Labour's
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MORE CONNECTED
CONSTITUTION |
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I Involvement in politics used to be through class-based parties. For a long time, the division between the Conservative and Labour parties reflected a class divide which mirrored the main dividing line in UK politics. They were close in popular support and their core support, which was substantial could be relied on to vote for them. Between 1945 and 1979, the two parties were in power for 17 years each.
Reflecting a range of issues That type of politics has largely gone, and with it the connection in politics for very many people. Now politics reflects a range of issues, which do not pivot only around class. Fewer members of the public find that one party reflects either their full economic interests or their social views. Class solidarity and party loyalty has declined.
Most people aspire to individual prosperity, not class emancipation. That is not the same as wanting an atomised, isolated, selfish life. Most people aspire to individual prosperity, in tandem with a sense of community and a sense of responsibility.
People want to be empowered by the state, not run by it. They want to be governed by people who work for them, not for the Westminster village.
For very many people, the empowerment of the individual depends on a strong community, unambiguously undertaking the responsibility of ensuring true equality of opportunity. Without that, many people cannot realise their full potential.
Individual empowerment The move from class-based politics towards individual empowerment means that different ways of connecting politics to the people have to be found. The parties themselves have to become much more adept at listening and identifying the aspirations of the public. They must also be clear in identifying their values.
But it also means identifying ways that connect the individual leaders of each party, in particular MPs, much more closely to the public they serve.
Once the class base of a party erodes then it is all too easy to see its only purpose as being to formulate policy and provide an organisation for the leadership to get elected, It is hardly surprising that many political party activists are seen – all over the world – as self-seeking and careerist, rather than principled and connected.
The right course is not to increase the power of parties in our politics – which would be the consequence of proportional representation or alternative vote systems – but to identify ways in which the community has a much greater say and influence on who their leaders are. This is what I address in this essay. But it is important to set the constitutional proposals in a wider context.
Promoting strong communities The position of Labour going forward must be to promote the growth of strong communities with a view to allowing everybody to soar as high as they can. To achieve that involves recognising and accepting the new balance between communities and the individual, and working with the grain of people's aspirations.
So a very emphatic yes to legislation which imposes a general duty of equality, to ensure that the social mobility which Alan Milburn's commission identified as being so absent becomes more pervasive – that's the community discharging its responsibility to ensure true equality of opportunity.
And a very emphatic no to a high pay commission designed to ensure that people's earnings do not get too high. That is setting a cap on how high people can soar. A state which sets the highs of people's wealth is a society where aspiration is deadened. Society should set minimums on people's wealth – we should be lifting as many people out of poverty as possible. Poverty is unacceptable. The state should intervene directly to alleviate poverty.
The community should promote redistribution of assets, not by crude taxation measures, but by increasing the skills distribution in the country. This would in turn increase access to the higher paid jobs and break the cycle of low achievement in poverty ghettos in the country. Work bonuses for work which have destroyed the financial system are bad: they should be targeted by the law and taxed as high as possible. Wealth which is the product of hard work and skill should be taxed at levels which involve a fair contribution to the community. But that wealth should not be regarded either as intrinsically bad or something to be discouraged.
Promoting ability The critical and essential difference between Labour and the Tories is that we actively seek to promote the ability of people to achieve to the highest possible degree. We recognise that this cannot be done without active intervention to promote real equality and a much greater spreading of the skills on which wealth depends. We also recognise that very many of the challenges we face today require community action. Climate change and protecting children from abuse are two disparate examples of this. The Tories focus only on the individuals who have, and seek to reduce the community input and responsibility to the minimum. Listening to Tories this summer describe the health service as a 60-year mistake illustrates the divide.
The fair community, empowering the individual to soar as high as he or she can, is Labour's vision going forward. It is deeply rooted in the values on which Labour was founded and has developed. It takes support and inspiration from Antony Crosland, Tony Giddens, R H Tawney and from New Labour. But it is moving on from all of these approaches, as we have to in these new times. The current economic crisis, which brings in its wake the need for reductions in expenditure on public services and support, does not undermine or knock off course these basic values. The fair community has to decide where it must focus its reduced resources.
Labour is demoralised. We fear defeat in the election. We face a resurging Tory Party whose fundamentally different vision of the country we rightly fear.
Our urgent obligation as the voice of progressive politics is to expose clearly the cold live and let live politics of the conservatives and the essential shallowness of that as an approach both because of its cruel values and its economic damage.
As a party, we need to identify very clearly our coherent vision for the country. We must avoid putting the individual and the community at odds with each other – the argument which says that there are limits on success which require state intervention to ensure there are not outliers at the top end.
The vision of the fair community allowing the individual to fly is resonant with our values and relevant for the public. It reflects the best of our radical traditions and it promotes social justice. Those who equate individual economic success with ‘selfish beasts’ and urge a return to the planned economy of the past will cement us into irrelevance.
II MPs and Connection In 1964, 44 per cent of the population strongly identified with one or other of the two main parties. In 2001, this figure had fallen to 14 per cent.
In 1951, only 3 per cent of the population voted for parties other than Labour or Conservative, while in 2005, 31 per cent did so. The reduction in party loyalty also means there are greater fluctuations between the two main parties. In the ten elections since 1945, the average lead was 3.5 per cent. Since 1979, it has been 9.2 per cent. The greater lead of one party over the other keeps one or other of them in power despite dropping popular support.
A purely proportional system with lists of prospective parliamentary candidates would produce a House of Commons which, mathematically, reflected the country’s votes. But it would hugely strengthen the hand of the parties. They, and not the electorate, would in practice choose who would become MPs, and the constituency link, which brings both connection and accountability for the MP, would be broken. AV or AV +, as recommended by the Jenkins Commission ten years ago , preserves the constituency link in the case of all or most MPs.
However, adopting either pure PR (a list system) or AV or AV+, on the current support shown for parties at general elections would inevitably lead to coalition governments, or minority government, or government where the governing party has to depend on smaller parties for some sort of support. Whichever of the three routes emerged, one-party government would either disappear or be diluted.
The connection between electorate and the government is, in those circumstances, weakened further. Governments emerge from the negotiations after the election, not from the election itself. Smaller parties make progress out of proportion to the votes they receive.
It is possible, now, for the public themselves to choose coalition politics in the way they vote in a general election. They have not done so.
Consistent values The Labour leadership has, over the last 30 years, adapted to the change from class-based politics. It has remained consistent in its values – a progressive party committed to social justice. But it now seeks support throughout the much enlarged battle ground of British politics, while being clear that one of its central aims is to improve the lives of the working class. In a non-ideological age, the identification of the values of the party is vital.
Just as important as sustained values is close links with the general public. Involvement in specific campaigns, both national and local, is one way of involving the wider public. Another is the public’s significant involvement in the selection of candidates for parliamentary seats, and the ability to recall an MP for re-election where a specific percentage of the electorate petition for it.
Currently, the majority of prospective parliamentary candidates come from within the activist circle. The selection process for parliamentary candidates would be most opened up by primaries, in which everyone in the constituency can vote. The connection between the MP and the constituency would be much closer. It would deprive party activists, alone, of the right to choose their candidates for office. While that might reduce the attraction of political activism, the disconnection between the small cadre of political activists, in all parties, and the wider public contributes strongly to political alienation.
The candidate must, within the outer limits of what is Labour, be able to demonstrate that s/he can garner public support for what s/he stands for. Having to win their candidacy by a popular non-party vote would ensure that the candidates for office remained grounded with the public.
This would not prevent a party having an all-women primary or other limited field. The limits would have to be legitimate, so it could not be used to obtain the candidate the party wanted – the limits would have to be based on gender, race or other legitimate factor. The extent to which limited fields were used by the party would depend on their effect on popular support.
A risk of manipulation? Would this system allow mischief to be made by a party’s opponents, who might vote for the weakest candidate? They could, but so few people are engaged to that extent in party politics in this country that the effect is likely to be minimal.
Would the rich manipulate the system by using their money to win primaries? US politics shows again and again that the richest candidate (Mitt Romney is an example) gets beaten by the candidate (in this case, McCain) who connects with the voter. Money can make a difference, but what democracy shows again and again is that the voters prove perceptive in seeing through the noise and going for the best. And the risk of money manipulating the vote is a price worth paying for breaking the stranglehold of the party activist on who become our MPs.
The candidate who was selected should not face a primary for every subsequent election. But there should be a system of recall – both for MPs who is no good on an individual basis and for MPs who are members of a party which has lost the confidence of the country.
The case for recall In his conference speech this year, Gordon Brown proposed a system of recall applicable where the MP had been found guilty of personal wrongdoing by a Commons committee and 25 per cent of his/her constituency petitioned for a by-election.
I favour recall. The percentage of the constituency supporting should be significant (25 per cent is, on average, about 18,000 people). It should plainly apply in cases of established wrongdoing, but I would go further and extend it to any case where the requisite threshold can be obtained.
In cases of personal wrongdoing, imposing the need for the Commons to have certified guilt means that it would be the Commons’ notions of acceptable behaviour rather than the public’s that would determine whether the MP would be vulnerable to recall.
A striking feature of the expenses scandals was the sense that there was a gulf between MPs and the public as to what was and was not acceptable. The variety of tribunals the political parties set up to determine acceptable or unacceptable behaviour by MPs in connection with expenses did not gain the confidence either of the public or of MPs themselves. The Norwich North by-election shows that this cuts both ways. A party loses the ability to treat MPs unfairly.
So I would favour a system of recall where the only condition was the obtaining of 25 per cent support from the relevant constituency. This would make individual MPs vulnerable on the grounds of their personal conduct, which would include the expenses issues. It would make individual MPs who were minsters vulnerable if they became unpopular in their ministerial role. It would also make a very unpopular government vulnerable to concerted attempts to recall. either to remove its majority or to demonstrate that a particular policy was unacceptable.
Norman Lamont, John Major and Jacqui Smith, for example, have all endured harsh unpopularity, in each case fanned by the media. Would they be vulnerable to recall? They might. Sometimes it might succeed. That would have a significant effect on the decisions they made as ministers. While it would make them more vulnerable to the mood of the public, it would equally make them more able to say no to internal pressure because of the consequence in their own constituencies.
Would this make governments over-populist? I doubt it. The daily pressures of politics now, in particular the remorseless scrutiny of the media, makes all political parties keen to promote policies which are popular and easily understood. It might make them less willing to take significant risks. The poll tax was very unpopular. If it had been possible to recall the minister most associated with the policy, or to target 30 Tory marginals to demonstrate the policy’s unpopularity, the policy might never have happened. Or if it had started, it might have been stopped in its tracks. Suppose the Lib Dems had targeted ten Labour marginals for recall in opposition to the Iraq war in 2003, and they had procured recall and then won each of them, what effect would that have had on the Iraq policy?
Facing the consequences For quite considerable periods of time since 1987, the government of the day has manifestly lost the confidence of the electorate. In 1992, after ‘Black Wednesday’, John Major lost and never effectively regained the confidence of the electorate. He himself understood this. He had to be dissuaded from resigning. His own party never united behind him after this. He was forced to provoke a leadership election himself and for tactical and timing reasons, no substantial figure contested.
The consequence of these events for the public is that the party is able to hold onto power against the wishes of the electorate – in Major’s case, probably for five years.
This may be inevitable in any democracy. But if the hurdle is high enough so that recall can only be used in exceptional cases, it would greatly concentrate the minds both of the MP and his/her party in ensuring connection, in a way that changing the voting system does not.
Significant effects Recall will have very significant effects on connection. It will prevent politicians from pursuing, for any length of time, policies which they think are acceptable but which they fail to persuade the electorate on. It will provide a means for quick removal for personal misconduct. And it will ensure that there is immediate pressure on an MP to consider very carefully whether a particular policy position is one of those rare situations where they might put themselves in very real political danger if they supported it.
While some might baulk at this suggestion on the basis it prevents the state from pursuing policies of which the public cannot be persuaded but which are in the nation’s best interests, they would be wrong to say that. The public is so much better informed now than in earlier times, when such an elitist view might have some weight. The occasions where the government has acted against public feelings in recent political history have tended to be when they are wrong.
And most significantly of all, if connecting measures are not introduced the public’s perception that the government is in any real sense owned by the public will reduce yet further, thereby reducing the state’s ability to provide leadership on the issues of the day.
III
The rights of the law abiding individual
The deployment of human rights is, inevitably, often used by unpopular groups or individuals within society, creating a sense of unfairness. The wider majority have political ‘rights’, which entitle them to be treated in accordance with minimum standards. But they are not normally legally enforceable in the way that basic human rights are. They should be.
For example, the groups of parents who are not told which secondary school their child is going to until a few days before the new term starts; the victims of certain sorts of serious crime or persistent antisocial behaviour who cannot get an adequate response from their local law enforcement agencies; the people who have no adequate A&E provision.
It is now beyond politics that the state has responsibility to provide a reasonable public education and health system, to provide protection against crime and antisocial behaviour, to protect children at risk and to work towards a sustainable environment.
Accepting responsibilities The acceptance of these responsibilities carries with it minimum standards of respect and content which the citizen should be enable to enforce. There are well recognised international statements of minimum social rights. We have always resisted incorporating them in any way into our domestic law because these rights have always traditionally been regarded as best enforced by politics, not law.
The courts cannot run the public services. Nobody wants them to. But they can adjudicate on whether the state provider has fallen below the standard which any reasonable provider should reach.
To achieve this, there needs to be a constitutional definition of the basic social rights to which the citizen is entitled, and a means of enforcing them. The courts will define what this means in practice. Once those minimum standards are enforceable in the courts, the UK state will act in a way which complies with what will be domestic law, as they did with human rights. The dramatic change will come not through a rush of court cases, but through the state’s acceptance of its legal responsibilities.
IV Conclusion The central problem of the constitution now is that it while it rightly provides protection for individual freedoms, it does not do enough to ensure than the state focuses on the concerns of the public. There is insufficient connection between those who govern and the public. My suggestions have at their heart the notion that the individual – whether by participating in primaries or recalls, or relying on basic legal rights – is able directly to influence the behaviour of those who govern to focus on real day to day concerns. I welcome a debate on this aspect of the constitution. There may be better ways of establishing the connection. But establish that connection we must. Or the difficult decisions which need to be taken, whether to save our planet or rescue our economy, will become all the harder, because the public will increasingly feel that the government has nothing to do with them. |
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