In a small Midlands town at the weekend recently, I saw a stall for NONPOL, the ‘New Open Non-Political Organised Leadership’. This non-party party, whose leader Neil O’Neil won 166 votes in the 2024 General Election, presents party politics as a blight that distracts our leaders from common-sense solutions.
Disregarding the fact that many of these ‘common-sense’ solutions appeared on the flakier fringes of the paranoid right, it reminded me of how I used to rail against the idea of political parties. They made no sense, I thought, they were an impediment to true democracy and freedom of thought (too much classical education, you might say).
I didn’t like first-past-the-post voting either, whereby a party could – as Labour just have – win a huge majority of seats with only a plurality of votes. Monarchies and unelected second chambers I saw as ridiculous throwbacks. The idea of owning land seemed absurd, as did private property more generally. How could individuals lay claim to these things that pre-existed them and would live on for many years after?
All these opinions (and many more) were pretty average for a young person, and all were founded on reasoning from (not unreasonable) first principles. At one level, our system of government is deeply undemocratic, inherited political power is an absurdity, and the foundations of capitalist economics are hard to justify.
But these are no longer the principles that animate me. It’s not so much that I no longer believe what I once did; it’s more that other considerations – of what seems to work practically in creating a viable state – have gained more prominence. I’m sure others have had a similar experience. Some people call it ‘growing up’; teenage me would call it ‘selling out’; I prefer to think about it as adapting your perspectives as you see how things work.
Thinking about this made me think about the much-reported failure of younger generations to shift rightwards as they get older. This is often attributed to their inability to buy houses in early middle-age, and therefore to adopt the more conservative views that naturally accompany property ownership. That’s part of it, for sure, but there’s a bit more to it. All the things that seemed to work OK in the 1990s and 2000s, when I was in my twenties and thirties – capitalism, economic growth, government – have been rocked since 2008. The ensuing chaos has not given people a few years younger than me any reason to think that the system does actually work.
And I can’t help thinking, they may be right. But I hope the new government can prove them wrong.
Richard Brown 