Parliament

Why Politicians Are Hated

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

On Tuesday, voters in South Carolina’s first congressional district will go to the polls to choose whether they want to elect Elizabeth Colbert Busch, a Democrat, or Mark Sanford, a Republican.

Mark Sanford was formerly the governor of that same state, a career politician, who was forced to leave office in June 2009 after explosive details of an extra-marital affair gave him too many of the wrong kind of newspaper headlines. However, after a short time in the political wilderness, he felt the need to return to the world of political power, and won the Republican nomination to run in the election.

The voters of the first congressional district did not look kindly on Sanford’s early attempt at redemption, and he is almost certainly likely to lose what was otherwise an eminently winnable seat for the Republicans on polling day.

Two things stand out here – first, the stupidity of the state Republican Party that they would nominate such a flawed candidate. But second, and most important, is what Mark Sanford represents. He is the epitomy of a career politician, whose whole life was about gaining political power, and who is totally unable to contemplate a career doing anything else. Oh, he may waffle about “devoting himself to public service” and suchlike, but it is self-serving nonsense. His career was, and is, about power, the pursuit of political power, and nothing else.

And it is precisely this phenomenon of the ubiquitous career politician which explains why people are so thoroughly disenchanted with politics and politicians today. Here in Britain, and evidently in the United States too.

Ask a typical voter (or non-voter, as these often make up more than half of our potential electorate) what is their idea of a typical politician, and you won’t hear a rapturous description about some incredibly well-credentialed person, someone who has a proven track record of success in their life, someone who has been a part of their community, who understands and knows and talks with people from all walks of life, and who was called to politics to try to accomplish something for the good of their fellow people and their nation, and who intends to do their part and then go back to living their life.

No.

The typical voter, once they swallow the bile that rose into their throat upon hearing your question, is more likely to paint a picture of an oily, self-entitled oik who got into politics for the power and trappings associated with it, who is intent more on climbing the greasy pole of power rather than serving their constituents, and who intends to cling to their position for as many elections and terms as they can possibly get away with, health and lack of scandal permitting.

In other words, there is no concept of the citizen-politician any more. Perhaps in Britain there never was, at least not in the modern age, but throughout American history one can see many examples. Look no further than the father of the nation, George Washington, who not only rejected entreaties for him to become a king-like figure to be addressed as “Your Majesty”, but finished serving his presidential term before retiring to his home and his farm.

You don’t get that with today’s class of professional politicians. Sadly, the well-trodden route taken by today’s slick young political wannabees is almost unvarying from candidate to candidate.

In Britain it looks like this:

1. Ingratiate yourself with your chosen political party’s university society, and start climbing the ranks. On day one of your first term. Get on committees. Make friends with the influential people.

2. Outside of your political society and party political affiliations, be as dull as possible. For heaven’s sake, don’t entertain any foolish notions of doing anything controversial, or exciting, or distinguishing, or any of the things that students should do. You can have no black marks on your resume when the time comes.

3. Graduate and move into a boring job. The law will do nicely, as you won’t be short of opportunities to make powerful new connections.

4. Join the local party association wherever you live, and get involved. Very involved. Attend all the meetings, all of the garden parties, all of the school fairs and church bake sales (if you do church – no longer required or admired). Try to become a school governor if you can, or get onto the board of a local charity. You are now Involved In The Community.

5. Schmooze. Schmooze, schmooze, schmooze. Climb the ladder. Think about trying to become a parliamentary researcher or assistant for an existing MP if you have the connections, or join a  “think tank”. Write lots of articles for anyone who will publish them. It doesn’t matter if they are any good or not.

6. Get selected as the party’s candidate. It doesn’t matter if it’s an unwinnable seat the first time, you are still building your profile. Campaign hard, and ultimately win at all costs.

7. Congratulations, you’ve been elected to parliament. Now you can choose whether to climb the ladder within your parliamentary party and try to get a cabinet position, or just relax and be a constituency MP. But why would you want to do that? Your whole life has been a continuous glide toward the Palace of Westminster, and you sure aren’t about to take your foot off the accelerator now.

And so we have a whole generation of MPs from all parties – people like Chukka Umunna – who are basically airbrushed, well-groomed and telegenic candidates who never really lived in the real world before entering politics and who have no idea what they would do with their lives if they ever had to leave it. Umunna likes to style himself as “the British Barack Obama”. He is not. Like or dislike Obama, he does possess significant leadership and rhetorical skills, and did his fair share of work in the community before his rapid ascent through the political ranks.

An important point here – we should not look to deify private sector experience above all else as Mitt Romney tried to do in the 2012 US elections. Running a government is not the same as running a private enterprise, and different skills and experiences are needed. Success in the private sector does not automatically lead to success in the public sector, and vice versa. So it is not my contention that we should be looking exclusively at corporate C-suites or the ranks of entrepreneurs for our future political leaders. There are people who have served the community deeply in many ways, who are capable of becoming excellent legislators and political leaders.

But neither should we be looking for the next bland, cookie-cutter candidate who has gone through the 7-step “become an MP by the age of 35” programme. If a candidate’s life up until that point has been all about gaining political power, what chance is there that they will ever want to relinquish it and do anything else after their first term? Their second? Their third? Their fourth? Until retirement beckons?

Thus, without term limits we end up with the same boring old faces hanging around forever, and with them a dearth of new ideas.

In South Carolina, voters are about to reject Mark Sanford’s attempt at early political redemption because they do not recognise that he has a divine right to be a politician forever and ever, until he dies, simply because that is what he wants to do with his life.

In a democracy, we get the politicians and leaders that we deserve. Let’s stop deserving bad ones.

House Of Lord Reform Fallout – Continued

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Not so fast. First we need to preserve democracy by translating the referendum question into Cornish.

 

While Conservative MPs and most right-leaning commentators continue to shriek loudly about dastardly betrayal by their Liberal Democrat coalition partners, the rest of the world has moved on and decided that it is the Tories who are the coalition cheaters in this particular relationship. Quoting a recent YouGov poll, The Spectator reports:

Here’s an interesting statistic from YouGov: more voters think the Conservatives have broken the coalition agreement than think the Lib Dems have failed to stick to it. When asked whether the Tories have ‘mostly kept to their side of the deal they made in the coalition agreement’, 51 per cent said no. For the Lib Dems, 45 per cent of voters thought the Lib Dems had stuck to the coalition agreement against 32 per cent who thought they had not.

So 51% of voters think that the Conservatives have failed to uphold the coalition agreement, while only 32% of voters think the same of the Liberal Democrats.

The ludicrous position in which the Conservative Party now finds itself is entirely due to political blundering by their leadership, and blinkered stubbornness from their grass roots. The Liberal Democrats have, in general, taken far more of a political kicking over the past few years than the Conservatives as a result of their mutual decision to go into coalition government together – look no further than the tuition fee increase furore as a prime example. If, as some commentators say, electoral constituency boundary reform is the most important thing to the Conservatives as they seek to win a straight majority at the next general election in 2015, perhaps they should have read the tea leaves better and realised that thwarting a cause dear to the hearts of their coalition partners might bring about a reprisal that would damage a cause dear to their own.

To clarify my own position: I am no fan of modifying the voting system in this country, and certainly no fan of AV. I’m glad that the referendum yielded a resounding “no” vote. I am, however, very much a fan of having the upper house of Parliament finally becoming a democratically legitimate body, one with equal status to the Commons and thus ending their primacy if possible (though the current bill would not do this).

It is all very well talking about principle and the fact that ministers are expected to support the government in Parliamentary votes. But we are living in interesting times and uncharted political territory. We have a government that no-one elected, comprised of two parties with (at times) very divergent views. The “glue” that holds this together, and the only thing stopping the Conservatives from having to form a lame-duck minority administration or calling a new election, is the threat of political reprisal by one party when the other strays. You squash my policy proposal, I’ll scupper yours. Is it pretty, and is it ideal? No, of course not. Coalition government is not ideal in any way. But successive governments, in their laziness, have failed to put in place a better mechanism for dealing with a hung Parliament, so this is what we are stuck with.

We conservatives screwed our Lib Dem coalition partners on House of Lords reform, and now they have hit us back. We tried calling the waambulance and demanding the sympathy of the British electorate for the terrible things that the naughty Lib Dems did to us, and by a margin of 51%-32% they told us to quit crying and grow up. By and large, no one outside the Westminster village cares about process. They care about outcomes. Referring to a sub-clause in the coalition agreement with outraged, wounded indignity will not win us any more supporters.

So there are two choices now, as far as I can tell:

1. Yet another embarrassing, totally avoidable political U-turn. David Cameron gets tough with his backbenchers and whips them into line to pass the House of Lords reform bill, or

2. Cameron accepts the Liberal Democrat retaliation, waves goodbye to boundary reform and possibly the only chance of winning an outright majority at the next general election.

It’s not complicated.

Lords Reform – Actions Have Consequences

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Not so fast. First we need to preserve democracy by translating the referendum question into Cornish.

 

Tim Montgomerie, writing at Conservative Home, believes that the decision by the Liberal Democrats to renege on their support for electoral constituency boundary reform in retaliation for Prime Minister David Cameron’s inability to win Conservative backbench support for House of Lords reform represents the Conservative’s “worst single electoral setback since Black Wednesday”, when Britain was forced to quit the ERM, torpedoeing the Torie’s reputation for economic competence:

When the Parliamentary and Voting Constituencies Bill was passed I celebrated the moment, noting that the introduction of fair-sized seats of equal population could boost the number of Tory MPs at the next election by up to twenty. That was certainly Conservative HQ’s view. This morning the hope of boundaries fairness** is close to death, if not dead. After having explicitly said there that there was no connection between Lords reform and equal-sized seats Nick Clegg has u-turned and claimed there needs to be a connection.

…

** Boundaries “unfairness” is one of the explanations for why Labour get a majority with a 3% lead in the popular vote while Conservatives need an 11% lead for the same result. Or to put it another way John Major got a majority of 21 in 1992 with an 8% lead and a 42% share of the vote while, in 2005, Tony Blair got a 66 majority with just 36% of the vote and a 3% lead.

There has been much outrage from Conservative MPs and political commentators about the decision, but most of it seems to be directed toward the Liberal Democrats – “how dare they do this to us?!” – than inward at their own political strategy and leadership.

If, indeed, boundary review is so crucial to the Conservative Party’s hopes of winning an outright majority at the next general election (and if this is the case, when Conservatives have managed to win elections under similar circumstances in the past, it is a pretty damning indictment of the current party’s policy positions and campaigning ability), perhaps David Cameron should not have played chicken with Nick Clegg on such an important matter.

Tim Montgomerie pretty much agrees in his article:

The only advantage of the likely defeat of boundary changes is that a central plank of the Cameron/Osborne battleplan has gone. Any residual complacency must have gone. They can’t carry on as they were. They need a game changer and, preferably, soon.

And perhaps, instead of venting their anger at Nick Clegg when said strategy blows up in their faces, Conservatives with an eye on the next election would do well to remember that because they sadly, miraculously failed to win the 2010 election outright, as a consequence they govern in partnership with the Liberal Democrats, and that if they screw over their coalition partners on a policy point close to their heart, they are quite likely to get screwed in return.

I don’t care what Nick Clegg said about whether Lords Reform and Electoral Boundary Changes were linked or not back in April of this year, as Guido Fawkes appears to do:

The Boundary Review had nothing to do with House of Lords reform. It was linked to the AV referendum which the LibDems secured.

Clegg accusing others of breaking promises beggars belief. The LibDems are desperately trying to spin this, but in reality the backbench Tories are the ones to sacrifice political gain for sticking to their principles – however wrong they are to defend the current upper chamber.

Waah waah waah. The Conservatives are supposed to be the more mature, politically experienced political party and they got played by the LibDems. Now people like me have lost two policy proposals that were dear to our hearts – democratic reform of the House of Lords, and reform of the UK’s constituency sizes and boundaries to make them more equal. I have no sympathy for them.

The Conservatives are the senior party in the coalition government. They should try acting like it.

On Class Warfare And Social Engineering

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

Veteran Labour MP Denis MacShane had a good think, and decided that the way to fix all that ails Britain is to introduce a draconian new method of social engineering. The BBC reports:

Only people on the minimum wage should be allowed to stand for Parliament in 10% of seats to make politics more representative, a Labour MP has said.

Denis MacShane said the backgrounds of MPs from all the main parties at Westminster had become far too narrow.

The backgrounds of MPs had become far too narrow? Seriously? I agree that there is a long way to go until the membership of the House of Commons comes remotely close to mirroring the population at large (if indeed this is even a desirable goal, which is questionable), but to suggest that we are moving backwards is surely pure lunacy? Has there ever been a time (the Blair Boom of 1997 aside) when the Commons has been more representative? And yet MacShane tries to convince us that a decades-long trend is underway, filling the Commons with wealthy landowners at the expense of everyone else.

Now, the BBC’s poor journalism makes it hard to divine exactly what Denis MacShane means. The BBC headline refers to “working class shortlists”, but the article only quotes MacShane advocating the idea that 10% of Parliamentary seats be reserved for those on the minimum wage. Both ideas are dumb, but it would be helpful if the BBC quoted MacShane properly, or at least came clean about what he is actually in favour of.

If a person earns 1p/hour above the minimum wage, would this render them ineligible to run for Parliament in those constituencies with “poverty shortlists”?

How would the Electoral Authority decide which parliamentary constituencies should have the shortlist? Would you select the wealthiest areas of the country, to stick it to all the rich suburbanites in Surrey and Kent, or let the “working man” represent his “own kind” by having the shortlists in traditionally lower-income constituencies such as my hometown of Harlow, Essex?

And if Denis MacShane literally means that 10% of Commons seats should be reserved for people who fall under the nebulous definition of “working class”, how are we going to define that? People on the minimum wage? People who did not go to university? People whose parents did not attend university? People who live in council housing? Does it depend on your accent, perhaps? Would I, as someone who grew up in a single parent household reliant on government benefits, be eligible to run as a “working class” candidate, even though I now earn a good salary?

What a useless contribution to the public debate.

How often do we hear politicians bemoaning the fact that their profession is “unrepresentative”, and expressing the hope that at some point (always indeterminately in the future) less people “like them” will hold the reins of power? Well, MacShane gives it to us again today:

Mr MacShane, an Oxford university graduate who worked as a journalist before becoming MP for Rotherham in 1994, said there needed to be fewer candidates with his kind of background in the future.

Feel free to do your part by resigning now to make way for the pilot scheme.

A House Of Lords For The Modern Age

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Not so fast. First we need to preserve democracy by translating the referendum question into Cornish.

 

I have wanted to weigh in on the topic of House of Lords reform for some time now, but have struggled to find a suitable jumping-off point from which to do so. I finally found one a few days ago, in the form of Ajay Kakkar’s op-ed piece in the Daily Telegraph entitled “Why Nick Clegg’s Senate is seriously flawed”, and now that the initial fuss about the US Supreme Court’s decision to uphold ObamaCare in the US is starting to die down a little, I finally have the chance to commit my thoughts to the blog.

In short, I am in favour of major reform of Parliament including its structure, composition and working practices, certainly incorporating democratic reform of the House of Lords. Kakkar’s piece, taken from a lecture that he delivered at Oxford some time ago, seems to me to represent a good summary of the many varied arguments against reform, so I am going to put forward my own views as a kind of point-counterpoint with his article.

Lord Kakkar (himself a crossbench Peer, from which knowledge we can perhaps already deduce his stance on this issue) begins thus:

Yesterday, a piece of legislation was laid before Parliament that has far-reaching ramifications for our country and its people – at a time when the political challenges we face are already considerable.

This is the first argument you are likely to hear against reforming the House of Lords, and it is a typical delaying tactic used whenever anyone wants to oppose or slow down any kind of change. It is the “oh, but surely we must focus exclusively on the pressing issues of X and Y, and we can worry about Lords reform in the future” argument, and we see it used against proponents of gay marriage and a multitude of other issues.

The “political challenges” that Lord Kakkar refers to here are, we can safely infer, the need to weather the current economic crisis. Personally, I do not believe that a single-minded focus on any one topic, be it from the executive or from Parliament, is very healthy. We are country of 65 million people and our government should be capable of tackling more than one initiative at a time.

Next comes an argument which is often deployed, but rarely explained – the supposed importance of ensuring the primacy of the House of Commons:

An elected second chamber is a principle that seems appealing. But we must consider two things. First, the House of Commons represents the will of the people, as expressed through democratic elections. As such, it must continue to hold primacy over the second chamber – or any other part of the machinery of government.

Really, it must? A fully or mostly elected House of Lords would also have democratic legitimacy, of a different and quite possibly beneficial kind. Elected peers would, under the government’s proposals, serve single terms of 15 years and thus would be more inclined to take the long view, and be less influenced by day-to-day political manoeuverings or machinations. Why, then, should the Commons hold primacy?

You often hear from opponents of Lords reform that the House of Lords is “complementary” to the Commons, acting in a reviewing and advisory role only, and that it need not therefore be democratic. But some other political systems – including that of the United States – actively try to build in conflict into their institutions, so that none are able to exercise unchecked power. This to me seems very sensible and worthy, and a democratically legitimate and empowered House of Lords, with a constitutional requirement that both must approve legislation before it becomes law, seems right and logical.

And then:

Second, there is the admirable clarity of our current constitutional settlement. The people elect their representatives to sit in the House of Commons, whose confidence any government must command. Those representatives can, in turn, be held to account and dismissed via the ballot box.

Within our constitution, the principle of democratic legitimacy is paramount – but there is no failing in the House of Lords, in itself, that would be resolved by a largely elected second chamber, as currently proposed. It is argued that democratically elected senators would be more accountable than appointed ones. But how would the election of 80 per cent of the chamber for a single, non-renewable term of 15 years, never facing re-election, make senators accountable to the voters who elected them?

Only a sitting parliamentarian, die-hard traditionalist or deluded person could look at Britain’s constitutional settlement and praise its “admirable clarity”. The thing isn’t even written down. There is nothing transparent, simple or clear about the division and exercise of power in Britain today, and I really wish I had been at that lecture at Oxford University to see if Lord Kakkar was able to deliver that line with a straight face.

Moreover, is Kakkar seriously trying to make the case that today’s breed of greasy pole-climbing career politicians is preferable to those who cannot run for re-election because they serve a single term? I would argue quite the opposite, that being able to take the long view, being less beholden to opinion polls or the 24-hour news cycle, could be a very good thing – at least for one of the two chambers of Parliament.

Another question that desperately needs to be answered is how this new second chamber will function in the context of its relationship to a democratically elected and constitutionally dominant Commons. The preamble to the 1911 Parliament Act states, with absolute clarity, that Parliament will have to take measures to limit and define the powers of any Upper House enjoying a popular mandate. It seems very unwise – at best – to create an elected Lords (or Senate) without setting out the precise powers of the two chambers and how disputes between them are to be resolved. If the Supreme Court is to play a role in that process, will Parliament still be secure as sovereign? Will our country need a written constitution to ensure the primacy of the Commons and protect the role of the monarchy?

This is from the Norman Tebbit “but if we allow gay marriage what courtesy title should we bestow upon the gay spouse of a Lord?” school of argument. The fact that reforming the Lords to add democratic legitimacy would entail extra work and the answering of some additional questions is hardly a reason not to proceed. Of course we need to properly define the relationship between the two chambers of Parliament as part of the reform process, that goes without saying.

Will the new UK Supreme Court be involved? I don’t know, but sure, let’s discuss that. Will we need a written consitution? Absolutely! Lord Kakkar says this as though it would be a bad thing and another legitimate reason to avoid reforming the Lords, but I have been clamouring for a consitutional convention and a written British Constitution for years, I think it would spur much-needed discussions about the role and size of government, and its relationship with the people. And again, this worry about the primacy of the Commons. Why is this essential to maintain? I do wish an opponent of Lords reform would take the next step and explain why the Commons should remain dominant in our system, rather than just stating it as though it is commonly-held and irrefutable fact.

But perhaps the proponents of an elected second chamber believe their reforms will make a qualitative difference to the kind of people who sit there. If they did, they would surely be worth considering. But what sort of senatorial candidates are likely to come forward? Will we see many social workers, historians, scientists, charity administrators, campaigners or academics? Or is it more likely that the Senate will be seen as an attractive option for those party politicians unable to secure election elsewhere?

I would rather have a democratically elected House of Lords full of conniving fools and morons than an undemocratically composed House of Lords full of people who did favours for former Prime Ministers, and a bunch of bishops from the Church of England. Just my two cents.

The role of the Lords, whatever its membership, should be to share the increasing burden of scrutinising and improving the torrent of British and European legislation that comes forward; to bring to bear experience, expertise and independence of spirit in advising and counselling the Commons; and ultimately and always to bow to its primacy.

Why?

So in short, that’s it. I’m still casting around the internet looking for an opponent of House of Lords reform who can actually take the next step and answer some of these questions. Why must the Commons retain primacy? Why would a written Consitution, even a limited one that just defines the relationship between the chambers of Parliament, the devolved assemblies and the Supreme Court be such a bad idea? Why are single terms of a long timespan worse than neverending terms of five year intervals?

As yet I have seen no compelling answers to these questions from those who want to preserve the status quo, and so on this issue I am squarely behind Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats.