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Parliament and the Public

My Lords, first, I pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley, who made a terrific speech. It was a good speech because it reeked of integrity, of decency and of realism. If we want an example of the sort of politician whom the public respect, my noble friend is exactly that. She has always been popular and well respected. She is the kind of person who puts politics in a good light. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Puttnam on producing an exemplary report. What is so impressive is that it is both honest about the seriousness of the problem and uncompromising in the radicalism of its solutions. I only wish that I could make films as well as my noble friend can write reports. We do face a crisis of political engagement. If a visitor came from Mars and observed the polling in the last general election, their impression would not be that this party or that policy is preferred, but that the whole political process is viewed with something that approaches bemused contempt. In the Hansard Society report, Enhancing Engagement, the word ““politics”” is associated with sentiments like, ““hypocrite””, ““dishonest””, ““liar””, ““self promotion””, ““greed””, ““selfish”” and ““disdainful””, to name only some of the best of them. They are entirely typical. Let us have no illusions here; this is what the public are saying. Politics are, in the first years of the 21st century, becoming a minority sport. The institutions of politics as we know them and often love them—we love them here—their procedures, culture, language and rules, are turning away the public they seek to serve. The game of politics is, by and large, played in the same way by the same old rules, but the stadium is increasingly empty and the crowd is melting away. The crisis of political engagement has no single cause, a point which has been made clear in our debate. It flows from the whirlwind of change that has transformed so much in recent years. Globalisation has sucked power upwards, sweeping away the traditional geography of politics. Citizens feel increasingly insecure and disempowered. Consumer expectations have been transformed so that we accept as normal qualities such as choice, quality, responsiveness, consistency, personalisation, and even a measure of control. Traditional institutions have lost their right to unchallenged respect. Trust has to be earned and depends on authenticity, transparency, a moral cause and, increasingly, responsiveness. The politics of Westminster have become divorced from the politics of the people. Mums in the focus groups that have become so popular in this House today recoil at the notion of politics, but are intensely political in their interests and their lives. Young people regard rejection of politics as normal but are involved in more political activity than ever before. Politics are like a river that has burst its bank and is flowing in one direction while the riverbed continues in another. Westminster politics goes one way, the people’s politics another. Finally, the supply of information has exploded; it is continuous, intensive, personal and interactive. These factors alone would challenge politics, but compounding them is the breakdown in trust between politicians and the media which now contaminates so much of our political discourse. Steven Barnett, Professor of Media Studies at Westminster University, believes we have entered a ““new age of media contempt””, in which politicians are treated routinely as a lower form of life. On the other side, many in the media believe that it is the default mode of politicians to dissemble and it is the media’s duty to expose this. We have all become trapped in a circle of disengagement. Consumers with raised expectations, citizens with insecurities, a media edging towards the destructive, politicians who feel defensive in the face of unrelenting scrutiny—all these factors reinforce each other. The process does not start in one place alone and the solutions do not lie in one place alone. If we want to change politics, everyone—the media, political parties, citizens—will have to play their part. We are all responsible; we all have to make a difference. But the challenge is vast. We have to move from the politics of disengagement to the politics of participation in which involvement is continuous, the political process accessible and political institutions responsive. This is a very long journey, but the first steps are clear. We need a new settlement between media and politicians. The age of contempt has to end. Politicians need to be more open and more transparent; the media need to be less hostile and destructive. The London School of Economics and the University of the Arts in London are creating a joint initiative, in which I am involved, in an attempt to strengthen confidence in the media and to help restore trust between media and politics. The poison has to leave the system. Journalists have their job to do but politicians are, for the most part, decent people, serving the public interest as best they can, and both sides need to recognise this. We need to modernise radically the institutions of politics. This is where the Hansard Society report is so useful and so right. Our political institutions must be shaped around politics as they are, not politics as we would like them to be. The key here is accessibility and responsiveness. This is an old building, but it is a fascinating one. We need everyone, not only the lucky few who visit or report on it, to see it as it is. Television coverage of Parliament should be as unconstrained as possible. We need to uproot Parliament and take it to the public. Parliamentary committees—even, possibly, the whole House on occasion—should move to regional centres. We need interactive communication between Parliament and the people. At first, this can be just communication, but then possibly petitions and citizen’s initiatives with real political content. We need to rethink what democracy means in the early 21st century. Democracy in this modern era cannot mean only elections every four years or so; we have to move to continual involvement and dialogue. As involvement increases, so does trust. Citizens’ juries work. They are not a complete democratic model but they are a hothouse of democratic possibility. People need real mechanisms that involve them in decisions that affect them. Politics and political campaigning must become more local, more interactive, more of a partnership. Finally, we need a new culture of politics. I have lost count of the number of times I have shown a television bulletin to a group of the electorate and they have looked on bemused and uncomprehending. They see politicians fighting and commentators interpreting arcane events in a way that simply leaves them cold. That is, incidentally, why the consensual character of this House, if only anyone knew about it, is so close to what the public now prefer. The solution is not sensationalism or entertainment, but relevance. Everyone—politicians, reporters, commentators, the public—wants the same thing: they want the hard truth without embellishment, explained in language that people can understand. People are wise. They know that the problems are complex, cannot be solved overnight, and may not even be solvable at all. They want to be treated as adults; they should be—they can take it. There is a very long way to go to fix all this. It will not be solved by one silver bullet but a complex myriad of solutions, but solved it will be, and this report is an outstanding place to start. I congratulate the authors of the report, and I congratulate my noble friend the Leader of the House on facilitating this debate.