Some day in September 2014, I parked my car in a disabled parking space outside the Marks and Spencer discount store in Meadowbank planning to look at the latest intake of slightly damaged furniture. The car in the next disabled bay was plastered with campaign stickers. 'Yes!' and 'Bairns Not Bombs'. The man climbing into it, like me disabled, caught my eye and asked gruffly: 'What will you be voting?' I made some non-committal answer like: 'Oh I don't know'. Turning a little red in the face, he raised his voice to say: 'It's suicide for a disabled person to vote No. Suicide'. Got in his car and drove off.
I found myself thinking about that recently. While my companions explored the many caverned shopping centre in Livingston, I took my place in the café of a well-stocked but mostly deserted Waterstones and read much of the second part of
The Shortest History of Democracy by John Keane. A coffee and a slice of millionaires shortbread later, I returned it to the shelf, shocked a little to have discovered that it is not uncommon for established democracies to go off the rails.
Democracy is not a thing that once established remains established. These derailments seem to be caused by one of a handful of things. One is a demagogue, a single human being of extraordinary guile, who uses democratic trickery to get into power and by clever legal wrangling keeps it for years and years, eventually transforming the country into an autocracy. Outside interference by a foreign government is also a common cause of derailment.
The Guardian recently reported on declassified papers revealing a British Foreign Office campaign to influence the 1976 Italian elections and there are surely many more examples by secret foreign services of many nations not yet uncovered, some of which have surely been done to us. Uncontainable civil unrest in times of great poverty, often leading to military intervention and military rule thereafter, is another democracy killer, as is extreme nationalism, now strangely simultaneously growing in many democratic countries. Not so strange really as 'My country first' always wins additional votes. It's simple maths. It seems irrefutably correct. How can you argue against it?
How can you bring people's minds to the equally self-evident fact that such a view will inevitably lead to transnational conflict and worldwide chaos if every nation adopts it? That some surrendering of sovereignty is required for harmony. Who wants to hear that? The thought that the democratic process is itself the source of rising nationalism and will mechanically always veer towards it is disturbing. An unfixable flaw that often plays a part in the transformation of democrat to autocrat.
The first time I entered a polling station must have been 31 March 1966, when I was five years old. I remember getting bored, letting go of my dad's hand while he chatted for ages to the poll clerks. I remember looking around at the hall, the wooden floor, seeing the mysterious polling booths with dangling pencils. I think I remember, though now it is more like remembering
remembering – asking him who he voted for. He would not tell me and explained that it was important for everyone to keep it a secret, hence the booths and the unopenable box, and that you should not ask. Testing the logic, I asked if he knew who mum voted for. He claimed he did not.
My father was the headmaster of a Catholic school and one of the candidates was David Steel, who later introduced a private members bill to legalise abortion, so perhaps he had reason to want to say nothing about it. Maybe my mum had other views on the abortion issue. Either way, I think there was more of a 'don't ask – don't tell' agreement across the 1960's population generally. As a generation, they were more aware of how democracy had recently been distorted in other parts of the world to a disastrous end and from that gained a better understanding of 'democratic decency' that we may have lost. It is as if they believed it was vitally important that people can vote as they vote without being abused for their choice, for as soon as they are abused, democracy is broken.
We can't help looking back like that thinking we can learn some lessons, but since history is more or less infinite compared to the capacity of a single feeble mind, the lesson we learn can often be more a reflection of something we as individuals seek to see in it. Perhaps I imagined that age of 'decent democracy'. Look back far enough and we can always find something to justify our view, some justice or injustice, whichever we care to look for. It is a simple consequence of the pool of history being infinitely deep and the human mind being rather small.
To get away from the problem of there being a near infinite amount of history from which to cherry-pick a view or a fight, we can perhaps listen to those who have not read history in a book but rather those who lived it and remain alive to talk about it. Listening to Tova Friedman, an American therapist, author and Holocaust survivor on
Channel 4 News, she urged people not to forget. But we
are forgetting. We have already forgotten a lot.
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A little over a year ago, just when Covid restrictions allowed, I attended the funeral of a neighbour, just one year older than Tova Friedman. It was explained in the eulogy that she was a member of the Hitler Youth, excused by the speaker as it was 'expected' of all young people of her generation. My mind wandered on to wonder what being 'expected' meant in practice.
I imagined the old lady as a child walking down a street in her home town of Königsberg. She might have passed a flag-festooned stall where she was invited to sign a petition for this or that, join this club and so on. If she joined, she had instant friends. If she did not, would she be shunned? Did she feel forced or was she genuinely attracted? Perhaps she didn't even know which one it was herself; such is the mind of youth. This situation, adults recruiting children for a political cause, is perhaps one of the forgotten things Tova Friedman was talking about.
Once when I dropped by to help my old neighbour re-tune her TV, she led me to the room to find it showing a documentary series about the war. 'Oh, I like watching the old movies of Hitler', she said with a mischievous laugh at what I might think. I took it to mean she liked seeing the old streets and the world of her childhood. I said I could come back another time. 'No. On you go. I've seen it before.' As I navigated my way through the multiple menus required to re-tune, she said in a more serious tone: 'What people don't understand John is that we all thought he was a very nice man'. I didn't know what to say or even quite what that meant. I took it to be a warning of some kind. That people can be charmed by monsters or perhaps it was simply a plain explanation as to why she joined a youth club.
I knew she had escaped from the siege of Königsberg, a town ethnically cleansed of Germans to create Russian Kaliningrad and I assumed it was simply to get away from the impending, inevitable brutality of the men in the Russian Army. She had on another occasion told me what happened to her mother who she left behind. But one fact mentioned at the funeral I did not know.
She went to Berlin not by idle teenage wandering. She said to me she went because 'lots of girls' from her town went there. 'I don't know why.' She followed the crowd as refugees do. This was not quite right. It turned out she had been ordered as a member of the Hitler Youth to go there and fight. Fortunately, she was too late and it was all over. She married a Scottish soldier she might have shot in the head had she arrived a month or so earlier. Stop the war and people make love instead. There must be a lesson in there.
She was 16 going-on 17 when the war ended in September 1945. It ended many years later for her mother and only when she was released from a Russian forced labour camp. Forced German labour was part of Stalin's demands for reparation and astonishingly by present day standards, the key Allied leaders agreed to allow it. Hundreds of thousands of German citizens were taken as slaves and died in these camps. The German Red Cross estimate an additional 1,300,000 disappeared. The last slaves were not released until 1955 and for the most part her mother's experience, like her own, has joined the forgotten things.
I saw that 'very nice man' on the screen more recently, this time on the Smithsonian channel. He was ranting. This ranting, it was reported, was known to the audience to be a performance of the sort expected of a great Shakespearean actor, a persona of a character they all wanted personified. A heroic nationalist. Before and after the show, he was calm and charming. The subtitles on the screen under his ranting face read: 'When the older generation falter, the youth are a blank piece of paper and are committed body and soul'. You might wonder why I had to freeze the frame and note that quote. It was a chilling point.
Some few days previously, someone came to my door to hand-deliver a personally targeted letter to 16-year-old voters in Scotland. Written in bold at the top it read: 'As you vote in your first council election in Scotland, please VOTE [1] to elect me as your (Name of Party) Councillor for (Name of Ward)'.
I have omitted the party name and the ward name as it is in my view an act of such indecency as to bring more shame than I would wish on the individual. It seems extraordinary that Meta, that great social media company formally known as Facebook, can be fined €400m by an EU Court in Ireland for a similar crime – my understanding being that for some period of time Facebook set privacy 'defaults' to 'public', making it possible for others to identify and therefore directly target users aged 13-17.
While allowing this vulnerable age group to be targeted directly is a data crime in the EU, it is a perfectly acceptable political campaign strategy in Scotland. Even if it is legal by data law, it is surely a breach of Article 14(1) of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child: 'States Parties shall respect the right of the child to freedom of thought, conscience and religion'.
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Crutching to the end of Musselburgh harbour one evening, a good place to catch the last rays of the setting sun, I spotted a herring gull dig a small crab out the mud. It was immediately pestered by a speckled youngster from whom it turned and marched away with the youth marching comically in step behind. I thought it was heading for a sheltered place to eat but to my surprise it stopped by a pool of water and just as the adolescent chick caught up it dropped the crab in the pool. The young bird froze, as if a little shocked by the behaviour of its mother but then began to search the pool and sure enough found the crab.
I was astonished to see such parenting skills. I could hardly believe it. It took me years to learn the importance of that. I salved my sense of parental inadequacy with the thought that these birds can live to not so short of 50 years and so this bird was probably a far more experienced parent than me.
The right to vote at 16 was passed unanimously by the Scottish Parliament in 2015. As predictable perhaps as asking a parliament of 129 professional football players whether football should be part of the high school curriculum. There was an absolute presumption that it was a good thing and every one of the 129 had an undeclared interest. What salesman doesn't want more footfall? That not one MSP opposed it means it was also never seriously thought about. It was 'expected'.
Scottish Liberal Democrats even argued to include some young offenders, presumably to give them something else to fight about in the common room. Young people wanted it we are told from studies. Similar studies will likely show young people also want to lower the age you can buy fags and booze. It's that selective application of science thing often used to deceive.
I know that the well-intentioned parents among those 129 MSPs who approved the lowering of the age of suffrage thought they were doing something like that clever gull teaching its young to fish. The trouble is they have dropped the crab into a pool of toxic waste and now their young are fishing in it. This waste is damaging to the psychological framework we use to fairly assess others, it damages our friendships and splits society into societies.
I'm not complaining about generational gerrymandering or even so concerned that Scotland finds itself in a list of 12 countries out of about 98 functioning democracies to have voters that can fit within the UN definition of a child. The same definition is used to separate migrants in Kent and take more care of the young, and quite right too in my opinion. If they washed up on Portobello beach, would they be treated with such care? Who cares that any election or referendum in Scotland will be found by the electoral rules of 88% of overseas observers as 'a bit dodgy'? We know better than they do. We're empowering our young people. A few other countries are considering it too – Ireland for one. I hope they consider it more carefully than we did.
I have to confess to being as thoughtless about this issue as the MSPs who voted for it but since that visitor came to my front door I have woken up and tried to catch up on the argument. There are no shortage of articles on this topic. One in the
Washington Post from 19 September 2014 by Ilya Somin seems typical of most of them when it comes to the gist. It proposes a slightly absurd idea that 16-year-olds could be made to pass a basic knowledge test before being given the right to vote and goes on to laud the benefits for democracy. Coupled with the self-evident point that young people have more interest in the future than old people, then the argument seems, a bit like nationalism, to be an irrefutably correct idea.
All the articles I could find were about the democratic efficacy, good or otherwise. None had anything to say about the impact on the child, the child's social standing, the society of children or their right to free thought. It seems nobody cares about that – except perhaps the parents of 16-year-olds – and they are a small passing section of the population. I won't care so much myself in a few years. I'll forget all about it just like everyone else.
*****
What is more important than the much-discussed rules of the game of democracy is that 16-year-old people have a right to live without a political care in the world. They have the right to live without being picked on by political predators and asked to join this club or that. To them, the world is still new and full of wonder. To call on them to vote is not an act of empowerment, it is an act of exploitation.
A quote in
The Shortest History of Democracy from a nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Louis Bernays, jumped out at me and I photographed it. It read: 'The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government'.
There's more but it seems in summary that democratic dialogue will always descend into 'plant a fear and promise a cure' as an inevitable part of the process of 'engineering consent'. A government calling a referendum to measure the will of the people while at the same time telling them how they should vote is a perfect example of 'engineering consent'. Something that recently happened in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk. It would never happen here of course.
By Edward Bernays' view, the people who sit at street stalls festooned with flags saying Yes or No or Leave or Remain, SNP, Labour or Tory might be campaigning for different things, but somehow, they are all doing the same thing. Looking out for a vulnerable passer-by to manipulate. They each hand out a glossy leaflet with a cover photo of people of every minority crowded round some party symbol, a chilling echo of those black and white images of happy plantation workers gathered for the annual photograph taken to show that
bwana is a good boss. Open the leaflet and you will read about the fear and the promised cure.
In Scotland, 120,000 people have learning difficulties; there now are about 140,000 child voters; 90,000 people living with dementia; 22% of people living in deprived areas have mental health problems. These susceptible people are perhaps more likely to believe that the first step to freedom is imprisonment. That anyone with an opposing view is to be despised. That everything can be summed up in a single slogan. That the alternative is suicide. 'Suicide.'
Another quote in the book from Churchill that most will already know reads: '... it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time'. This may be true but even the worst form of something can be made better. We could start by protecting susceptible people. We could restore the minimum voting age to the internationally respected standard. Failing that, more effort must then be made to minimise manipulation of new young and all vulnerable voters.
Campaign leaflets could be given the same treatment as cigarette packets, stripped of manipulative images. Politicians could stop their routine gaslighting of the electorate and see that while it might seem clever to present statistics in a misleading way, it is ultimately cruel and exploitative of those least able to understand. These changes and others might help us get back to that distant dream of democratic decency.
John McGrath is a retired teacher of Physics and Maths who lives with his partner and daughter in Portobello
