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Democracy: POWER Inquiry

My Lords, it is a delight for me to follow the elegant and entertaining maiden speech of my old friend and colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Lee of Trafford. He joins us with vast experience as a parliamentarian, and as a distinguished former Minister of defence and of tourism. He has given important public service outside Parliament, particularly in the fields of culture and health. He therefore comes formidably equipped to contribute to the deliberations of your Lordships’ House. He also brings something else: he is one of that small group of people who have had the privilege to serve in Parliament as a member of more than one party. We like to think that that experience gives us a special perspective and even a certain additional insight. We very much look forward to the noble Lord’s contributions. His excellent maiden speech followed the wonderful maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach. The Power commission, chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, has usefully focused our attention on a variety of issues, particularly disaffection and disengagement from formal politics. This is not a new concern. I remember my dismay, following the 1992 election, when, if I recall aright, we found that only 42 per cent of 18 to 24 year-olds had taken the trouble to vote. I thought then that perhaps that was the writing on the wall for Westminster democracy. But for many years even before then Members of Parliament had been weeping into their soup in parliamentary dining clubs as they bemoaned the decline of Parliament. We need to place our present discontents in the perspective of history. Professor Paul Langford, in his remarkably interesting History of Parliament Trust lecture, told us that concerns about the debility of Parliament are nothing new. Walpole’s opponents pictured a time when Members of Parliament would serve as footmen in livery for the Prime Minister of the day. Equally, the debility of Cabinet government is a longstanding concern. Sheridan remarked of Pitt the Younger:"““There was no counting of noses in his Cabinet. Only one nose as large as the steeple of Strasbourg””." Ronald Butt, in The Power of Parliament, quoted by Peter Riddell in Parliament Under Blair, wrote:"““Criticism of Parliament has a long history. In this century””—" he was writing in 1967—"““it has been almost incessant since parliamentarians were depressed after World War One by a sense of lost independence and by the encroachment of bureaucracy and government action””." He chronicles complaints that recurred throughout the 20th century: the impotence of Back-Benchers, the low ability of Members, the frustration of life at Westminster, the failure of the press to report Parliament adequately and the need to modernise Parliament. Public contempt for politicians was perhaps even more virulent in the 18th century. The satire of The Craftsman and the cartoons of James Gillray may make the satire of Private Eye and the cartoons of Gerald Scarfe seem anodyne. But that these issues and problems are not new does not make it less important that we think seriously about them. We should be grateful to the noble Baroness and her commission for the prompt that they have given us. Undoubtedly, there is now a perception among both the public and politicians that power and decision-taking happen in places other than in our formal institutions of politics and government, and in ways that are not democratically accountable: in the media, at the Bank of England, among regulators and quangos, in the courts, at Brussels, in the White House, and in the activities of global capitalism and of the World Trade Organisation, to give but a small selection. So parliamentary sovereignty and democratic government may seem a charade to many people. It is important that we persuade them that parliamentary government is still effective and valuable. The commission understates the problem regarding the media. The media may, indeed, not prompt disengagement but they do make for disaffection. John Lloyd, in his book What the Media are Doing to Our Politics, proposes that there is a master myth of today’s media that politics is a degraded activity. The Hutton report had to be a whitewash. The noble Lord, Lord Gould, spoke powerfully on that issue. It seems to have become de rigueur—as John Lloyd, a journalist, says—to present politicians as stupid, incompetent, absurd, on the make, creeping and crawling to the Whips, sleazy and contemptible. The indictment of the media is almost as severe: that they are guilty of simplification, partiality, casualness with fact, and, above all, trivialisation. Issues are instantly converted into matters of personality and gossip. It is assumed that the national attention span is minimal. The reporting of Parliament has been reduced to sketch writing and relegated to long wave. Parliament is seen as an unsatisfactory subset of the entertainment industry. The press proceeds on too many ignoble assumptions about human nature, and the human nature of politicians in particular. John Lloyd quotes Harold Evans, as editor of the Sunday Times, offering a precept to his staff:"““Always ask yourself when you interview a politician, why is this bastard lying to me?””" Political journalists are not just reporters and commentators, they are engaged in a competition for power. The ““Today”” studio and the ““Newsnight”” studio are to be the real debating chambers of the nation and the zones of political accountability. The ultimate quest of too many members of the media pack is to bring down a Minister, and, best of all, to bring down the Prime Minister. Woodward and Bernstein are seen as role models. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, in a Reith lecture observed that if you cannot trust the media, the wells of public discourse are poisoned. Of course, there is great ability and, indeed, great integrity among a number of political journalists, but the able, decent and democratically responsible among them do not prevail against the cultural momentum and commercial imperatives that I have sketched. Presumably, the commissioners do not agree or do not take such a worried view. Perhaps I have caricaturised the position, but the reality seems to me a poisoned symbiosis between politics and journalism, which does not make for a joyous democracy. The commission regrets that there are no more grand ideologies to fire and mobilise the citizens of our democracy. In truth, British politics has never been very ideological. The greatest Conservative thinkers, such as Burke and Oakeshott, have never articulated Conservatism as an ideology, more a view of life hardly susceptible to the strong delineation of ideology. Fabian socialism and Crosslandite social democracy were dilute ideologies compared to the schemes of the Left elsewhere in Europe. Politics, of course, must be constructed on values, but whole-hog ideology—fascism, communism and, I dare say, Thatcherism as expressed by some of its crasser interpreters—does not conduce to happiness. Ideology ignores inconvenient complexity, economic and human cost, the fact that you need to break eggs if you are going to make an omelette, and it makes for arrogance and the very authoritarianism in politics that the commission deplores. So I do not share the commission’s hankering for more ideology in place of the intelligent pragmatism and discipline, tempered by a principled concern for social justice, which characterises our present Government, and which, we live in hope, will in due course characterise the Liberal Democrat and Conservative Parties under their new leaderships. Politics, policy-making and government are tough and difficult. More public participation is, of course, an admirable objective which we all share and, indeed, it will happen in a whole variety of new ways. We have to take account of that. But amateurism will not provide what is needed. The commissioners are too fastidious about politics. As all of us who are veteran politicians know, elections will not be won with kid gloves. They are hard fought, and rightly so. What is at stake are our routes to prosperity or ruin, our choice of values as to what makes for a decent society and how as a country we acquit ourselves in the world. We can wince at the ruthlessness of spin, the stridency of advertising and the grotesqueries of the parties’ characterisations of their opponents, but squeamishness does not win out in the inevitable and proper struggle for power. This distastefulness is for honourable purposes. The public understand that electioneering is a stylised form, more like Noh theatre than the Ballet Russe. The commission is too fastidious also about the Whips. Tales of the black arts of the Whips ought always to be taken with a large pinch of salt. Effective whipping is normally rather gracious in my experience—I speak as a former Whip—and involves a good measure of tolerance. Everyone who is a professional in politics understands the necessity of whipping and, indeed, of determined whipping. Most Members of Parliament have strong personalities; they are individualist, tending to the unruly. They have to be organised if parties are to get anything done in Parliament. The myth that the Whips are running a more and more totalitarian set-up is quickly dispelled if you look at voting patterns in Parliament, as analysed, for example, by Professor Philip Cowley of Nottingham University. I do not share the enthusiasm of the commission for referendums and citizens’ initiatives. How do you pose the right question in a referendum? How do you prevent extraneous factors influencing votes on the specific issue in question? The commission points to California as an encouraging precedent. I visited California when I was higher education Minister, after the vote on proposition 13 had wrecked the tax base of the state. The state-funded University of California, including Berkeley, was in terrible trouble. Politics needs to be able to screen out facile and populist propositions; it can never be exclusively about the single issues that attract popular enthusiasm. Elected representatives must take difficult and unpopular decisions. Politics is a laborious, infinitely complex, largely unglamorous process of reconciling competing interests and forging compromises. It is a profession, which needs to be practised by honourable, courageous, hardworking and able people, and in my observation that is what nearly all Members of Parliament are. Of course, that view is at odds with the negative perception of politicians that was so extensively reported by the commission. Without downplaying the reality and the importance of that view, other aspects of the public view need to be taken into account. One is the phenomenon of scapegoating. It is a commonplace of social psychology that anyone who sets themselves up on a platform or pedestal of authority is bound to attract irrational and negative attitudes. Part of the role of politicians is to take the blame. It is every free-born Briton’s right—and indeed it is a pleasure for many of them—to kick their elected representative. We also have to recognise that there is a plentiful dose of healthy scepticism and irony in what people say about their attitudes to politicians. They do not think that we should get too big for our boots, and they pretend to think that we are all as bad as each other. They like to keep Members of Parliament on permanent notice that they are liable to be kicked out at the next election. Actually, if there are so many safe seats, perhaps voters are not as dissatisfied with orthodox politics and political parties as they tell commissioners and others with clipboards that they are. We may also wonder whether, in the post-industrial culture to which the commission in a salutary way insists politics must adapt, the public may be entertaining some rather fanciful views about what politics is and what politics should be expected to do. Is it appropriate to regard voting or non-voting as a lifestyle choice or as an act of consumerism? Is democracy an exercise in mere individualism or of civic responsibility? Democracy must be predicated on assumptions about maturity and responsibility in its participants. The report romanticises democratic politics—not the politics that we now have but the politics that the commissioners dream of. My view is drearier. Politics will not deliver the good life. Democracy is a necessary but insufficient condition for the good life. If we lead a good life, we do so in our private relationships and in our communities, not by contracting the responsibility out to politicians and public officials. A proliferation of referendums, citizens’ initiatives, new political parties and votes at 16 will, I fear, produce more demagogues, more George Galloways, and more disappointment. Indeed, I was interested to note that sensible and serious sixth formers from Lliswerry School in my old constituency visiting the House of Commons recently told my successor and me that they did not want the right to vote at 16. Our very scepticism about politics may be a saving grace. For many, politics is seen best as a backcloth, only brought into focus when things go badly wrong, rather like an insurance policy that you get out and study when you need to. So long as we do not have hyperinflation or mass unemployment, sectional conflict or total war, so long as the Government are perceived as working for the nation as a whole and performing decently and adequately, most people are content to get on with their lives. They will seek fulfilment in a myriad of other ways and not bother much about politics. Proportional representation may indeed persuade some who do not now vote to do so, though there is not much evidence of that in turnout to the elections to the Welsh Assembly or the Scottish Parliament. However, it could introduce new elements of dissatisfaction, particularly at the choice of Government being taken out of the people’s hands. While I do not agree, therefore, with some parts of the commission’s diagnosis and prescriptions, I do think that the commission is spot-on in identifying the weakness of local government as a very significant issue for our democracy. Local government has taken a pounding at the hands of central government for many years. We therefore must take it as a high and urgent priority to restore a much greater degree of genuine autonomy to local government. Without that, we will continue to experience a withering of our democratic culture.