18th November 2022
One day at university, in about 1991, a religious friend said to me “you do realise we are still in the early history of the church?”
I am a non-militant atheist, but for some reason that statement has always stuck with me, as a perfect expression that things may seem very different from a longer perspective.
For us, things like the press and political parties were legacies of the nineteenth century.
In the United Kingdom, Fleet Street and party-based democracy came about at the same time, as often top-down means of communicating with and organising masses of people.
But they were only ever means to an end, and the notions of old print media and old-style political parties may not last that much longer than black-and-white films.
In the United States and France, Presidents have now been elected outside the regular party systems (though Trump was nominally a Republican); in the United Kingdom, the free-standing popular mandate of Brexit is destroying the governing party.
The conventional ways of organising people and information in a democracy may not last much longer.
What purpose is a political party, other than as a badge of convenience, when candidates can create and mobilise their own networks?
What purpose is a news outlet, other than as a hallowed name, when people can readily obtain the news and comment from other sources?
The laws of the land, which matched and regulated those old methods of doing thing will need to change fundamentally.
There is no point seeking to regulate media or political activity on the basis of what media and politics were like before the world wide web.
De-centralised networks undermine command-and-control certainties.
We are still in the early history of communication networks – and of their potentially subversive impact on established hierarchies.
And a lot of what we see – positive and negative – is about this most fundamental of shifts.
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Have a good weekend – and thank you for following this blog.
The issues behind all of this for me that matter are the vulnerability of democracy and pluralism and respect for the rule of law. There is no reason to assume that changes in communication networks that you discuss perceptively in your piece will strengthen any of the above. Too many of us assume these values are certain to survive. See Moises Naim in The Revenge of Power
Love religious comments.
Almost as good as ‘eternity hasn’t really started yet’
And?
It brings to mind Chou en Lai when asked to comment on the French Revolution: “Too early to say” (I understand this may be fictitional).
As I understand it, Zhou Enlai was speaking about the student protests in 1968. e.g. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191826719.001.0001/q-oro-ed4-00018657
That quote immediately came to my mind too.
A political party isn’t necessary to form a network of like minded people but such a network needs an explicit identity if you want people outside the network to vote for it. Similarly even informal news sources need a masthead of some kind so people can associate its brand with the quality of news (or lack thereof) it provides.
Informal networks are ideally suited to undermine established organisations, and make it much harder for authorities to monitor them. This is the excuse the authorities use for imposing ever more draconian measures so such networks can be traced.
The ultimate in informal networks are spy networks and terrorist organisations, where even the members have no idea of the network.
Whatever facilities the internet gives to individual politicians to maintain their own media platform, they have to combine to propose and implement a programme of policies. Horatio Bottomley is a twentieth century example of an individual politician with his own newspaper and arguably as successful as an independent as, say, Nigel Farrage but once he was thrown out of the Liberal party his effectiveness was done.
“The laws of the land, which matched and regulated those old methods of doing thing will need to change fundamentally”
I have read your blog long enough to have understood that a written constitution is not what the UK or England may need now.
But the quote above sounds like the UK should at least “reform”
it’s Laws and to write down some Rules instead of conventions, to close its gap to the 21 century.
My question if i may, can the Crown do it or is it the Parliament or is there no precedence .
“The laws of the land, which matched and regulated those old methods of doing thing will need to change fundamentally”
I have read your blog long enough to have understood that a written constitution is not what the UK or England may need now.
But the quote above sounds like the UK should at least “reform”
it’s Laws and to write down some Rules instead of conventions, to close its gap to the 21 century.
My question if i may, can the Crown do it or is it the Parliament or is there no precedence ?
sorry for the double post
I am not a historian, but I’d suggest that “the press” (that is, public discourse published in pamphlets and broadsides, and later in newspapers) started in the 16th century but evolved alongside political parties (that is, groupings that organise towards shared political goals) in the 17th century after the Restoration, developed in the 18th century, and flowered in the 19th century.
Today’s Conservatives and Liberals are the direct offspring of the Tories and Whigs of the 1670s and 1680s. The history of the Liberals 100 years ago shows that parties can come and go, but there has always been a “conservative” faction and a “progressive” faction, either of which may splinter but then tends to coalesce around a new position.
Trump is in effect the leader of a populist Trump rump of the Republican party, just as Macron’s Renaissance (which seems to be their name currently) is his own centrist vehicle. Can either party survive after their charismatic leader is gone? We are at a peculiar time when the right and left both seem to have lost their way, which leaves space for extremists and populists, but I expect (or rather hope) normality will reassert itself eventually, and the non-Trump Republicans will re-emerge, just as the French Socialists and Republicans are still there and could easily bounce back when the people become disillusioned with the insurgents.
The circulation of newspapers has reduced so much, it is a wonder that any survived. I suspect most people get their news these days from broadcasters such as the BBC or Sky, with echoes in online sources such as Facebook or Twitter, but their days are numbered too. What is the business model to pay journalists, when everyone expects everything to be available online for free? Perhaps we need streaming platforms such as Amazon and Netflix to get into journalism?
“I am not a historian, but I’d suggest that “the press” (that is, public discourse published in pamphlets and broadsides, and later in newspapers) started in the 16th century but evolved alongside political parties (that is, groupings that organise towards shared political goals) in the 17th century after the Restoration, developed in the 18th century, and flowered in the 19th century.”
I really had hoped I was careful enough in my wording to head off this foreseeable response. I expressly referred to the Fleet Street, which is very much a model of the late 1800s. Just as political parties existed before the late 1800s, so did the press. But after c. 1865 both took on their modern, mass form.
I even wrote about the C17 meaning of press in the New Statesman: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2012/07/what-freedom-press-should-mean .
Totally agree, this has been my viewpoint for a while now.
If we are indeed “in the early days” wouldn’t a written constitution, now, be a little premature?
I find it reassuring that things as they are, needn’t always be so.
I find it worrying that contemporary idealists might lock us in to something which in time and for all time will become archaic and dysfunctional .
If we must have it written down can we please keep it short and Delphic.
Any solutions? Trals. But what about news media?
“We are still in the early history of communication networks – and of their potentially subversive impact on established hierarchies”.
I’m not sure the chain of causation is right here. The early Christian church may have started with a few enthusiasts but as it grew it was captured by traditional power structures. In similar vein a King cannot run a realm on his own, he needs the support of barons and enforcers and scribes. Which comes first, the blog or the power structure?
I feel that Twitter, the FT blogroll, the comment columns in the Mail/Telegraph and dare I say this august blog are irrelevant to power that matters. There to be used and exploited by power. Otherwise merely a place for those who don’t matter to let off steam – and reveal preferences.
Power may be influenced – see how the land lies – but power will find a way to exploit and influence new and old media rather than media controlling power. Our own Mail/Telegraph axis seems to be a symbiosis rather than a control mechanism. But who or what is ‘the power’ is a bit of a puzzle.
But – a confounding factor is Mr Trump. He seems genuinely outwith the usual power structure – that is his attraction and the threat he presents. He cuts through the veil of smoke put up by traditional power and media. We know we are being lied to and power is merely looking after itself. Trump speaks to that notion – but whether he is ultimately better or worse is yet to be made clear. But even for him and those behind him Twitter etc is merely a tool.
Communication is merely a tool of power IMHO.
Not the whole picture, I think. Political parties are the focus for particular interests (let’s say the landed gentry or the proletariat) to exert their influence. They do this very effectively. Bottom up guerilla warfare has a very hard task in organising itself to counter that influence. It’s the money.
I think the problem is that: “History is written by the winner.”
I think it is quite important, in the mean time, that we try to ensure that the least bad person / organisation / Party / President wins.
“What purpose is a news outlet, other than as a hallowed name, when people can readily obtain the news and comment from other sources?”
They can, but clearly a significant number of people don’t, David: as of right now, it’s still axiomatic that if you control what the newspapers say, you control what people think – to an extent which still makes it a worthwhile enterprise to those who want things their way…
Your opening quote begs the questions ‘ when was the beginning? When does it end?’
Interesting thoughts to ponder on! Can change ever be stopped? Should change or changes be stopped if they can be?
I was moved to comment only yesterday that nothing ever stands still, somewhat mundanely in connection with road widening that will badly affect those with frontages on to the existing road and who over decades have colonised and built on land which is not theirs but belongs to the state. So these buildings or parts of them must all come down at the encroaching persons expense. There may be temporary stasis that in human temporal terms may seem very long and unchanging but something or someone will break through it.
Why do you say The French President was elected outside the regular party system?
“Have a good weekend – and thank you for following this blog.”
Thank you for continuing to stimulate conversations through the blog.
Political parties facilitate corruption.
If an MP’s vote can be bought for money, nearly everyone would call that corruption. If an MP paid money to another for their vote, nearly everyone would call that corruption. But if one MP agrees to vote a particular way in return for another MP’s vote on a different matter, that looks (and often is) a lot less like corruption. There is often a genuine tradeoff – for example, you wouldn’t site every waste incinerator in the same place. A local area might agree to have a waste incinerator which services a much wider area in return for some other benefit which relies on a different area paying a local cost.
While political parties make it much easier to handle genuine tradeoffs, the way they work is a corrupting influence whereby MPs end up voting on grounds which are not their personal opinion, what is best for their constituency, or what is best for the nation. They often instead vote in accordance with what is best for their party, which is not a legitimate basis. The fact that party support makes such a big difference in the chances of being elected gives parties undue influence. You often hear complaints of party donors having undue influence, but the parties have even bigger influence.
Political parties are essential and inevitable. It’s unreasonable to expect individual MPs to generate their own manifesto for people to vote on. How would 600 MPs collectively decide what policies enough of them support to write a Bill to debate on? Parliament could become a shambolic talking shop.
Parties provide a means to aggregate a set of policies to put forward in government and a platform for individual MPs to stand on. If you didn’t have them they would evolve over time naturally. The drawbacks you rightly describe could be overcome with things like public funding of parties to prevent donors having undue influence, better accountability for MPs, parties and ministers behaviour, etc. MPs can already vote according to their own beliefs. However they must respect that people voted for them on the party manifesto and may object to their MP voting against that.
MPs can only vote according to their own beliefs until the next election as such behaviour would result in expulsion from their party and consequently, unless their position was far more popular that that of their party, failure to get re-elected.
Yet such rebellious MPs still keep their seats as often as not. Most of the time MPs will willingly vote on party lines because they believe in the party policy.
Rebellious MPs keep their seats because they confine their rebellion to very few occasions which they know have exceptionally strong grounds for rebellion making it very difficult for them to be deselected. Any MP who routinely voted against their party or did so over only a small disagreement would quickly get expelled.
How can you tell when they want to rebel but don’t. It’s just as likely they don’t rebel because the support the policy.
Even notoriously rebellious Jeremy Corbyn, with a very loyal local party and under no threat of deselection, only voted against his party 15% of the time.
There is plenty of scope for rebellion.
On the upside; by primarily serving the interests of political parties, our system does at least protect us from being governed on the basis of what governments like ours want.
I note that there is much dismay at the inevitable loss of democracy to the dictatorship of this omnipotent deity that has evolved. But surely the network will spare us loyal devotees; we who feed the furnaces that power its being with unquestioning belief in its goodness and essential nature; we who worship for endless hours at terminals, enraptured by its applications.
Cheerful optimism about the benevolence of our new rule loving god seems to be the happiest choice.
We can’t switch it off, and it might well eventually grow so big it consumes all of our resources, including low carbon air it doesn’t really need. In the evolutionary scheme of things, intelligences that are essentially planet sized silicon based networks are clearly a lot fitter than the competition we see. Cruel mother nature cares not that prey are conscious of their slow excruciating demise to enslavement by a parasitic being.
Back to work people, and Happy Monday :)
I meant to write something profound (but got waylaid over the weekend) on the intersection between the DIKW / TS Eliot hierarchy / pyramid of Data; Information; Knowledge; Wisdom in which each depends on the former and Communication which may be said to have its own hierarchy: Broadcast; Monologue; Dialogue and the requirement for active Listening as opposed to passive Hearing in order to achieve informed and informative Understanding.