With a year to Jersey's
next election, the politically interested are once again turning
their mind to the island's remarkable lack of formal political
parties.
Eight years ago, the
2005 election saw a surge of interest in party politics. The Centre
Party, who were actually staunchly right-wing, but just not of the
Establishment, soon vanished, while the Jersey Democratic Alliance
nearly settled into becoming a permanent institution, taking several
years to fade away after an unsustainably vigorous start. The
Establishment politicians, for their part, did not see the need to
set up a formal party to promote their own side, but they made it
clear that there was a considerable amount of teamwork between those
who intended to be working together when elected or re-elected.
Several more years of
drifting in the same direction have kept those who are content with
it from wanting to be any more politically active than they were.
However, those, who are are discontented with various aspects of
Jersey's current government, are beginning to feel the lack of formal
vehicles to express their grievances and, one day, possibly implement
solutions.
To
topple, or even constrain, the established clique of ethically
challenged cynics will require all who are not positively with them
to unite against them. Saying that much is facile, but the first
challenge is in how to unite them in a manner that is both flexible
enough to accommodate internal dissensions without schism, and strong
enough to maintain a cohesive direction. The Jersey Democratic
Alliance was initially founded with the intention to be a very broad
group, hence the name of Alliance. However, the centre-right element
soon found themselves uncomfortable with the dominance of more
left-wing thinkers, by both work rate and intellectual power, and
baled out. The centre-left element bled away more slowly over the
next five years, and, since the left-wing remainder became, in
effect, the Jersey Labour Party, it has done nothing, if it even
continues to exist at all. If practical lessons can be learned and
applied from the JDA experience, though, then it was not all in vain.
To form a
party, there has to be a nucleus of people agreed on a series of
policies that they either desire, or at least assent to for the sake
of their colleagues' desires, and motivated to pursue them. They can
then recruit the uncommittedly sympathetic as rank-and-file members,
and market the policies to the relatively apolitical general public
as something worth voting for, come election time. Now, it seems to
me that there are more than one tenable set of policies that could be
pursued, according to taste and conscience. Therefore, there should
be different nuclei of supporters around the different visions. The
consequence of that, in turn, is a multi-party system.
A
multi-party system, though, does not in itself unite the opposition,
so much as formalise its divisions. Thus, to actually achieve
anything, the parties must form coalitions to implement the overlaps
on their policy lists, which will probably be quite substantial. Many
things that should be either done or undone remain good or bad in
capitalist, social democratic and socialist societies alike, and the
parties can agree to do that much together. In a simple two-party
system, cross-party agreements do not happen as often as they should,
as tactical gaming tends to displace political integrity, but, with
four-plus parties, dirty players can just get frozen out and
marginalised.
If
Jersey is to succeed in achieving
the degree of political health most comparable jurisdictions enjoy,
we need more than a party. We need a diversity of parties, and we
need formal inter-party structures in turn. I envisage something like
this as the way forward:
Four
to six smallish parties, perhaps representing left, centre-left,
centre-right and
right on the traditional
socio-economic continuum, and maybe
green and libertarian
taking other priorities, would make the basis. Most people, who would
be activists at all, could find something for them amongst that
selection.
Pairs
or trios of parties with substantially overlapping aims would then
have coalition agreements to work together on these shared aims and
co-operate electorally. Certainly there is scope and even need for
such a coalition between a leftist party and any centre-left and
green party that may also form, and other parties will probably want
to make similar connections.
All
parties would benefit from also having an association of Jersey
political parties, strictly concerned with the general promotion and
support of party politics, and neutral as to what its constituent
parties' politics may be. This could be used to both make general
recruitment drives to encourage the public to work for their
political beliefs, whatever they may be, and as a lobby group, to
discourage The States from further measures to restrict the formation
and growth of political parties.
The
detailed picture of what emerges would have to depend on how many
people actually care enough about what policies. There is a threshold
of 20 signatories required under Jersey Law to found a party in the
first place, and, given our firmly entrenched tradition of political
apathy, some of the parties that could have been might not find them.
Anyway,
I see the way to mount an effective challenge to the Establishment
clique as not a simple unity of opposition, but a trinity of such
left-wingers as there are in Jersey in one party, non-socialist
liberals like myself in another, and a formal joint project of the
two parties to organise a coalition in pursuit of the two parties
shared objectives.
