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Democracy: POWER Inquiry

My Lords, I suspect that I am going to demonstrate some of the Lincolnshire qualities to which my noble friend Lord Taylor of Holbeach referred. We both hail from Lincolnshire, which is England’s premier county. I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, and welcome the opportunity to debate the report of the Power commission, which was chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. She and her commissioners have clearly devoted a great deal of time to investigating the problems with our political system—there are problems—and have produced a substantial report. Regrettably, though, it is flawed in its methodology, its analysis and its prescriptions. In terms of the methodology, the report is deficient at several levels. One is in respect of definition. The title of the report is, Power to the People, but what people? That is basic to the whole exercise. Does the term refer to everybody in the country, to the majority of the people, to those who shout the loudest or to those who can be bothered to participate? At no point are we told, and the report itself appears to jump from one to another of those categories. The report devises means for the majority will to prevail, except when the majority want something that is incompatible with the Human Rights Act, and at other times, as with the experiment in Harrow, for an interested minority to have its say. One cannot retort that it does not matter and that the term encompasses all the categories for the simple reason that they are not necessarily compatible with one another. What happens if the views of the participating minority clash with majority opinion? The report does not tell us and cannot because it never explains who constitutes ““the people””. That leads to the second problem under the rubric of methodology. There is no rigorous analysis or testing of evidence in order to produce findings and conclusions. Instead, reliance is placed on often unsubstantiated assertions by some of the disparate array of groups and individuals who appeared before the commission and on suppositions by the commission itself. There is no attempt to test whether some of the perceptions of witnesses are actually empirically well founded. The views of ““the people””, or, rather, some people, are taken at face value, even when the commission’s own evidence, as at page 92, reveals high levels of ignorance of the subject. At times, in the absence of evidence or, worse still, despite the evidence, the commission rests on its own suppositions and prejudices. In the report, we find phrases such as ““we felt””, ““it is quite conceivable”” and ““our sense on this issue”” as substitutes for evidence. The most glaring example of the willingness of members of the commission to prefer their own unsubstantiated views in the face of hard evidence is to be found in the section entitled ““Red Herrings””. That is the section where they park interpretations that do not fit with their particular view of the world. They dismiss the claim that the decline in voter turnout can be attributed to the absence of competitive elections. They cite the studies carried out on the basis of empirical analysis that supports that claim, but then go on to assert that it seems highly likely that the support for the claim is either overstated in its impact or has been misinterpreted. The counter-evidence they offer is hardly compelling, but they go on to declare,"““we have heard an alternative explanation of the data””." They then write:"““We have not seen any hard evidence to support this thesis, but it seems as plausible as the original interpretation””." So detailed analysis of hard data is dismissed—all those qualified researchers who have laboured long and hard have got it wrong—and someone who happens to have suggested another view, with no hard evidence at all to support it, is given equal, if not more, weight. Indeed, the commission is quite good at ignoring the evidence in front of it. We are invited to believe that a growing disengagement with politics has led to a falling turnout in elections. In which case, one wonders why the turnout in the 1992 general election was higher than that in the 1964 general election. The data are in figure 1 in the report. Membership of political parties has indeed declined, but if one compares the data in figures 1 and 2 in the report there is no obvious correlation. Party membership has declined over time, whereas turnout has not; it has gone up and down, as figure 1 shows, and only dropped dramatically in 2001, when the outcome was obvious. We are also invited to accept that there is a clear dichotomy between formal and informal politics, with people deserting the former in preference to the latter. As Tim Bale, Paul Taggart and Paul Webb of Sussex University point out in a forthcoming article in Political Quarterly, the distinction is not that clear cut. Many of the supposed informal activities are linked to formal politics. According to the data cited in the report, more people contact politicians in an attempt to change law than take part in demonstrations. The percentage of those who volunteer is less than the percentage of those who vote, and no evidence is presented to demonstrate that there is not a close correlation between the two activities. Furthermore, as Bale, Taggart and Webb note, many of the activities listed involve little ongoing commitment. This leads to another problem. We are invited to believe that the explanation for disengagement is structural rather than attitudinal. The existing forms of the political system are not structured in such a way as to enable people to engage. However, as Declan McHugh of the Hansard Society points out in a forthcoming article in Parliamentary Affairs, data from the latest audit of political engagement challenge this assumption. When questioned, people tend to say they want to have a say in the way the country is run and feel that they are presently denied the opportunity. When pushed on what type of activity they would be prepared to engage in, a different picture emerges. As McHugh writes:"““The answers suggest that there is indeed a fairly big gap between their broad desire and concrete intentions””." As he notes, beyond signing petitions, the vast majority of respondents were unwilling to undertake any further action. These findings are consistent with those of other surveys, including those undertaken by Ipsos MORI on participation at local level. MORI found that most people questioned were content to let local authorities get on with governing, provided they are informed about what is going on. The Audit of Political Engagement contained another finding that is very relevant to the argument of the Power inquiry and what constitutes ““the people””. The audit found that those most likely to want to have a say and to participate are the informed middle class. McHugh notes that while the call for more participatory democracy,"““has a visceral emotional appeal, in practice it may only succeed in engaging those already over-represented amongst voters and party members—that is, the educated, affluent and middle class. Mechanisms designed to provide greater opportunities for citizens to participate more directly in decision-making as a means of increasing legitimacy and reducing the perceived democratic deficit may therefore have the opposite effect””." In other words, the introduction of mechanisms of participatory democracy may enhance the position of groups that take particular, sometimes self-serving, positions on policy, strengthening them at the expense of the mechanisms of representative democracy. The advantage of our existing representative system, operating through parties, is that it helps aggregate opinion through collective deliberation and serves as an effective shield against the demands of powerful interest groups. The Power report may therefore prove to be an enemy of the people rather than a friend. Furthermore, the report misunderstands not only what the people would prefer, but also the institutions that attract its strictures. It has no clear grasp of what is happening in Parliament. Parliament is not as supine as it suggests, nor has the institution failed to adapt to deal with changes in the Executive and the wider political community. This point is well developed in a paper to be presented tomorrow by Alexandra Kelso of Strathclyde University at a legislative studies conference in Sheffield. As she argues, there is much more to be done in reforming Parliament—something I have regularly argued in your Lordships’ House—but the point she stresses is that Parliament has taken steps to develop more deliberative and participatory mechanisms within its representative framework. There are two things that I find especially surprising about the analysis offered in the report. The first is that the members of the commission seem to feel that they have come up with some great new finding, yet on page 258 we discover that in their meetings with politicians in Cardiff, the politicians were aware of the problems and had an understanding of how they had come about. The second is that, having come up with their analysis, the members of the commission present a disparate array of proposals which rarely appear to bear on the very analysis they have presented. This point has been made succinctly by the Constitution Unit at University College, London. Its newsletter, Monitor, published last month, offers the following observation on the report:"““Many of the proposals are familiar, and predate the recent concerns with electoral turnout and falling levels of political trust. Many are already existent in other developed countries which are suffering identical problems to those in Britain. Whilst the commission therefore provided a considerable analysis of the problem, and a useful checklist of reforms, it remains doubtful whether the two are connected in the way that they suggest””." Electoral reform, for example, will not obviously produce a greater engagement. Changes from one electoral system to another do not necessarily result in an increase in turnout. Look at the experience of New Zealand. Closer to home, one can cite the example of the European Parliament. Rather bizarrely, the commission concedes that it has not seen evidence to suggest that a new electoral system will increase engagement, but argues none the less that it is a part of the jigsaw. However, if it will not increase engagement, why is it part of the jigsaw? Indeed, it is not clear how the various pieces of the jigsaw fit together. It is not obvious why they will deliver on the three major shifts advocated by the commission, nor incidentally why the three must be taken as a package. It is simply asserted. Some of the proposals have, as the report concedes, seen the light of day in other reports. Some are simply na&-uml;ve. Some have not been thought through. One or two, as with the recommendations on citizenship education and engagement at the EU and supranational level, are not radical enough—in respect of the latter, they are distinctly unimaginative. The noble Lord, Lord Gould, spoke about the effects of globalisation on the citizen. He was quite right and that is recognised in the report. But it is like a lion roaring about the impact of globalisation, which is quite severe, and the report coming up with a mouse in terms of the structure of recommendations to deal with that problem. I could offer a detailed critique of each proposal—my copy of the report is extensively annotated—but I realise that the price of engaging one’s critical faculties is to be accused of complacency. I am conscious of time, so let me end by quoting from Declan McHugh’s article again. He writes:"““The sense of estrangement from the political process felt by many may be better addressed by improving communications between representatives and citizens rather than by creating novel and elaborate avenues of participation few will ever use””." The kindest thing that I can say about the report is that it is a lost opportunity.