Most good political speeches on policy are made up of mood music, initiatives and core ideas. By far the best section of Nick’s manifesto speech was the serious attempt to refine and define core beliefs on public services.
I am therefore emboldened to distil out of it the essence of Cleggism with the hope that if I am wrong I will be corrected and so further enlightened.
As I understand Nick’s thinking on the matter of public services, the state remains the funder and regulator of services but not the exclusive provider i.e. it can give money to individuals to secure services or non-state organisations to deliver them.
This is self-evidently what nearly every state on this planet does already – though to a greater or lesser degree.
What Nick also says is that public services should be delivered equitably to each citizen with the clear implication that it must do more for those communities or individuals less capable of taking advantage of services available (hence the pupil premium etc).
Again there is widespread but not quite uiversal acceptance of this across the political spectrum.
Rhetoric aside the USP of Cleggism appears to be the insistence that central government is not particularly good at delivering these public service objectives and elected governments (aka the state) should make fewer decisions about how they are met.
More decisions about how services are delivered should be made by communities,locally elected bodies and the recipients of services (aka citizens).
This is what people seem to mean mean by the buzz word ‘empowerment’.
Cleggism therefore functions like a political version of Occam’s razor.
Why let national and/or local politicians decide how to deliver a service if that can perfectly well be decided at a local or individual or generally lower level ?
Cleggism retains the traditional belief that what services are funded and the level at which they are funded and quality control should be a matter of collective agreement either at national or local government level.
All of which looks like very much like classic Liberalism.
However, Liberals have claimed equally vigorously that making executive decisions at national, European and even international level is not actually ‘disempowerment’ but pooling powers to great effect and therefore under Cleggism it cannot be argued that it is always smart to pass decision-making powers down the line.
Doesn’t it really depend on whether passing power down or up or whatever frustrates or fulfills the general will of society expressed through the democratic process – and depressingly interpreted by political parties in increasingly similar ways ?
When in the game of ‘pass the power’ the music stops we still need to make clear how we want a truly liberal society to differ from what other parties propose and what we have now.
John Pugh is Lib Dem MP for Southport. He is the Lib Dem Shadow Treasury Spokesperson.
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17 Comments
The key is that much maligned European principle, subsidiarity, which sets out a very clear principle that power should be exericsed a the lowest practicable level. Using this as the basis for deciding which level of government is most appropriate it is relatively straightforward to place the various powers of government at the local, regional, national or European level with just a few exceptions.
Thus local authorities should control education, with perhaps a regional coordinating body to share services between education authorities and ensure standards are kept and raised. The role of Whitehall can simply be light touch monitoring to make sure that there are not huge discrepancies between different regions.
I hope your assessment of Cleggism is indeed borne out in further announcements.
It’s an interesting post, but I can’t help but frown at the 2nd last paragraph:
“Doesn’t it really depend on whether passing power down or up or whatever frustrates or fulfills the general will of society expressed through the democratic process ”
I’m sure this hasn’t been properly thought through, but the implication is that the liberal approach to public services is that we’re in favour of whatever level of centralisation the public are willing to vote for.
Are you sure?
As pointed out above, the test is one of subsidiary/federalism/liberalism. If something can be done as well or better by a lower level of govt (or the individual), then it should be done by them.
I’m a Cleggist! 🙂
Cleggism?
Horrible word.
Can’t we call it Cleggery instead? Or even Cleggage?
Cleggery, that’s it! I like anything ending in -ry. Irishry is a great word, imho. Other top words are realm, bereft and regale.
Actually I think the Pugh test amounts to saying that any elected public authority that wants power to do something (and to remove this power from lower levels) should have it. (I don’t see what other test of the “general will” is offered.) I prefer my Cleggism undiluted!
I find it both amusing and perplexing to read a Lib Dem MP explain the doctrine of subsidiarity without actually using the word.
Peter Bancroft writes: “As pointed out above, the test is one of subsidiary/federalism/liberalism”
No it isn’t. “Subsidiarity” is a legal doctirne of civilian origin recognised and applied by the European Court of Justice and written into the Treaty of the European Union 1992. “Federalism” is a method of government and “liberalism” is a term so vague as to be useless. People misusing legal terminology makes me want to scream.
Angus, I’m not sure of your specific objections?
Subsidiarity did indeed get its original meaning as a made-up word within an EU context, but today’s it’s used more widely – it means that powers are at an “appropriate” level and only higher up when necessary.
Federalism is the same, though is usually explicitly described as devolving power to the lowest possible level. As you point out, this is indeed usually a matter of governance, but the lowest possible level can often be one of the individual. Federalism’s really my “pet subject”, so surprised at being accused of not properly understanding the term!
Liberalism obviously can mean many different things, but I would say that most sensible definitions would say that if someone can make their own choices with good outcomes that the state shouldn’t make those choices for them.
Surely there is no need for a personal label for what Nick Clegg is suggesting when ‘liberalism’ is already there and is what he is using himself?
Blair needed the label Blairism becuase he was doing precisely the opposite to his party – ditching their core philosophy and replacing it was something more pragmatic.
Liberalism though, unlike socialism, is already a pragmatic philisophy. It is about how you structure society to cope with multiple beliefs and ideas about the good life while gradually improving opportunity for all.
If we’re starting to call rediscovering that Cleggism or some varient, then I really think we’re missing the point about what Clegg’s trying to achieve. Hopefully his reforms and reattachment of this party to our underlying principles will outlast his leadership…
Unlike Blairism.
Putting ‘ism’ after a politician’s name should be banned as it is a totally vacuous statement. Andy Mayer is absolutely spot on. Call it ‘liberalism’.
This habit of confusing a pseudo-creed with a coherent philosophy started with Thatcher, and was grossly overstated then. But, once started, commentators couldn’t help themselves from describing Major’s actions as ‘Majorism’, and the same woolly thinking happened with Blair.
Please no more ‘Cleggism’!
Subsidiarity is a great concept but for me it should always be subject to a pragmatic test – what works – rather than being simply a call to pass everything down to the lowest possible level. More often than not (and especially after years of centralising Tory/Labour rule) that does mean that powers should be passed to a lower level. Indeed I would like to see communities right down to village-size being given the power to run most local things for themselves.
However, the “who does what?” question is and must remain a judgement call. Circumstances change and so does the public mood. What matters is that duplication is avoided. Failure to observe this vital principle is mainly why the referendum on a NE Assembly was lost in 2004 (rightly so in my opinion): opponents were able to describe it as “yet another layer of expensive bureaucracy” without any riposte from the Yes campaign.
The EU too is guilty of failing to observe this basis rule. The European Parliament has just been debating the question of school uniforms (specifically banning the hijab in primary schools across the EU). Sure, it was defeated but that’s beside the point; it should never have been on the agenda in the first place. In fact I simply don’t believe the EU’s claim to support the principle of subsidiarity. When controversy about the Maastricht treaty blew up in John Major’s face it was suddenly ‘discovered’ that this was a basic principle as a way of placating the euro-sceptics. Read the text and you will indeed find the word, but only in passing not as a fundamental principle.
If Clegg can develop a narrative on this that is consistent from parish council to Brussels, he will be halfway to Downing Street.
“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as is escaping from old ones.”
John Maynard Keynes
It’s statements like this that worry me:
“Why let national and/or local politicians decide how to deliver a service if that can perfectly well be decided at a local or individual or generally lower level ?”
In the first half of the sentence the word “local” is negatively attached to politician, in the second half it’s positively attached to “individual”.
Maybe it’s not thought through but it’s the same unhelpful ambiguity that was in Nick’s speech. The best people to make decisions about local services are locally elected representatives, genuinely accountable to the local population – they may be politicians or at parish council level, say, not really. There’s a lack of clarity in what I’m hearing about how we’re going to revive local democracy and that’s dangerous when Labour has pursued, especially in urban areas, models of local involvement that are near-Troskyite – turn up to a meeting and you can take control of a substantial budget of public money. No need to prove that you represent the local population. And even if you’re outnumbered at the first meeting by ordinary people, you just carry on turning up and talking loudly until everyone else goes away and leaves you and your friends in charge of the budget.
O.k. John but how ‘genuinely accountable’ are local politicians when it comes to the nitty-gritty of service delivery? The politicans are largely there to decide strategic direction and raise money to pay for it across a broad basket of services. They are not and can’t be responsible for every detail of how such services are delivered.
Which means that elections are great accountability if your primary concern is the general improvement of welfare of around 250,000 people every four years (if we’re talking councils). It’s bugger-all accountability when it comes to a specific bad school or a specific failing recycling service. Particularly not if such failures occur in wards or areas where regime change is deeply unlikely, or they’re not a sign of general weakness or underfunding, but isolated cases due to bad management.
It’s also a level of accountability entirely alien to the way we consume the vast bulk of our other services.
We would not for example deal with a bad mobile phone service by waiting four years on the off-chance of kicking out the board of directors on a vote at the AGM. We’d change supplier very quickly.
We’d also be happy to make that change ourselves, not rely on a local sales manager who we can only contact on a Saturday to liaise with customer services on our behalf in the hope that something might get better after a strategic review in 18 months time.
Individual choice doesn’t undermine local democracy, it’s just more honest about what the role of politicians actually is.
Some matters are strategic and about how we best allocate scare resources. Those should be issues for political and democratic leadership. Some are operational and managerial and should be left to front-line staff and managers, properly and directly accountable to front-line service users where that is practical and fair.
The notion then that there is a conflict between more local democracy and democratic accountability and individual accounability and is false. This party really has nothing to fear from empowering people.
I see you’re a Londoner! But we’re not just talking about London. I didn’t say that existing democratic systems are adequate. I said we should be careful of replacing democratic systems with undemocratic ones.
The original Liberal education system created in 1870 set up 2,000 local education boards, directly elected locally, and these proved massively dynamic, creating a national education system within a few years. The party fought the creation of local education authorities in 1902 which merged these local boards into local authorities and, incidentally, created faith schools. By and large our predecessors got things right.
What I’m not hearing is the language of extending local democracy, rather than simply extending the powers of the existing structures. For instance, the 1870 principles continue to be represented by the election of parent governors. Will “parent” schools be run by a clique of parents or by all parents? Those are my questions and I’m not getting reassurance.
“What I’m not hearing is the language of extending local democracy”…
probably because this thread is about what Clegg was talking about in his framing of the manifesto, not what he might have said. What extensions to local democracy do you believe should be in the manifesto? Personally I’d let local authorities have more control over their own democratic structures and decentralisation agenda, rather than prescribing them from the centre.
“Will “parent” schools be run by a clique of parents or by all parents?”
I’m a bit lost on your point here. Parent governors are elected by all parents, at least down our way…
I comment here in the hope that so doing might revive interest in this piece and introduce it to a new audience or one made wiser by close to four years of seeing Cleggism in action with willing partners.
The questions it raises remain.
What surprisingly does not remain is any connection anywhere on the net to the then new Leader’s speech to a special Manifesto conference in 2008.
Perhaps the Leader’s office would tell us where it’s gone … and perhaps why it is no longer thought worthy of publication?