RENEWING THE REPUBLIC: Today's article in this series represents a shift of gear. Helena Kennedy QC (Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws since 1997) is a British Labour Party member of the House of Lords. She is an avowed democrat and much of her professional life in both law and politics has involved promoting civil liberties and human rights, about which she has written extensively.
She has also been a driving force behind Power 2010, a rolling experiment in deliberative democracy which seeks to restore faith and participation in politics in the UK. Power 2010 provides a structure through which ordinary members of the public can say what sort of democracy they want in Britain and reinvigorate politics.
Power 2010 invited people to be “part of a nationwide campaign to reinvigorate our democracy from the bottom up”. This article explains why and how the process works.
AFTER THE last UK general election, when more people abstained than voted for the government, I was appointed by the Joseph Rowntree charitable and reform trusts to chair an inquiry into political disengagement. Why were the public voting in smaller numbers and why were so few people joining political parties? More people now belong to the National Trust or the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds than belong to all the parties put together.
The Power Commission comprised people from across the political divide and included young and older commissioners who were not politically affiliated at all. It got its name because we very quickly realised that the crisis in contemporary democracy is all about power – who has it, how it is exercised, how it has changed. The reason for disillusionment with politics is that people feel powerless. They feel their voices are not heard. They see the rich buy access to Downing Street; they watch Rupert Murdoch decide whether there is a referendum on the European Convention; they witness the tabloids dictate policy and they see unregulated markets decimate their savings, their mortgages and their pensions, with parliament appearing supine in the face of these events.
The disengagement of the British public from politics is not surprising. The expenses scandal, which exposed wholesale fiddling of MPs’ and peers’ allowances on the part of all parties, fed into a pre-existing suspicion that too many politicians were in politics to line their own pockets. The recent exposure of Tony Blair making £20 million since leaving office and some of his ex-ministers jumping ship and hawking their wares to the private sector for incredible sums has added to a public sense of revulsion and belief that our polity is morally bankrupt and that ethics are disappearing from public life.
However, the blame cannot all be put at the door of politicians. Society has changed. Lives are being lived in different ways, but the political institutions and the main political parties have failed to keep up. We have seen the shift away from industrial society where the two main political parties represented two political interest groups, the bosses and the workers. And although class divisions are as defining of life chances as they ever were, people no longer have the same tribal attachments or ways of describing themselves as in the past.
We have seen a huge change in communications, which means that political leaders do not need old-fashioned party structures to communicate with the public. They can do it from the sofas of breakfast television and they think they can find out what the public wants through the marketing strategies of business – polling and focus groups: “Tell us what you like and we will see if we can give it to you”. It leaves people feeling disconnected because voting once every four or five years does not feel like real engagement. Asking people set questions in focus groups or polling is a poor substitute for real democratic processes.
Voting itself seems irrelevant to increasing numbers of people because even if there is a candidate you like, the nature of the UK’s first-past-the-post system is such that if you are in a constituency where the outcome is preordained and your favoured choice is not going to win, you may feel there is no point turning out to the draughty church hall and inserting your vote in the ballot box.
But the disconnect is also about feeling that there is no choice, despite our living in the era when “choice” is the dominant political mantra, there is very little on offer as the main parties now seem to be much the same. Each steals the clothes of the other if there seems to be gain in it. The public have also come to realise that even members of parliament have little say because all the decisions are made by a handful of people at the centre and then driven through the system. Politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the hands of privileged elites as if democracy has run out of steam. And into the bargain, the public recognise that a lot of power emanates from places beyond our shores – be it the White House which beguiled other countries’ leaders into wars; the globalised corporate world and the international banking system, which screwed the global economy; or the EU, which many people have come to distrust.
The Power Report recommended root and branch reform, which involved three major shifts in political practice:
- A rebalancing of power from the executive and unaccountable bodies towards parliament and local government;
- The introduction of greater responsiveness and choice into the electoral and party systems;
- The giving to citizens of a much more direct and focused say over political decisions and policies.
The changes would in practice mean a fair voting system – preferably PR – a reformed, mainly elected, House of Lords; a reformed party funding system with caps on donations; a reformed House of Commons with less power to the whips, stronger select committees and stronger powers for parliament to initiate legislation, inquiries, etc. It would also involve introducing transparency on all lobbying. And, vitally, citizens themselves would have to be given more rights to initiate legislative processes, public inquiries and hearings into public bodies.
The political parties all made positive noises about the Power Report but nothing much actually happened. Why would the beneficiaries of the present system want to change it? For them it works. It is the public who feel disenfranchised.
And now we in Britain are already in election mode. Only this week the two main parties have gone head to head on party funding. Labour has been exposing non-domiciled Tory peer and party bankroller, Lord Ashcroft, for his deceit in obtaining a seat in the unelected House of Lords on the promise of putting his affairs in order and paying his taxes – which he has failed to do. The Tories have got their own back by denouncing Labour’s dependence on union financing, using Unite, the British Airways union, as their sample bogeyman.
Same old stuff. Such is the nature of elections, you might say. But this time the fight is going to be particularly vicious because the parties are desperate to persuade the public that voting could make a difference, that there is a choice between the parties. Who faced the banking crisis with the right policies? Who will cut deeper into public services to get the country out of debt? Who will reform the system? Who took the UK to war? Who underfunds soldiers?
Since the public have been deprived of grown-up discussions about politics for so long, they may just decide that they are so profoundly disillusioned with party politics that they might as well stay at home. The election, we are told, will be decided in the marginals – the swing seats where the conservatives are investing so much of Ashcroft’s money. So populist policies rule the day.
And the tragedy of low turnouts is that governments can still have huge majorities. Questions about legitimacy arise when a government gains power with only 35 per cent of voters casting in their favour. This is a travesty for democracy. Ways have to found to engage people.
British people are not apathetic. They still volunteer in huge numbers; they marched against the Iraq war and for the countryside; they sign petitions and run marathons for charity. They sit as school governors, read with children who have learning difficulties, visit prisons. They recycle their waste, campaign for better street lighting, send donations to the people of Haiti.
What they no longer want to do is join a party or engage with formal politics. As a result democracy is being hollowed out.
The answer to this crisis is to rethink how we do politics. What the UK needs is a parliament committed to systemic reform. The only way this will happen is if MPs are forced to make a commitment to their constituents to support reform – Out with the Lords! Out with first-past-the-post! Out with rich donors corrupting the system! Out with MPs jumping into jobs with the privatised companies they helped create while in office!
This is why Power 2010 has created a pledge card based on certain key reform priorities which citizens voted for online. Voters can use it in quizzing their prospective MPs.
Why should we care? As my granny would say, “sure, isn’t it the government that always wins?” It matters because a healthy society depends on it and our children deserve something better than we now have.