So you want to get involved in politics, eh? You want the world to be a better place? You want to Get Involved?

Well, as everyone knows, the way to Get Involved is to join a political party and start spreading the message! Off you go, start researching the parties and decide which one you want to join. It’ll be fun!

Of course, you’re going run across a problem. You’re going to discover, in short, that there isn’t actually a single political party worth the membership fee.

You can’t join Labour, you see, because you’ve seen what happens after 12 years of rule by people with their hearts in the right place but their heads firmly stuck in the crazy bucket. You can’t join the Conservatives because you’re not a millionaire and you don’t eat babies or get your moral outlook from a bloke in a dress and his imaginary friend. The Lib Dems look mildly tempting for a little while until you notice that they all bring homemade cupcakes with them to meetings and sing songs round campfires well into middle age. So that’s the main ones taken care of – who else? The Greens are a bunch of scary bearded sandal-wearing hippies tied to trees. UKIP only really care about one thing and it’s not the one thing that the rest of us really care about. White cloth over the head is very much out this season so the BNP are definitely not an option – and besides, raw egg isn’t that tasty when it’s dripping down your face. After that, what are you left with? The Socialist Workers Party? The Libertarian Party? This started off with you wanting to Make A Difference, not become an evil dork! You’re not about to spend the rest of your life ranting on the internet/muttering in dark smoky rooms1 about the authoritarian/bourgeoisie1 conspiracy that’s out to subvert the sheeple who are slumbering to their doom.

And the overriding feeling from the lot of them is that they aren’t really out to make a difference – they’re out to make a war. They want to make a statement, or spread a message. They want to get one over the other guys.

It’s very easy to diagnose this problem. God knows I’ve said it before, the perpetually irritated one outlined much the same thing rather brilliantly just this morning, and the concept formed the backbone of the best episode of The Thick Of It so far2. As with all things, though, offering solutions is a much harder task than defining problems.

So, here’s my idea: how about we all start just ignoring the various political parties wherever we can. Forget about their self-aggrandising, shrug off their ridiculously overblown accusations about their opponents. Ignore their posturing and their blatant vote-grabs.

Instead, let’s start treating them like religious bodies – for the similarities are indeed quite striking. Like religions, their importance depends entirely on us believing in their importance; like religions their strength is drawn from the unity and zealotry of their members and supporters; like religions they regularly condemn and attempt to suppress those who choose not to follow their ideals and ideologies. Like religions, they have been faced with an ever-increasing irrelevance in the modern world, and like religions their response has not been to accept this fact or work to make themselves more relevant, but instead to grow more zealous and more self-assured, to protest and assure us that they are extremely important, and to make dire warnings about what might happen if they were allowed to die away.

Most of us have learned to take this sort of behaviour from an Archbishop or senior Rabbi with a knowing roll of the eyes and a cluck of the tongue. So why have we not figured out how to do the same when politicians start explaining how much belief they have in the party system, or how important it is that people Get Involved in party politics?

Let’s start treating them like the religions that they are – and let’s start recognising that there’s a whole lot of value in being an atheist.

PS: At the precise moment my fingers were hovering above the ‘publish post’ keystroke, I was distracted by this tweet which lead to this blog post about games machines and political parties which renewed a little of my faith in the world. Go read it.

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  2. Confession: I’m kind of new to The Thick of It – but that episode was so good that I forced it upon my long-suffering wife, who also agreed it was fantastic, having never watched the series before. [↩]