Dan Leighton Every so often the discretionary powers available to our politicians come along and bite them on the backside. The debacle over the snap election that never was and the oncoming car crash that is the EU ‘treatitution’ are the latest additions to the litany of constitutional blowbacks that regularly plague the UK. The point in both instances is not that Gordon Brown is inclined to act in his party’s short-term interests (despite what he may have us believe, he is of human rather than divine origin) but that there is nothing in the way of constitutional rules that restrained him from doing so. As long as politicians have the capacity to make self-serving decisions over elections and referendums, the temptation to use them will be too great to resist.
Yet as Gordon Brown is finding out to considerable cost, availing one self of these discretionary powers can inflict lasting, perhaps even fatal, wounds to one’s reputation.
It is a lazy truism that people in the Dog and Duck don’t care about constitutional reform. Yet nothing appears to irritate them more than politicians manipulating the democratic process to their own advantage. It’s no coincidence that these recent ‘trust busting’ issues relate to the discretionary power the executive has over the democratic process itself.
Generic arguments about the need for ‘flexibility’ just don’t cut the mustard when it comes to the democratic rules of the game. The political philosopher Stephen Holmes has argued that liberal constitutionalism is premised on the art of self-binding. Credible democracy demands institutional restraints on power. That is, those in power have to be bound - or in the UK bind themselves - to pre-determined rules to prevent themselves from acting on the type of self-interested impulses that undermines their own authority. Just as we place our alarm clocks away from our beds as a pre-commitment to getting up rather than hitting the snooze button.
How far does to the Government’s agenda of constitutional reform contain a meaningful self-binding strategy? Where are the pre-commitments to the public good to be found? . The rules governing the timing of elections and the reason for referendums would be obvious candidates here. Yet they are not on the Governments extremely large constitutional reform agenda.
We shall have to wait and see whether the Lib Dems well timed campaign for fixed term elections, soon to be reinforced, as Facebook members will know, by the Iain Dale inspired (and OK supported) campaign Fixed Term, changes this. True, Brown has promised to bind the power of the executive by getting rid of (or ‘limiting’) the prerogative powers and passing them over to parliament. But as many have pointed out, this looks ike a trick, a prime minister with a workable, let alone large, parliamentary majority makes such a transfer of power more symbolic than real. But even were we to grant this will make a difference, will it be a difference that does anything to restore trust in our political system? If the Prime Minster does not remove his own discretionary powers over the democratic process will any other endeavours bring any wider symbolic returns? Brown made such a move when he gave the Bank of England independence over interest rates but is clearly less enamoured with doing the same when it comes to the democratic process.
The Tories faux shock at an incumbent PM ‘playing politics’ with the timing of the election wilfully misses the point. Who, given the choice, wouldn’t call an election when they seemed most likely to win? Likewise, given the choice, who would call a referendum they are likely to lose?
The point is they shouldn’t have the choice in the first place.
For politicians own sake they need to let go of the politics of angelic good intentions and start building the architecture for a more human politics of democratic accountability.
