Ballot Boxing Clever: Is voting a worthwhile exercise? Eamonn McCann gets to the nub of the matter

Declare for Clare: Clare Daly is an independent candidate fighting for real political change

When it was first mooted that society should be run by representatives of the people, ruling classes everywhere shuddered, fearing that if the common multitudes dictated what laws should be passed, they’d take back the property robbed from them by the rich and the royals.
This seemed a real possibility to the rank and file of Cromwell’s New Model Army when they gathered at Putney in 1647 to debate the sort of society with which they’d replace the tyranny of kings. This was the first occasion in these islands when the idea of one person, one vote was seriously proposed and formally debated. Thomas Rainsborough spoke directly to Cromwell:
“For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he, and therefore truly, Sir, I think it is clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.”
(“He”, is, of course, significant. Votes for women was raised at Putney, but not pursued. Equality had to wait. As we know, in many aspects of life women are waiting still). Cromwell had no hesitation about sending Charles I to the gallows. (That’s one of the historical differences between English and Irish Republicans: the English have been willing to chop off a king’s head.) But give the poor a share of power commensurate with their numbers? That was different, that would risk the ruination of the respectable class (among whom Cromwell himself was numbered) upon whom all hope of stability rested. Opposition to the franchise was rooted in property rights.
So the franchise had to be limited. Many of the Putney radicals were arrested, many of these put to death. But the question posed at Putney rings down the ages. As Paul Foot put it in his last book, The Vote: “Does (voting) – can it – threaten private property, and what happens if the aspirations of people without property, expressed through elections, clash with those of a propertied minority?”
The evidence suggests that the propertied minority would abolish elections and deploy their armed forces to impose dictatorship if they felt their class rule under imminent threat. The military coup in Greece in 1967. The murder of the elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, in 1973. The re-imposition of military dictatorship in Egypt in 2012.
In each case, a democratic election had produced a result which the economic elite thought endangered their position, so they discarded democracy. Think they wouldn’t do the same here if the popular vote went ‘wrong’?
When tens of thousands marched to a demonstration for liberty and the vote at St. Peter’s Fields in Manchester in August 1819 – including hundreds of women marching in formation – Lord Castlereagh sent in the hussars to slash through their ranks – the “Peterloo Massacre.” Eleven were cut to death, hundreds wounded. Women were disproportionately punished, wounds to breasts and bodies suggesting brutal misogyny. The massacre was to prompt one of the great poems of the English revolutionary tradition – Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy.
“I met murder on the way/ He had a face like Castlereagh... Rise like lions after slumber/ In unvanquishable number/ Shake to earth your chains, like dew/ Which in sleep had fall’n on you/ We are many! They are few!” We being the many, they need violence to stop us shaping the future.
Five years ago, David Cameron admitted there had been “shocking” collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and British state forces in the 1989 murder of Belfast solicitor Pat Finucane. He promised Pat Finucane’s widow Geraldine that he’d set up an inquiry into how this had happened.
The following year Geraldine, with members of her family and Jane Winter of British-Irish Rights watch, met Cameron at Downing Street for an update. But no update: there wasn’t to be any inquiry, he told them.
When challenged, in Jane Winter’s account, “Mr Cameron said, ‘Look, the last administration couldn’t deliver an inquiry in your husband’s case and neither can we. Because there are people all around this place who won’t let it happen’.” Ms Winter recalled that as the Prime Minister made this admission, “He raised a finger and made a circular motion in the air.”
So there are secret elements who can tell an elected prime minister that he must break a freely-given pledge, and the PM obeys. There is a permanent government with no sort of mandate with authority over the government elected by the people. We’ll say nothing about Michael Noonan, austerity and the necessity of obedience to the IMF/EU/ECB, even when their instructions are to abandon the policies on which he and his colleagues had been elected.
In London, Dublin, in most democracies you might mention, the power of governments is constrained by a self-interested class and the shadowy enforcers who couldn’t care less what voters had decided.
But everybody should vote nonetheless. For People Before Profit, the Anti-Austerity Alliance, Clare Daly, Joan Collins, for candidates you can see on the streets fighting for real change and who will use their mandate to boost a mass movement rather than facilitate manoeuvring in the Dail.