Unbundling politics

There's much to admire in the report of the Power Inquiry, summarized here, not least the call for citizen-initiated referenda and the recognition that non-voting is motivated by contempt rather than apathy. There's one trick, though, the report misses. It's hinted at in this from Helena Kennedy:

Principle and ideas seem to have been replaced with managerialism and public relations. it is as though Proctor and Gamble or Abbey National are running the country.

Whilst this contains much truth, it is way too kind. Politics could learn a lot from business.
For one thing, no shareholders would allow their chief executive to have as much power (or as much conflict with their finance director) as we allow our Prime Minister.
And for another, business has progressed in the last few decades in a way politics has not. Political parties are like 1960s-style conglomerates. They contain a bundle of policies - Iraq , public services, ID cards and so on - just as conglomerates were a bundle of businesses.
Eventually, investors realized that conglomerates were a bad idea. Why should I buy a dozen bad businesses, just to get a couple of good ones? they asked. They shunned conglomerates, just as voters now shun political parties - and (partly) for similar reasons.   
Conglomerates responded by breaking up. Hanson, for example, once one of the most sprawling conglomerates, is now a focused building materials company.
Indeed, much of the history of finance in recent years is a story about how bundles of services have been split up.
Take government bonds. Once, if you wanted to buy these, you had to buy  a bundle of interest payments and a redemption sum. Now, strips markets allow you to buy just the income streams or just the redemption. Similarly, credit derivatives allow you to buy a firm's default risk but not its interest payments (or vice versa). There are loads of other examples. But in all cases, the unbundling increases demand.
If politics really were like business, then, politicians would ask: how can we increase our appeal to voters  by unbundling what we offer?
But of course, unlike in business, there's no pressure upon politicians to raise this question. Whereas company bosses suffer if investors lose interest - because the share price falls - politicians don't give a damn if people ignore them.
So, when people say politics is like business, they are flattering politicians. Can you think of a more damning indictment than that?

Comments

[Mark T]

They will of course use the reoprt selectively to push their own agenda. Very interesting to here Helena kennedy on the Today programme this am happily pushing the spin that the vote for 16 yr olds was "what everybody wanted", only to be contradicted by the other guest "expert" who pointed out that most 16 yr olds (as oppossed to lobby groups on their behalf) were at best indifferent but more importantly 80% of the rest of us didn't agree under 16-18s should get the vote. This rather spoiled the planned seguey into how Gordon Brown was highlighting votes for 16 yr olds as a
great new idea. Presumably an enquiry into who let the facts sneak in and ruin the story to follow.

[Mark T]

oh and sorry 'bout the spelling

[Alex]

Of course, the next step from unbundling is using open standards to permit user-initiated recombination ("mashups").

[John Angliss]

That's down to the degree of accuracy the first-past-the-post system allows us. Most constituencies have only two potential winning parties: both of whom have to be bundled because people care about more than one issue in most cases. Thus we have the equivalent of a stark choice between Unilever-Coke-EasyJet-RBS-O2 products or P&G-Pepsi-AerLingus-HSBC-Vodafone products for the next four years. If you want to unbundle, you need to change the electoral system first.

[MatGB]

John is completely correct there. I've got a post planned, really must finish it rather than open 15 tabs about the same subject...

Electoral system determines broad church politics to be the way we have to vote. That it no longer works is the reason the system needs to change.

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