Are we in for a democratic or political shock as a result of the recession?
Professor Niall Ferguson is speaking on this idea tonight and trailed his ideas on Radio 4's Today programme.
His ideas didn't actually seem too far from what I've posted on here and what others are saying around the blogosphere - essentially:
- the recession as a background makes the MPs expenses scandal seem even more scandalous;
- we get the politicians we deserve in terms of how we are as a society; and
- in the tensions of a globalised recession plus loss of faith in our political system equals a potent powder keg...
So even the people that get paid to think about these things academically are thinking the same way. Niall Ferguson talks about China leading the recovery (and notes that it's not a democracy) and also flags up the same thing that worries me - that people will turn to the extremes because they've lost faith in the big, mainstream parties.
But the question is, once the problem has been diagnosed, what can be done about it?
What can anyone actually do to make it better?
Various politicians are suggesting a variety of solutions. While it's easy to dismiss all of them and many in the press have done so, actually it's worth looking at some of these in a bit more detail.
Let's get the General Election issue out the way first. There is certainly an argument for having one - when every MP is potentially going to have their expenses hung out to dry, every constituency wants to know whether their MP is worthy of their trust.
But our constitutional system gives the Prime Minister the right to call the general election when s/he wants (or techincally to ask the monarch to dissolve parliament).
And we've no trigger mechanism - even losing a confidence vote in parliament wouldn't force an election.
Top of my list is Proportional Representation.
The UK voting system is first-past-the-post, which effectively means that
The big lie about Proportional Representation is that it automatically equates to less personal contact between an MP and their constituents and with the enforced dominance of the main parties.
The problem that we in England have when trying to explain PR is that the only experience that most people here have of PR is voting using the closed Party Lists that we have in the European Elections (which are taking place this Thursday). But given the really low turnout how many people have even seen that?
The European Elections Act is the UK way of implementing a decision of the Council of the Euorpean Union (of which we are part) that a PR system would be used to elect memebers of the European Parliament. But unlike many other Member States, the version we use puts power in the hands of the political parties - they choose who tops the list. So if you are a pro-European who leans to the Conservatives and lives in the south-east of England, if you vote Conservative Eurosceptic Daniel Hannan tops the list and would be the first beneficiary of your vote for his party even if his particular views were not quite to your taste and the views of others on the list fitted you better.
PR does not have to be this way. The open list system used in the Netherlands for example means that someone like Esther de Lange on the Christian Democrat list who might be relatively "safe" like Daniel Hannan in the UK has to actually get out there and get known to her voting public.
This is all getting a bit long so I'll post more on PR separately. But I must just flag up my responses to the argument that it usually results in coalition governments as no one has an overall majority (frankly good because it means compromise has to be reached rather than one party's view imposed) and that it lets in more smaller parties including extremists (yes, but if people in full knowledge wish to vote for them then that's democracy). Just waiting for someone to launch Project Hemicycle...
A written constitution for the UK
Contrary to popular belief, we do actually have a written constitution. What we don't have is a codified constitution, that is, it's not all in one document. Our constitutional documents include the Bill of Rights 1688, the Parliament Act 1949, the European Communities Act 1976, the Human Rights Act, the Acts of Devolution and many other documents.
Writing our constitution down in one place would mean needing to sort out some of the little knots that we fudge at present.
We'd have to decide about what we want the House of Lords to look like, why there's a difference in the sort of devolution that we have in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, what our relationship with the European Union is and should be, how much role we want the monarchy to have. Then what about the English regions, an English parliament, Cornish independence...
The problem with sitting down to write a UK constitution, as far as I can see is in part one of buy-in.
We can't just write down what we've got - it's a mess. Besides, I'm not clear whether many people actually know what we have already - certainly the extent of our integration with the rest of the EU seems often to take people by surprise, at least Sun journalists.
It's not simply a matter of a committee of the great and the good sitting down and coming up with the text (as we tried in the Convention on the future of Europe which got together representatives of governments, parliaments, social partners and civil society and came up with a constitution). Others will have strong views too (we learned this from the Convention's minority reports, and the fact that afterwards the governments went away and wrote a much weaker version - the Constitutional Treaty - and even this was rejected by voters in the Netherlands and in France, two founding members of the EU, but NOT despite what the antis in the UK would have you believe because they wanted less Europe but because they wanted geater social protection - the bit the antis here seem to most despise!)
But without the deadlines that e.g. the need to rebuild a constitution after civil war imposes, there's a risk either of the process getting bogged down in seemingly intractable problems or attempting to steamroller without giving proper consideration to the issues.
Also at present no parliament can bind the next. A written constitution would change this, just a bit, but it would set something above merely the will of the next group of elected representatives.
Oh, and it would give us the chance to think about disestablishment of the Church of England.
None of this is to say that we shouldn't have a written constitution - just that this is in no way a short term project or quick fix.
Right of recall
One short-term, high impact measure would be to introduce constituency recall for MPs. The idea behind this, which is already in force in the USA, is the idea of "recall". In the UK at present, unless an MP dies, goes to jail or is sent to the House of Lords/ to be an ambassador, European Commissioner etc. then that MP is the MP for the consitutency for the whole term. Even if they do something about which a substantial number of constituents object, there's nothing they can do. Recall would allow a certain number of constituents e.g. 5 % to recall an MP and trigger a by-election. If we had this mechanism, constitunets annyed with their MP over the expenses claims would be able to express this right now with the individual themselves being held accountable rather than taking it out on the candidates for the local or European elections.
There's a tonne of other options too:
- fixed term parliaments (pro: Prime Ministers can't choose the optimal timing for the next election, con: the first year is a slow build-up, then a couple of years of competence, then a final year of electioneering);
- proper Lords reform: there's an outstanding vote in the House of Commons in favour of a fully elected chamber - there's all sorts of reasons given for that vote e.g. that it was the least worst of the options put forward in the debate, but the current situation with the rump of the hereditaries hanging on and the rest appointees of the current or previous Prime Ministers is surely untenable;
- reducing the number of constituencies: I can't remember the precise stat, but we've a huge number of elected representatives at national level who - given the increased role of the EU and proposals for devolving power to the regional or local level is just a nonsense. Backbenchers write lots of letters on behalf of their constituents, yes, they might also scrutinise legislation on a committee, but they've a less significant role than the MEPs we're about to elect. I can't honestly see why we need so many;
- ending the guillotine: a bit esoteric this one, but it is possible that one thing that could really make things better is proper scrutiny of legislation. Unlike the EU where every sentence is pored over, sometimes whole chunks of legislation is never scrutinised because time runs out. More importantly though, the government can set a timetable for debate, which it's argued can increase the quality of debate. But although specialist parliamentary lawyers and dedicated civil servants have worked night and day to produce as near to a finished piece of legislation as possible, this doesn't mean there should be less scrutiny of it - that is after all what we send our MPs to parliament for - to hold the government to account.
So what do you want?
The price of getting this wrong is potentially enormous. While smaller parties per se are not a bad thing (as I've tried to explain above), unless something pretty serious is done and quickly, the worst case scenarios are turning into the Weimar Republic , or fragmentation of society. Neither scenario really appeals to me.
What do you think?
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