David Alton
The dangerous dogs legislation is perhaps the classic example of Parliament legislating in haste and having to repent at leisure. In the aftermath of the House of Commons expenses debacle a flurry of proposals is now raining down on us and risks making precisely the same mistake.
Knee jerk reactions are rarely the right ones and there is a lot to be said for a period of reflexion before setting solutions in train that are often worse than the problems they sought to address.
Winston Churchill got it about right when he remarked that
“democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”
Democracy will never be perfect and political parties will never be the Communion of Saints but as we cast our eye towards Tehran, Burma and North Korea we can understand why Churchill believed that our imperfect system of government was worth fighting and dying for.
This theme of an imperfect but cherished democracy was captured well by E.M.Forster in his book “Two Cheers for Democracy.”
Forster reserved three cheers for the purity of the Athenian polis but argued that the justification for our model of government are the idiosyncratic, bloody minded Members of Parliament who through sheer dogged persistence gets some minor injustice put right:
“Democracy has another merit. It allows criticism, and if there is not public criticism there are bound to be hushed-up scandals.
“That is why I believe in the press, despite all its lies and vulgarity, and why I believe in Parliament. Parliament is often sneered at because it is a Talking Shop. I believe in it because it is a talking shop. I believe in the Private Member who makes himself a nuisance. He gets snubbed and is told that he is cranky or ill- informed, but he does expose abuses which would otherwise never have been mentioned, and very often an abuse gets put right just by being mentioned…Whether Parliament is either a representative body or an efficient one is questionable, but I value it because it criticizes and talks, and because its chatter gets widely reported.
So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.”
During the 30 years since I first came to Westminster the disappearance of too many of these dogged constituency MPs – only to be replaced by mass-produced look alikes – has weakened our democracy.
The reason why the British National Party has been successful in the North West region, where I live, is in part because of the disappearance of mainstream political parties from the day to day lives of local neighbourhoods and communities. It is staggering that many of the BNP’s xenophobic and racist policies have gone unchallenged. In the 1930s the BNP – who wrap themselves in the flag – would not have been marching with Winston Churchill against appeasement and Hitler, they would have been marching with Oswald Mosley and his Brown Shirts.
The success of the BNP is also in part because of the introduction of a voting system that detaches the elected representative from their constituents and puts power into the hands of small political elites.
Despite having joined a political party when I was seventeen, then led by the late Jo Grimond, and having attended many talks over the years by the redoubtable Enid Lakeman – who was the great champion of electoral reform – I had no hesitation in speaking and voting against the introduction of the closed party list form of proportional representation for European elections, precisely because it was bound to open the way to groups like the BNP and because it offends a fundamental principle of our parliamentary democracy: the right to vote for an individual candidate rather than for a party or its list.
If there is to be a change to our voting system let it have as its first requirement that an MP will represent a defined geographical area and that votes will be cast for people not parties. The Single Transferable Vote, with constituencies based on county and city boundaries would meet that test but any change would need to command wide spread support and should not, under any circumstances, be steam-rollered through as a last gasp political fix to keep an ailing government in power.
If Parliament has become detached from the people it has less to do with voting systems than the culture of politics itself. Politicians have spent too much time worrying about their image, about honing rent-a-quote sound bites, and learning the dark arts of spinning. They should spend more time in their constituencies and they should live there. The frenzied taint of the Westminster Village produces a self serving form of politics that often appears devoid of principle and belief and preoccupied with fringe concerns.
Political parties need to reflect on why they have been deserted by millions of people – who today abstain from voting or vote for small parties. In part it is because they have turned themselves into cults and sects rather than broad churches. Narrow, politically-correct positions on issues that were traditionally conscience questions – for example, abortion, euthanasia, embryo experimentation and human embryo cloning – make it impossible for many people who have conscientious objections to such policies, to join or to vote for such parties.
In resisting the temptation to make such matters questions of party policy David Cameron is beginning to benefit. In a recent Com Res Poll of British Christians 56% said they would now support the Conservatives, compared with 9% for Labour and 7% for the Liberal Democrats. This is comparable with the polling evidence from the 1982 glory days of the Liberal-SDP Alliance when support from within the churches gave it a huge base of active supporters.
The immediate crisis of confidence in our political system and political classes has been the expenses debacle – it is not a crisis of faith in democracy (despite its manifest imperfections). Ultimately, constituency parties and, failing that, the constituents themselves, are best placed to sort this out. They need to ponder long and hard on the character and the motives of their candidate. What motivates him or her; what are their causes – and, if they have none, might it be that they are entering political life for the wrong reasons?
In looking for a new generation of candidates David Cameron is right to have reopened his party’s “A” List of candidates and it would be good to see something like the primary system that so energises and renews American political life become a feature of British politics. Maybe then we would see the emergence of candidates who are connected to the public rather than to their own small world.
We need a renewal of Britain’s political life not a raft of measures from State funding of political parties to votes at 16 – measures that are beloved of political activists but which are irrelevant in the current crisis of confidence.