Former Labour minister says Merkel acting in overbearing manner and politicians risk alienating public
The former cabinet minister David Blunkett will on Monday deliver a stinging attack on "the dangerous overbearing imperialism of Germany", as he makes a call to find new ways to end public disengagement with politics and strengthen the power of elected politicians to combat the power of unfettered markets.
He accuses the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, of trying to "veto the voters" in sovereign countries, and claims that without German-imposed austerity measures, the crises in Spain and Greece might not have happened.
Warning about new levels of alienation from politics in the UK, Blunkett claims governments can only act as a counterweight to the debilitating global power of bond markets and technocrats if they have an engaged electorate behind them.
He says in a pamphlet titled In Defence of Politics, with a foreword by the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, that rebuilding interest in politics from the bottom up will need initiatives to help school governors, community health commissioning groups and even state funding of campaigns such as Make Poverty History. Recent constitutional reforms such as an elected House of Lords are irrelevant to re-engaging ordinary people with the potential power of democracy and collective action, he claims.
"The left has to put a shot of electricity back in the political system and find new ways of re-engaging people with government, or else it will be lost, and people will turn to the politics of grievance offered by extremists. A functioning, engaged political democracy has to be the countervailing force against the unfettered and unregulated market. You rebuild commitment to the political process from the bottom, and not from top-down reforms," he said.
Blunkett, one of the older heads that advises Miliband, also addresses:
• what he regards as the irrelevance of the Leveson inquiry. He believes it has failed to address the real risk that the entire traditional newspaper industry is on the brink of commercial collapse, leading to a decline in reliable journalism – a bulwark of democracy. He proposes a tax on search engines, such as Google, recycling journalism. "If proper journalism goes down the pan, we are all doomed", he said.
• the likelihood that vast swaths of local government services will after 2015 be delivered by volunteers, or by fractured education and health services for which there is no true accountability.
• the failure of Labour politicians to offer voters a coherent narrative for the causes of the banking crisis of 2008, so allowing the right and the bond markets to seize back control of the argument on the economy.
In an accompanying interview, Blunkett says the bureaucracy and interference of the EU has been a force for alienation in the UK, saying we need to be crystal clear about what Europe does". He singles out Germany for the way in which it has sought to impose its thinking across Europe on how to respond to the economic crisis.
He said: "Angela Merkel has behaved in a very dangerous, almost imperialist, manner. It is ironic that Europe was established to stop one individual government having overbearing power, and here we are.
"It could be described as nothing short of a coup in terms of what occurred in Greece, with the removal of the prime minister, and in Italy, with the removal of both the prime minister and the cabinet.
Blunkett said: "No sooner had the voters given their verdict than the chancellor of Germany was seeking to veto the voters with the argument that recently signed pacts cannot be easily unpicked by incoming governments. The tone and nature of the German response was, however, deeply unhelpful and the height of arrogance. Once again, the Germans were appearing to believe that they had the right (or their leadership had the right) to trump the decisions of voters in individual sovereign countries".
He claimed: "If Germany had been willing to be flexible earlier, we probably would not had the last three years".
He also warns that greater transparency about the lives of elected politicians has increased rather than decreased voter scepticism. "More is known about our professional politicians than in the whole of our history. Their lives, their income, their contacts are registered, surveyed and commented upon; a transformation from the much-revered and often grossly overblown view of the past. Taken together, the24-hour, seven-day-a-week news, instant communication through the internet and social media such as Twitter, has changed the terms on which we do our politics."
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