The British Crisis

Melissa Lane joins the discussion of the possible strategies for democratic reform post-expenses launched by Anthony Barnett in his recent post.

Anthony Barnett > Peter Oborne > Melissa Lane

Anthony's 7 options is an excellent clarification of the choices we face.  I also agree with Peter Oborne that the rehabilitation of parliament is critical.  Attacks on parliament as a meaningless charade from both the left and the right were a key part of the delegitimisation of liberalism in the Weimar Republic, echoed contemporaneously in France and Italy especially.  If people give up their faith in parliament, right-wing 'solutions' will be quickly offered.  

So the question is how to go forward: how to combine a meaningful expression of public opinion with the prospect of real change within the actual system.  I would argue for an iterative process: start with a series of citizen juries, say one per region, to generate a shortlist of ideas to feed into public meetings, and then synthesize those results back into a citizen jury panel. Or, start with just the pure local meetings, but then work up from the first round to a more focused agenda for the second round.  As Philip Pettit has pointed out, people can participate as 'editors' as well as 'authors': forms of participation will have to be diverse if the whole process is going to be both inclusive and productive.

A poll commissioned by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust and reported in today’s Guardian and by Stuart Weir indicates that 75 per cent of those questioned believe either that the UK’s system of government could be ‘improved a great deal’ or that it could be improved ‘quite a lot’. A mere 3 per cent suggest that the system works well and could not be improved at all. The poll also suggests a clear majority – over 60 per cent - would be in favour of a more proportional electoral system.

The question asking survey respondents to assess the current system for governing Britain has been asked in an identical form in 15 surveys since 1973 and on a regular basis since 1991.  The ‘net’ score of -50 per cent in 2009 for faith in the system (calculated as the percentage largely in favour of leaving the system alone minus the percentage suggesting significant reforms are required) is the second lowest ever recorded (narrowly beaten only by the score of -53 per cent in 1995). The 42 per cent proportion responding that the system needs a great deal of improvement is the highest ever.

The results for 2009 are hardly surprising, other than for the fact that there are 3 per cent who somehow continue to believe that the system ‘works extremely well and could not be improved’. Likewise, nobody doubts that support for major constitutional and electoral reforms has received an enormous boost from the revelations surrounding MPs expenses. But everyone knows that these are exceptional times politically. To what extent do poll results like this reflect a deep-seated desire for system reforms?

I've just blogged on Cif my response to Tom Watson MP's sudden Damascene conversion to electoral reform (of the unproportional AV kind), which, by wonderful coincidence, has happened at the same time his leader, Gordon Brown, has converted and not long before his party faces a thrashing in the polls. We deserve better than this!

The word "crisis" is perhaps one of the most over-used in the lexicon, but when it comes to the astonishing collapse of political and economic orthodoxies in recent months it rings undeniably true. Is it a "good" crisis? Established modes of thinking and organisation have been de-legitimated but it's not yet clear that anything radically new or different is going to take their place. Thinkers like Jeremy Gilbert have joined a growing call for new democratic forms to give individuals more meaningful control over their own lives, but so far the response from the political elite can best be described as "reforming so as to preserve".

Can anything positive be taken from the simultaneous collapse in trust in the political system and the financial markets? How do we build on this crisis to secure much better liberty and democracy in the 21^st century? 

This Saturday you are invited to join a panel of thinkers and activists to discuss these questions and more at a workshop on "Radical democracy and imagination: people and power after the meltdown".

It's taking place 1.30 - 2.45pm at the excellent Compass conference at the Institute of Education in Bloomsbury. On the panel will be our very own Anthony Barnett (founder of openDemocracy, first director of Charter 88 and Co-Director of the Convention on Modern Liberty), Gerry Hassan (author, political commentator and columnist for the Scotsman), Liam Taylor (member of Climate Camp) and David Babbs (38 degrees) and hopefully we'll be joined by Suzanne Moore (Mail on Sunday) and Oxford philosopher Stuart White.

We'll be launching a major initiative at the conference to help build an open movement for democratic reform to influence candidates and parties before the next election. There are lots of other great speakers and workshops there too and only a small handful of tickets left. If you haven't got yours already, get one here.

Labour is in an historic crisis. It has been pummelled in the council and Euro elections. Gordon Brown's Premiership hangs on a loose thread. A wider existential crisis now faces Labour about its purpose, who it represents and its future.

Labour Government's have faced huge crises before and faced into the abyss. They have experienced division and fratricide and ultimately been defeated at the polls. In post-war times three Labour Governments have fallen from power, 1951, 1970 and 1979, each of which offer lessons for today.

In 1951 after the Attlee administration fell from office, the party was plunged into a battle between the Gaitskellite right and Bevanite left. The Gaitskellites wanted Labour to modernise, drop nationalisation and emphasise redistribution. The Bevanites stressed the need for a more traditional approach and extending nationalisation.

The Gaitskellites are seen by some as the precursors of the Blairites - the former trying after Labour's third defeat in 1959 to abandon Clause Four - something Blair finally accomplished in 2005. The Gaitskellites talked of changing the name of the party to embrace the middle classes and aspiration; the Blairites did it creating ‘New Labour'. This comparison is unfair to the Gaitskellites who are like left-wingers compared to the Blairites with their emphasis on public spending redistribution and greater equality.

I've taken a selection of some of the more interesting commentary and analysis from today's papers.

Matthew D'Ancona in the Telegraph is still convinced Brown will be toppled but reckons it'll be the Parliamentary Labour Party that sticks the knife in now that the cowardly Cabinet has bottled it:

As instructive as precedents can be, this crisis really has no direct forebear. More accurately, it is so multi-layered, so bipolar, such a roller-coaster ride that it seems to contain and synthesise all previous leadership crises. Just when you think he's dead, Brown rises like Rasputin. Just when you think he's saved his skin, another minister resigns - for a different reason. Hazel Blears marches out in fury at her treatment over expenses, Jacqui Smith pre-empts the axe, John Hutton goes but stays loyal, Purnell goes and doesn't, Caroline Flint demands a L'Oréal promotion - "Because I'm Worth It" - and then, denied the prize, sends a resignation letter of awesome feminist fury. There is no choreography, no co-ordination, no theme. All the interventions have in common is that they weaken the Prime Minister yet further.

This is the full version of an article I wrote on the need for a citizens' convention which has just gone up on Comment is Free:

The last few weeks have witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of the two main party leaders attempting to outdo each other on democratic reform (with a lot borrowed from the Lib Dems but little credit going their way). At times it has felt like watching a bizarre game of constitutional poker - "I'll see your right of recall, and raise you one Lords reform" - played with no overall strategy or purpose than to appease the wrath of angry voters. With nothing less than the future of British democracy at stake, it's time that we, the people, called their bluff.

A bill introduced into Parliament today by constitutional campaigners aims to do just that. The Public Accountability and Political Ethics Bill would establish a citizens' convention composed of one hundred people selected by lot from the electoral register to look at ways to clean up and reform the UK's political system. They would deliberate on urgent questions of democratic reform before submitting their recommendations in a report to be enacted swiftly by Parliament unless, the Prime Minister, or Parliament, disagrees with them, in which case either of them, or 5% of citizens, could call a referendum on the issue.

Gordon Brown has great clunking feet, too, and he has an uncanny knack of putting them in it - usually because he is being so transparently manipulative and canny. His new proposal to set a minimum service commitment for MPs, "naming and shaming" and possibly ejection from their seats of those who break it is a populist gimmick, unworkable, centralising and constitutionally wrong-headed.

Doh, you can see the thought processes clunking through his brain.  I have to keep up with Cameron; I must show I can be tough with MPs; I must home in on their work with constituents; ah, more central control, that's tough. But the one thing that most MPs do concentrate on is wooing their constituents, keeping abreast of their correspondence, taking up individual and constituency cases.  I don't mean to be cynical, but there is obviously a strong incentive behind their local activity: it all reinforces the incumbency factor and they can throw money at it - taxpayers' money that too often serves a largely party political end.

Meanwhile, Parliament and MPs are failing in their primary duty: to check all Bills with great care, to check the flow of secondary legislation, to hold government to account for its policies and actions.  That's why we need a reinvigorated House of Commons, that's why we need independent-minded MPs, that's why we need a proportional election system.

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.

This just gets more and more outrageous, doesn't it? Via the Evening Standard's Paul Waugh comes this transcript of Labour MP Jane Griffths describing to Radio 4 programme The Report how party whips taught her to abuse the expenses system.

"I don't drive a car, I never have, so didn't claim any mileage allowance for travel in the constituency. My whip said to me 'You don't claim mileage, why not?'

"I said 'well, because I don't drive a car'. He said 'You must get a taxi sometimes?' I said 'I do sometimes but not that often'. '

"No,' he said, 'There's an allowance of £250 per month for taxis and you don't have to give receipts, you just fill in a form that says £250 for taxis. And he said 'I want you to claim that'.

"So I did because it would get the whips off my back telling me to claim for things. So I had that money that morally I shouldn't have".

Waugh has done the maths: "That's a cool £3,000 a year effectively stolen from the taxpayer. Over a four-year term, that's £12,000. Will Ms Griffiths now tell us who the whip was? Or does she fear that Plod will be at her door too?" From the picture that has emerged over the last few weeks, this was clearly part of a pattern of behaviour where those that didn't fiddle were encouraged to do so by their more practiced colleagues who would make them feel guilty for letting the side down and making others look bad. The whole culture, not just a few individuals, has been corrupt and corrupting, starting at the head with the Speaker and the party whips. You can listen to the Radio 4 show, which contains an account of former Fees Office staff, MPs and others on how the scandal was allowed to develop, here.