Who speaks for the people?

In Britain last week, as the party politicians acted out the Budget day rituals, the United States called on the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to disband; the British Army came under the fiercest pressure it has ever faced to treat its recruits decently; and the issue of special needs schools was propelled to the top of the political agenda.

None of these things happened because of conventional party politics, although conventional politics played a part.

They all happened because of something more interesting and new: the way in which ordinary people, with the help of the mass media, are muscling in on the political process.

The report blasting the Army's failure to care for its troops would never have come about without the calm, persistent and morally forceful campaign waged by Geoff and Diane Gray, Doreen and Des James and the other parents whose children died at the Deepcut training camp.

Margaret Dixon and Maria Hutchings have made the government squirm over health and education.

Above all, the sisters and fiancée of Robert McCartney are holding another monolith of power, the IRA, to account. These are all people who have been, to some extent, failed by traditional political avenues, finding new ways to get their messages across.

It is uncanny how similar the tone of both the political and terrorist establishments has been towards their tormentors. Martin McGuinness warns the McCartneys to stay out of politics, it is no concern of theirs.

The Health Secretary, John Reid, talks insultingly of "human shields", as if the intervention of ordinary citizens in the political process is somehow illegitimate. What it actually shows is how out of touch they both are.

The political parties no longer own the political process and the more they act as if they do, the worse trouble they will be in. They occupy a diminished, if still substantial, space within it, of less interest to the rest of us than before.

In the past, the two main parties could genuinely claim to represent the vast majority of the country. In the 1951 general election, Labour and Tory won, between them, 96.8 per cent of the votes, on a turnout of 82.5 per cent of the electorate.

In the last general election Labour and Tories won, between them, 72 per cent of the vote on a turnout of 59 per cent.

New Labour won a landslide, with nearly two-thirds of the MPs in the Commons; but this impressive result was actually gained with little more than 40 per cent of the vote.

Factoring in turnout, Labour won the positive endorsement of less than one in four of the electorate.

This is surely the most important, if least often discussed, reason why there is so much disaffection with politics.

The vacuum in British politics has been filled by Fathers for Justice, the fuel blockade, the countryside marches, the largest street demonstration in British history against the Iraq war, and a privately-organised referendum in Scotland against the repeal of anti-gay laws.

Simple tactics

Street protest and direct action are now ecumenical, not simply tactics of the Left. In the response to the tsunami, it was the British public which led the way, leaving the politicians fighting to catch up.

The think-tank Demos has criticised the role of the press in what it calls "manufacturing dissent", creating a "self-referential universe in which small groups can have their voices hugely amplified".

The McCartneys and the Deepcut families do not fall into this category, but this is often a fair criticism. Populism, untroubled by responsibility, can be dangerous - sometimes racist, for example.

Individuals, however deserving, may not be representative. Righteous does not mean right.

So the task must be to bring these movements into conventional democratic politics, with all the discipline that imposes - enlarging the political system so that it is flexible enough to accommodate them. This almost certainly means electoral reform.

But there is no indication that either Labour or the Tories has any interest whatever in the subject.

Real reform means more than postal voting, or tinkering with the sitting hours at Westminster, or recruiting more black party clones to sit on the backbenches alongside the white party clones.

The government recognises the disillusionment problem. But for the moment it prefers the appearance of listening rather than the reality.

Will it matter? For all the pre-poll excitements, it still seems likely that New Labour will again be re-elected by a landslide far disproportionate to that actually desired by the public.

And it means that as disillusionment with Tony Blair grows, it is British democracy that will face the toughest credibility problem.

–Evening Standard