Russell Brand has my vote

You may have noticed Russell Brand being in the news a bit this week: not for his shagging or drug exploits or even for offending the delicate, but for saying that he doesn’t vote.

That derives from this, an article he wrote for the New Statesman – which he was guest editing this week.

Quite what it means to get a celebrity to “guest edit” a magazine, I don’t really know. How many crap contributions were spiked by Russell Brand? Did he give the advertising department a hard time for a lack of renewals? I suppose we’ll never know.

Anyway, over the course of 4,500 words, Russell Brand (celebrities are always to be referred to by their full names – that’s in the ODHSNM style guide. The editor would have a fit if I didn’t follow it) says this:

I don’t vote because to me it seems like a tacit act of compliance; I know, I know my grandparents fought in two world wars (and one World Cup) so that I’d have the right to vote. Well, they were conned. As far as I’m concerned there is nothing to vote for. I feel it is a far more potent political act to completely renounce the current paradigm than to participate in even the most trivial and tokenistic manner, by obediently X-ing a little box.

He also says:

Apathy is a rational reaction to a system that no longer represents, hears or addresses the vast majority of people. A system that is apathetic, in fact, to the needs of the people it was designed to serve.

This has caused an eruption of ruffled pomposity from the political and media establishment this week – whose response to Russell Brand’s unauthorised trespass into their exclusive domain has been akin to the expression on the face of a wood pigeon that has just fallen out of a tree.

It is best summed up by the tired spectacle of that sneering symbol of everything that is loathsome and exclusive about the establishment, Jeremy Paxman, calling him a “trivial man” on Newsnight – followed by columnist after columnist commenting on this and then on each other’s comments, like a dog eating its own shit, sicking it up, and then eating it again.  

The argument appears to be that Russell Brand is not entitled to express an opinion on politics because he chooses not to vote, despite having a reasoned explanation as to why this is. Maybe Russell Brand's explanation can shed some light on why millions of other people don't vote - or is that an impossibility because he's a Hollywood celebrity? I'd suggest that he has more in common with those non-voters than anyone playing the Westminster game. 

Russell Brand is a witty man who expresses himself well, while also annoying people and being a monstrous show-off. Who else was like that? Socrates was a lot like that. You could argue that Jesus was a lot like that.

CLEARLY I AM NOT COMPARING RUSSELL BRAND TO JESUS OR SOCRATES. Come on, this isn’t the Daily Telegraph comments section.

You don’t have to agree with his point of view (Russell Brand even points out later in the article – YES, I DID read it all – that he acknowledges that apathy also comes from laziness and the inability to care about distant things) but he deserves a hearing. That’s what’s different between today and back then. 

Equally ridiculous looking

Russell Brand may not be the best person to explode the political/media/business cabal, but so what if what he says resonates with people? Paxman trivialises himself once again by playing the man not the ball. His persona and schtick is just as absurd as Russell Brand's. 

Plus, this is not a new point of view. Here’s HG Wells, 100 years ago talking about Parliament.

So far representative government has not had even the beginnings of a fair trial. So far we have not had representative government, but only a devastating caricature. 

Politicians are: 

Not really the elected representatives of the people; they are the products of a ridiculous method of election; they are the illegitimate children of the party system and the ballot-box 

Criticising the electoral system, HG Wells (the celebrity, not the conference centre) says 

The system lies, in fact, wholly open to the control of political organisations, calls out, indeed, for the control of political organisations, and has in every country produced what is so evidently demanded. The political organisations to-day rule us unchallenged. Save as they speak for us, the people are dumb. 

Echoing Russell Brand, HG Wells goes on: 

Elections of the prevalent pattern, which were intended and are still supposed by simple-minded people to give every voter participation in government, do as a matter of fact effect nothing of the sort. They give him an exasperating fragment of choice between the agents of two party organisations, over neither of which he has any intelligible control. 

Last quote, I promise: 

Our governments in the more civilised parts of the world to-day are only in theory and sentiment democratic. In reality they are democracies so eviscerated by the disease of bad electoral methods that they are mere cloaks for the parasitic oligarchies that have grown up within their form and substance. 

Perhaps HG Wells was a “trivial man” too. He did, after all, write science fiction novels, thought bicycles were the future of warfare and was a prominent “useful idiot” for Lenin.  

Oops - now we can't take him seriously on anything

Perhaps I am a trivial man too. Almost certainly I am. 

And I'd much rather be one than the sort of creature a Paxman takes seriously. 

My point is simply that there has been a tradition of dissatisfaction with the (still) prevailing political orthodoxy that goes is more than a hundred years old. That critique is not new, nor is it something that establishment has a right to reject out of hand because a “celebrity” is putting it forward. 

You shouldn’t have to be nothing but “serious” to be taken seriously. Politics is not the sole domain of people who have never thought about or done anything other than politics. 

The meaning of “democracy” is not exhausted by the Westminster farce and the media wankers who tell you what you can think about it. Russell Brand has reached his own conclusions – so can you. It's as much ours as it is theirs.