The General Rejection? Political Disengagement, Disaffected Democrats and ‘Doing Politics’ Differently

Table 15.1

Bibliographic Data

ID6312002
AuthorsMatthew Flinders (0000-0003-3585-9010, University of Sheffield, corresponding author)
Year2015
Volume68
Issuesuppl 1
Pages241-254
Publication date2015-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueParliamentary Affairs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-2290 • E-ISSN: 1460-2482
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pa/gsv038
OpenAlexW2253686963
LanguageEN
Citations received14

In the run up to the 2015 General Election Douglas Carswell, the former Conservative MP who defected to UKIP in 2014, reflected on the growth of anti-politics and argued that British political parties seemed to resemble ‘Kodak parties’. He drew from arguments made in his book The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy that identified the need for an ‘old politics’ to keep pace with a ‘new politics’ that was being driven by exactly those processes of social, economic and technical change that have been identified as ‘liquid modernity’. Carswell’s argument is that the Kodak brand was once synonymous with cameras and from the moment George Eastman launched the first Kodak camera in 1888 Kodak had a dominant market share. By the 1970s, more than 90% of camera film products sold in the USA were made by Kodak to the extent that people even spoke of taking family photographs as capturing that ‘Kodak moment’. Then came digital cameras and in 2012 Kodak filed for bankruptcy. Political parties were once synonymous with democratic politics but their social position and role has clearly changed from the mass-based organisations of the twentieth century. Carswell diagnoses a failure of British political institutions to keep pace with the expectations and demands of an increasingly diverse society and that exists to some extent beyond the reach of the public—the demos. It is in this context that this chapter reflects on the 2015

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