori also had 32% for the Conservatives.
Audience Response Systems
Switch over to ITV News at Ten to find the “Worm”. With tongue in cheek, in my book I call this the ARS, an acronym for Audience Response System. ARS or Forum Voting is becoming more common at workshops, seminars or meetings where respondents are restricted to one room. This restriction in location is important because radio keypads are given to each person attending. The keypads may have buttons to press or a radio dial. The audience is required to “vote”. These responses are then sent to a receiver so results can be immediately collated for display to the researcher or indeed to the audience as a whole. The problem with ARS is that if the sampling is done badly it will make a poor attempt at quantifying what is really a qualitative group discussion. This can be misleading for this election as ARS has been applied to the three debates featuring Gordon Brown, Nick Clegg and David Cameron.
The term Worm has been used because the opinion summary twists and turns across a visual display that depicts the passage of 90 minutes. We have three worms in three colours: red, yellow and blue. ITV use a firm called ComRes who recruit a panel of 20 undecided voters in two key marginal constituencies in Bolton. This was planned for the three live debates.
Not to be outdone BBC News at Ten used Ipsos Mori to recruit 36 undecided voters to watch one of the three leaders, to give their reactions as they watched the debate unfold live.
Word Clouds
Switch over to BBC2 and Newsnight to find Word Clouds. Word clouds are visual representations of the vocabulary used by people i
