A  new way of thinking, a new invention, a new culture that benefited us all

At Poldhu Point in 1901, thirty miles away from Porthcurno, a young Italian scientist ,Guglielmo Marconi ,transmitted the first transatlantic wireless signal to Newfoundland. Wireless communication had arrived.

This radio signal was received  at Signal Hill using a large antenna about 600 feet long suspended from a kite.  The signal heard was just the three faint clicks dot dot dot that denote the letter S in Morse Code.  After much more development work, Marconi’s radio system  provided us with one of the most important communication tools known to humankind.

His achievement completely confirmed Marconi’s opinion that electric waves would not be stopped by the curvature of the earth and therefore could be made to travel any distance separating any two places on our planet, a view he had held for many years in the face of considerable opposition.

In the late nineteenth century, the remote beach at Porthcurno, I’ve swum in the sea there many times,  became internationally famous as the British termination of early submarine telegraph cables, the first of which was landed in 1870, part of an early international link stretching all the way to India, which was then a British colony. 

In those days Marconi’s ‘wireless telegraphy’ was seen as a potential threat to the established ‘cable and line telegraphy’ on which Porthcurno and many local jobs depended.

Similary, many people in Britain see the result of the outcome of the British general election as a threat to the established political British culture and will try to do anything to negate the historic opportunities before us now as a result of how we have voted.

First past the post as an electoral system served Britain well, just as the cables served us well before wireless,  when there were two dominant parties representing two dominant class interests. However, the world has moved on,  there are now a number of different parties representing different interests who are not served well by the old system. We need, more than anything now, the introduction of proportional voting in order to release all the creative energies there are in Britain, of which there are many, which will bring our society forward and help to deal with the serious problems we are facing. There is not a monopoly of wisdom in one political party.

The first Green member of the British Parliament

One of the most exciting things yesterday was the election of  Caroline Lucas, the

Green Member of Parliament for Brighton Pavillion. It is the first time ever in the history of British politics that a Green has been elected, amazingly under the old electoral system. She will bring a breath of fresh air to the British Parliament and with the introduction of Proportional Representation (PR) voting there will be many more Greens after the next election.

New paradigms and new ways of thinking

Marconi’s invention ushered in a qualitatively new era in our history and today we are standing at a similar crossroads in the history of British Politics. In our own profession one of these moments was when Chomsky wrote “Syntactic Structures” in 1957 which nailed the idea that we were behaviouristic beasts who couldn’t generate our own language. In 1966 Hymes came along and introduced the idea of communicative competence, the idea that knowing how to use language was much more than knowing its grammatical rules. Both of these innovations were beneficial for and fed into our language teaching profession and both marked a break with the past, the same break we need now in our political system.

Today is the biggest day in the history of the lib/dems. It is also potentially the biggest day in the shaping of our political culture for good.  Do the Lib/Dems stick to their principles and insist on, at the very least, a referendum on PR by the end of June and a fresh election under the new system in October? Or do they prop up a Tory government in order to taste power and renege on the policies that they believe in and where they have a golden opportunity to steer Labour back to its core values and the reason for existence  in a Lib/Lab coalition?

There would be a Lab/Lib/SDLP/Green/SNP/Plaid Cymru majority which would provide stable enough government up till October, after a referendum on PR,  when a new government would be elected and the opportunity for a progressive coalition and a joint Lab/Lib programme which would be put to the electorate. (The Welsh and Scottish Nationalist parties have much to gain from PR)

It is time for productive co-operation between Labour and Lib/Dems in a new political culture similar to the one that exists in Germany,Austria,Switzerland, Denmark etc. The Lib/Dems are a Centre/Left progressive party, as one of its leading spokespersons Simon Hughes says, and creating the conditions for these views to be implemented are the most important thing at the moment. To do this full blown PR should be introduced.

Seeing the referendum as a learning and educational process

Of course a referendum is no guarantee of this, but the debate that would ensue in the referendum would hopefully lead to this and a deeper political maturity all round, although the majority of the Conservative owned  press would be against it. In our internet age though, the power of the press is gradually being chipped away as blogs, twitter and facebook have increasing influence on the political process. We have more opportunities ourselves to shape  the political process than ever before and electronically this was the first British election where new electronic media had so much influence.

The creation of a new political culture is more important than any short term considerations about being part of  government or not or influencing a Conservative  government or not. In the long term full blown PR will benefit the Lib/Dems more than any policy issue they may or may not come to agreement with with the Tories over this weekend.

A fig leaf of partnership

Cameron’s offer just to accommodate the Lib/Dems is not to do with genuine partnership. Polly Toynbee wrote in today’s Guardian:

Cameron’s offer of an “all-party committee of inquiry” into political and electoral reform was about as generous as handing down his old clothes to the servants. All he did was invite Clegg with lofty condescension to sign up to his own manifesto. Go round the tradesman’s entrance and leave your muddy Europe, immigration and defence policies outside the door. Clegg will surely not be doffing his cap in that direction.

Genuine and real partnership can only happen with the Labour Party. The nature of Liberalism is its radicalism which cannot be reconciled with Conservatism. If the Lib/Dems ignore their founders, their values, their ethos and their historic legacy in pursuit of  short term gain they will pay for it enormously in the future. It is at these moments in history that people need to act fast,think on their feet, embrace change and take risks. This is the one of the characteristics of agents of change and good teachers in the classroom as well.

And on language testing, one of the Tory policies in their manifesto is “There will be an English language test for anyone coming here from outside the EU to get married” An interesting condition, I wonder if they will be insisting on any British person marrying somebody else and going to live in their country taking a similar language test.

Holding out the hand of friendship and making modest proposals

And on taking risks and embracing change in Lib/Lab coalition talks how about the Labour Party offering Clegg the Prime Minister’s position as an interim solution and a referendum on PR and a commitment to campaigning for the strongest version of it on offer when it takes place later in the year? There were two elections in 1974 when a similar thing happened, why not now? We also need to remember that we do not have a Presidential system in Britain despite what the televised debates may have suggested. The implementation of policies requires good facilitators and not slick charismatic leaders and anything that enables channels for views of the the grassroots of the parties to be expressed should be paramount. Whether we like Clegg or Brown should not be the main issue, what is up for discussion now goes far deeper than that.

Pessismists, purveyors of gloom and doom and scaremongers

The talk of the markets getting impatient and needing decisions by Monday is pure scaremongering.  Are important decisions about who runs Britain to be decided by “the markets”, whoever they might be? There is no rush with this, parties in other European countries often take up to three weeks after an election to come to agreements. We need time to digest what has happened. The same things happen in our workplaces when more time for discussing the most important things is often not found when it is this very time and space that is necessary to reach better understandings and better cooperation in the long run. Nobody should be pressurised into hasty and ill-thought out compromises.

A window of opportunity for change

For some people this election result is the worst possible outcome, for others it is chaotic, a mess. Some people staggeringly even argue that we are not a coalition nation as if this was some inborn national character trait. Surely in terms of the opportunity for creative thinking and new ways of thinking our current scenario is actually what is needed to focus people’s minds in different ways, to think out of the box, to think creatively, to think of new paradigms, new alliances and new ways of thinking.  People will always use the words chaos and mess  in order to put the lid on change, but there is a chink of light now, just a chink, let’s make it bigger and wider and nudge the door of change open a little further.

Carpe Diem..it’s now or never

Many people opposed Marconi but in hindsight it was a change for the better. The mould of British politics hasn’t yet been broken yet , it’s cracked but let’s break it for good now, we have our chance this weekend let’s hope the Lib/Dems don’t let us down…A progressive alliance for electoral reform is the way forward