Woodcraft would spoil its ballot.

The Election Series

Ey up. The Election is now less than a week away. The Final TV leaders debate went up yesterday and the newspapers care about little else. Amidst all this welcome to possibly the final SpanThatWorld.com Election Series article. Where members have been bigging up a party of their choice as the true embodiment of Woodcraft Folk Principles.

We have already heard from Kieran Ford for Liberal Democrats (Click HERE), Daniel Rawnsley for Labour (Click HERE), Kit Jones for The Conservatives (Click HERE) and Allie Cannell for The Green Party (Click HERE)

Now Joel White and Rohan Orton put a twist on the story and tell us why voting in the general election is counter productive and not at all Woodcrafty.

DISCLAIMER: The views presented in this series are of the individuals not of the organisation. Woodcraft Folk and The District Fellows Movement remain party politically neutral.

DONT just VOTE

Panic stations in Westminster. For the first time in four years our Mps are getting a sharp reminder that their existence depends on us, the general public. We’ve had electronic stalls set out for each of the main parties here on Span That World, arguments made in their favor, comparisons made to Woodcraft as an organization. My original intention was to controversially try and convince you all not to vote, to spoil your ballots and tear up your rosettes, but that wouldn’t make my point properly. Vote if you want to, many in the world don’t have the chance, but do so with an acute awareness of the realities of our parliamentary system. Politics is vital. Democracy, ‘rule of the people’, is a concept worth fighting for. But is putting a cross in a box once every four years really an empowering act? What do you do if the people who are standing do not seem to offer anything to you? What if they do, but fail to act upon it once elected?

There is an accompanying piece written by Rohan, which lays out the classical anarchist argument against voting brilliantly, hopefully it will surface once he has recovered from celebrating the end of his dissertation! I’ll try to link the arguments more specifically to the here and now, to Woodcraft, and to the actions that we can take to be truly political.

Voting wont challenge the powerful.

The original struggle for franchise in this country was a serious affront to abuse of power and hierarchy. But this doesn’t mean that spoiling our ballots in the next election somehow soils the name of the suffragettes or the original ‘right to vote’ campaigners, if anything I’d like to think that they would be despairing at the way true democracy has been halted and usurped in the last few decades.

Take the House of Lords, a totally unelected chamber with power to amend or reject bills brought before it by the House of Commons. It’s made up of 733 paid ‘Peers’, 78 more than the elected House of Commons.

Then we have the civil service, MI5, chiefs of police, army generals, the royal family. All are supposed to be to an extent accountable to our elected Mps, but often are not, and usually have considerable power over those we choose to represent us in parliament.

On a wider scale we have global corporations; who now make up 51 of the world’s 100 largest economies, and media conglomerates; who exist to make money out of how we consume information and thus often sacrifice its truth, validity and usefulness; let alone any grand belief in democratic process.

Rather than holding these bodies to account, politicians often live in a world which puts the interests of those that are unelected yet powerful before the will of the people.

Courting journalists rather than listening to constituents, gliding from parliament into lucrative jobs at big companies (or vice versa), keeping one’s  head down and waiting for a peerage; there are far too many ways in which political decisions in Britain are no longer (or have never been) shaped by us, the voters.

Even a quick look at the Cabinet, which describes itself as “the committee at the centre of the British political system and the supreme decision-making body in government.” shows five members are unelected Lords, with Peter Mandleson as perhaps the most famous. We have no say in who takes any of these positions, nor did we get to choose whether Gordon Brown should govern the country as leader.

The question that needs answering after digesting all this information is, assuming you want to fight for change and make positive differences to people’s lives, should we reform from the inside or organise on the outside?

Woodcraft, to me, is a wonderful embodiment of the latter option.

True, there are good people with similar ideals to Woodcraft who go into parliamentary politics, but I would argue that the nature of parliamentary power ensures that only those with a readiness to toe the line, to vote with party whips, to sacrifice beliefs and make continual compromises, they are the ones who reach the higher echelons. Can we rely on the powerful to curtail their own advances? Cut their expenses? Lesson their chances of reelection with reform? Not by voting we cant. Let’s not forget that New Labour came to power in 1997 with a pro-reform stance. Didn’t quite happen, did it chaps?

Woodies, in general, seem to know this. We all know how dedicated, progressive and committed to making the planet a better place woodies are, so, with those as the main tick-boxes politicians try to give as reasoning for their own ambitions, why is there barely any crossover? Woodies tend to see the value of NGOs, of community activism, of direct action, of alternatives to the prescribed educational rules, living arrangements, attitudes to sex, gender and race which the State postulates. We don’t pump out politicians like Eton or Oxford, we don’t engage in Party Politics. There are many reasons for this beyond up-keeping our charitable status. Woodcraft and it’s predecessor, the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift were set up with resolute anti-war, anti-capitalist, cooperative ethos. Focuses are on youth empowerment and getting out into nature, not lobbying parliament. Who we might vote for ‘as Woodies’ has been an interesting parlor game, but ultimately the parties, the voting system and the policies on show are so far removed from what we, as an organization stand for, that to lend out support to any of them would be a disservice to our principles.

Some are better than others.

People will often say ‘but surely by voting Labour, you can stop the Tories’, a difficult argument to counter in our two party system. But Let’s be clear, tactical voting is totally un-empowering: the idea that I should vote for a party which took us to war in Iraq, continued the privatization of our public services after Thatcher, started the renewal process for our Nuclear Weapons and nuclear power stations, wants to bring in ID cards, sent British citizens to Guantanamo whilst colluding in torture overseas along with so many other seriously abhorrent (and unwoodie!) policies over the last ten years, just because they may be marginally better than another gang of identi-kit politicians is totally ridiculous.

Labour and the Tories are scrambling for one tiny, sacred slice of middle ground mediocrity.

The Lib Dems seem to have a weather vane rather than a solid set of principles, deciding recently to not scrap trident and not scrap tuition fees, even David Cameron says there is ‘a cigarette paper’ of difference between what he and most of the leading liberals believe.

There might be more lefties still in labour than the others, but the difference is too negligible to inform my vote. They ‘steal’ each others policies, jostle for who can make ‘the toughest cuts’, Mps literally change party now and then, as do advisors, donors and pundits. The Labour MP in my area voted for all the things I mentioned above, perhaps yours didn’t (http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/index.php), at best they opposed them, almost always from the back benches. Progressive politicians don’t get a word in. Decisions which affect our life so intrinsically shouldn’t come down to a game of ethical top trumps, where compromising your beliefs is the only way to find representation; nor should it be an exercise in seeing how many good apples we can throw into the rotting barrel.

Education for Social Change.

As I’ve said, the principles of Woodcraft are not represented in parliamentary politics. The closest, in my view, would be the Greens, or if your lucky, the SNP and Plaid Cymru. Yet as much as it was wonderful to hear people like Caroline Lucas and Elfyn Llwyd articulate views that I share on ‘Question Time’ in such a persuasive manner, I don’t live in Brighton, I can’t vote for her and I’m not welsh, I can’t vote for him! The Greens in my region have far less chance of getting in, which in itself is no reason to ignore them. But when it comes to their central environmental theme, I’d rather be taking more direct action than the serious graft needed to get them elected. It’s a difficult but real question- Do we have time in terms of Climate Chaos to wait for the Green Party in Britain (let alone other movements across the world) to reach a point of influence?

Other Woodcraft principles are similarly difficult-

All the main parties have a shameful record on supporting the rights of asylum seekers and refugees. None of them embody principles such as co-operation, peace, alternative education (unless it means private school, which a third of our Mps attended), consensus decisions making, or internationalism in any real way.

So why should we spend time agonizing about who to vote for or who might champion our causes when the lack of power, accountability and democracy which our current system of governance employs is so far removed from what we believe in?

Compare the debacle that was Copenhagen: hundreds of politicians across the world completely failing to do anything about climate change; to that of Plane Stupid or Climate Camp, which have had real effects on Kingsnorth, Heathrow and people’s day to day lives.

Direct action, direct democracy- from the small scale rotating councils used in Chiapas, Mexico by the Zapatistas, to the non-hierarchical living arrangements which characterize protest camps across the UK, there are people who are positively reaffirming ideas of democracy, anarchism, socialism, whateverism through their actions. They are sick of being told about the sanctity of ‘the vote’ whilst those they empower fail to act upon their wishes, they have seen the carrot of reform and felt the stick of state repression.

They might just be the woman down your street who is sick of being ignored by her MP, so cleans the streets with her neighbours.

They are not some crazy minority, 38.7% of eligible people didn’t vote in the last general election, Labour got 35.3% and took government. In a woodcraft election that would be a Re-Open Nominations right? Or a dangerously large abstention.

Only 24% of 18-24 year olds say they will vote this election.

These are not, as the media would tell it, lazy proles, they are people who have been abandoned by a political establishment that does not need them for it’s own agenda.

And what about the 16-18 year old Dfs who cannot vote? They get no say in this system.

Clearly this democracy of ours is in need of quite an upheaval, indeed they always are.

We cannot rely for those that benefit from this system to change it. We must do it ourselves.

So don’t let anyone tell you that spoiling your ballot, not voting on principle or feeling left out by mainstream politics makes you stupid, or lazy, or uncaring. The most exiting political actions in this country happen nowhere near the hallowed halls of Westminster, nor do the biggest advances in how we live our lives ever originate there. Parliament is at best a rubber stamp and at worse a distraction, a conveyor belt of self-interest, constantly widening the gulf between individuals and the chance to influence their own lives.

Sorry friends, but if it’s change you are after, voting isn’t going to bring it about.