Une analyse des élections en Grande-Bretagne.

Une analyse des élections en Grande-Bretagne.

Elle est proposée par le chroniqueur de Spiked, Brendan O'Neill.

Extraits :

«What we have seen in this campaign is the emergence and the attempted consolidation of a new political oligarchy. The campaign has finally confirmed the disintegration of the social bases of the two main parties that dominated British politics for the past hundred years – Labour and the Conservatives – and their replacement by a new political elite whose roots in society are fragile and weak and which is therefore inherently unstable. Britain has moved, in a typically British fashion, towards something like the Italian model: a shaky political system made up of professionals and chancers whose policies and profiles are shaped by very arbitrary processes.

»What we are really witnessing in this election campaign – in historic terms – is the exposure of the historical fact of the parties’ collapse. The short-termist, cynical, troubleshooting measures taken by the parties over the past 20 years are wearing thin, wearing off, exposing a Labour Party utterly disconnected from the working classes (as glimpsed in the Gillian Duffy affair) and a Conservative Party that looks as alien to older Conservative Party supporters as it does to the youth of Peckham or Moss Side.

»But perhaps the most significant impact of the wrenching of the two parties from their social roots – and one which has been writ large in this campaign – has been the creation of a space for something new to emerge, a new elite, a new form of political authority.

»The concerns of this new political force are striking. It is motivated primarily by a desire to overhaul the electoral system itself. Its main election ticket is not to improve economic conditions, raise people’s living standards or reinstitute our civil liberties, but to introduce electoral reform, to make this ‘the election to change all elections’, as one particularly enthusiastic Lib Dem backer put it. Their myopic focus on electoral reform is very revealing. It demonstrates that the emerging elite is completely cut off from the concerns of the public, so that it can talk endlessly about constitutional technicalities at a time of deep recession, political disillusionment and illiberalism.

»The good news about this new oligarchy is that, precisely because of its alienation from society and its lack of binding vision, it is very weak. It can be challenged, and it must be challenged, preferably to a war of ideas.»

“En marge”