Michael Calderbank's blog

With their most impeccably Sir-Humphrey like condescension, the resident experts on Parliamentary procedure and Whitehall wonkery at UCL's Constitution Unit have decreed that the public are to be denied the right to change the political system. Despite the fact that we were first promised a referendum in the manifesto of a government we elected on a landslide twelve years ago, we need to understand that these things take time. There might be an overwhelming sense that Westminster is in crisis - that the political system is fundamentally lacking legitimacy and accountability - but still, opening the doors to change is the very last thing that the system is geared up to do. To try to change things would mean introducing measures that might be - how awful! -"controversial" for the unelected upper House or - shock horror! - "strongly contested" by their lordships.

But nowhere in their latest press release do the academics explain why the government could not, if the political will was there, introduce legislation allowing for a referendum on a more proportional electoral system to coincide with a May General Election. Apparently, there is insufficient time for a "public education campaign", despite the fact that explanations of the Alternative Vote Plus proposals of the Jenkins Commission have been in the public domain for eleven years! Nowhere do Professor Robert Hazell and colleagues recognise the depth of public awareness that the present system is fundamentally broken in requiring urgent change. Voters who find that the majority of a miscreant MP is virtually impregnable under First Past the Post are only too well "aware" that the system is in urgent need of reform.

Michael Calderbank (London) reviews Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen.

On April 9th 1981 Bobby Sands, a 27 year-old prisoner on hunger strike in “H-blocks” of HMS Maze prison (known to republicans as Long Kesh), was elected Member of Parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, having polled over 30,000 votes. This was a momentous episode not only in British (or “British”) electoral history, but in the course of the republican struggle and possibly in the future of politics in the six counties. Yet Steve McQueen’s harrowing dramatisation of Sands’ tragic story sees fit only to mention this remarkable political episode in the closing credits. This has the effective of casting the wider social context of the hunger strikes into the background, as the spotlight focuses forensically on the horror of Sands’ imprisonment and the tragedy of his self-sacrifice.

Michael Calderbank (ERS): Alexandra Runswick commends David Davis for forcing a by-election for his Haltemprice and Howden seat and thereby raising a pertinent question about our concern for civil liberties, "regardless of whether this was the best way to do it". Whilst I share the widespread dissension from the government's insistence on 42 days, I don't think we can simply skate over the dubious democratic legitimacy of this artificially contrived by-election.

Maybe Davis has indeed been successful in posing the question of "how much do you value your rights and freedoms", but it's far from clear that that's the only question being asked, and - more worryingly still - it is extremely unclear how this particular by-election is in a position to answer it conclusively. Whether the by-election is seen as a narrowly defined plebiscite on the question of 42 days, or on the wider philosophical question of our basic liberties, these are surely issues of concern to the nation as a whole. It is far from clear why a few thousand voters in a relatively affluent part of the rural East Riding of Yorkshire should get to arbitrate on our collective behalf. And were Davis to be re-elected with an increased majority, as seems likely, would the good burghers of this constituency feel assured that their liberties would be championed by an MP who supports the death penalty and attacks trade union rights? Would a resounding victory over Miss Great Britain and the Monster Raving Loony party really signify a historic expression of liberal resistance to an increasingly authoritarian state?