Andrew Rawnsley, in the Observer, describes the rumoured Westminster paedophile scandal and asks the question: “Whom do you trust? Comes an answer that is as popular as it is succinct: trust no one.”
Rawnsley wearily summarises why we have lost trust in bankers, doctors, intelligence services, police, bishops, supermarkets, media and celebrities – and above all, politicians of all sides, from Blair onwards. Then he gets more original. He identifies judge-led enquiry as a means of establishing who we can trust – and then shows how that option was kyboshed. When Hutton exonerated Blair (and when Blair recommended the Hutton process to his friend Rebekah Brooks), judge-led enquiry was discredited. Government, as often, has been slow to recognise the problem – as evidenced by the recent proposal that the sister of a previous Attorney-General should lead a historic child abuse enquiry.
Rawnsley then poses a critical challenge. He concludes: “We mourn that we can’t trust our governing institutions and yearn to see some restoration. There’s a great prize here for someone in politics to win, if only any of them knew how to go about grasping it.”
Can we grasp the prize?
We have, of course, tried this before. They called it Cleggmania. In many ways, it was a great idea. If better sustained, it might have become a historic victory for electoral reform, rather than the humiliation of defeat on tuition fees. Sadly, history is littered with “ifs”. In hindsight, we merely raised the bar. In 2010, when we told voters we would be different and would not break promises, many believed us. Nobody would believe such claims now, from us or anyone else. These days, when politicians call around, voters count the spoons.
Another option is the Farage approach – to act the outsider, pose as a clubbable beer-swiller, appear ordinary and sincere. It’s an old trick, played in many guises – the farm-state US politico riding off to Washington to sort the rascals out, the fresh-faced “straight kind of guy” like Tony Blair (and one or two from our own ranks). We shouldn’t knock it. The “outsider” stance can be genuine enough – think of Paddy Ashdown and his military experience, or Alan Johnson. We do need our leader to look like a reformer, not a Cameron clone.
However, to help voters count the spoons and conclude that we are now trustworthy, what we really need are deeds, not words.
The most important deed we could do, I suggest, is to accept the proposal of the Committee for Standards in Public Life, and announce that henceforth, our party will not accept donations from individuals exceeding £10,000. We should be the party which has not been bought up by millionaire tycoons, which wouldn’t be seen dead on Oleg Deripaska’s yacht. The party which puts voters first.
That’s a start. It might just help us survive 2015. We should also show proof that we have changed, and proof that this is changing the way we work.
To show we have changed, we need something like a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We need to talk about Cyril. Michael Brown too. We need to explain that we failed to set rules to protect our own members against internal misuse of power, and that we have now put that right. We need to lift the lid on past misdeeds – and challenge opponents to do likewise.
To show that we are changing the way we work, we should put our policy proposals to Citizens’ Juries. So for example, if we believe in a cheaper nuclear deterrent, we should put the case to a randomly selected jury, in public, and ask them to vote. This won’t be plain sailing. Sometimes we will stick to our guns despite majority disapproval. But it will make publicity, show we are engaging, and show that we listen.
Have we the strength to make necessary reforms? Or will only a new party be able to do that?
* David Allen was a Lib Dem activist for more than 25 years, including being a Borough Councillor and local party Chairman in Rushcliffe. However, he opposed the Tory coalition, and finally left the Party in 2020. Since then, he has been politically independent. He would be delighted to support a centre-left Coalition including the Lib Dems.
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21 Comments
We have, of course, tried this before. They called it Cleggmania. In many ways, it was a great idea.
It was a rubbish idea. It involved raising unrealistic expectations, which meant we fell all the harder when the unrealistic nature of those expectations became apparent.
The problem to me is that politics has become viewed as a consumer product, sold with ad-man’s techniques. This just isn’t working, because politics isn’t that sort of thing. Politics shouldn’t be about choosing some package of policies devised by some remote team of superior types, it should be about choosing representatives we can trust, representatives who are people we know think like us, to come together and work out what needs to be done in government. I know that’s not how politics is seen now, because when I try and describe it that way to people who aren’t involved, I find those I am talking to are astonished, they never even considered it that way. The idea that political parties are about people coming together to select candidates from among their number for public office has gone completely. Most people nowadays seem to think that being a member of a political party just means signing up to be a volunteer doing what you are told to do by the executives at the top of the party through some sort of top-down management structure, in just the same way as getting a job in a big company – except you aren’t paid for it. I find that most people who don’t know much about politics really do assume that if you join a political party, you have to throw away any individuality and thoughts of your own, and just do what your leaders tell you. No wonder very few people want to do it.
So, when they see the political parties selling themselves with an “It’s all wonderful” line, of course they don’t trust it. Yet that’s just what we are doing in the Liberal Democrats, selling the party as brand Clegg, twisting and distorting what it is doing to make out it is all super wonderful, with excited high pitch optimism, and the salesman’s “buy this, it’ll solve all your problems, trust us” line. Quite obviously this doesn’t work when people look at it and then see the miserable little compromise that is the reality of what the party is doing now in government.
Yet it is a miserable little compromise, because that’s what politics is REALLY about – finding compromises. It is miserable because having to compromise from one’s ideals in order to meet the reality of the real world, and in our case the reality of having to work as a junior coalition partner with another party whose views are very far from our own, must inevitably mean making uncomfortable decisions.
I think we need to sell our party as something you join to help influence things rather than as all about a Leader and The Party Line. We need to talk frankly about policies as reaching an acceptable balance between competing desires, and not as ideal ready-made solutions in which all the good things are thrust forward and all the bad things hidden. The most basic thing is to be frank about the fact that if people want government services, they just be paid for somehow. We managed to get that idea across when we used the “penny on income tax to improve education” line. We fell down when we made a big thing about continuing to subsidise higher education and even increasing the level of subsidy and neglected to point out that inevitably meant more taxes to pay for it. To this day we are being mercilessly attacked because people just think tuition fees was a matter of voting for them or against them, the idea that we couldn’t get agreement from others for the taxes that would be needed to meet our pledge just doesn’t get a hearing because we were not honest enough to out it like that in the first place. Because of the way politics is sold as “it’s all wonderful”, people really do believe taxes can be cut and government services increased simultaneously and believe all politicians are bad because they seem to “promise” that, but don’t deliver – or they deliver the balancing bad bits they didn’t mention in their sales pitch to the good bits that seemed to be what they were all about.
To show that we are changing the way we work, we should put our policy proposals to Citizens’ Juries.
But we ARE the Citizens’ Jury. Or we should be. The whole idea of mass political parties is that they are composed of ordinary people which is the assurance that what they do is in line with what ordinary people would want. If we have to “show we are engaging, and show that we listen”, it is like saying we are some bunch of aliens, or imperialist colonisers from a strange land, or well-meaning but out-of-touch aristocrats who need to do something to understand what the people they aspire to govern want. It shouldn’t be like that because we should be seen as coming from the people, not being something pushed down upon them.
Plus I never liked the idea of Citizens’ Juries after Labour ran one in Lewisham to get agreement for its executive mayor idea while I was Leader of the Opposition there. They made sure the people on it got all their biased lines in favour of the system, and gave no chance for anyone to put the other case – I certainly wasn’t invited to address them or contribute in any way, for example. Then Labour forever after dismissed my arguments against abolishing councillors voting powers and installing a local elected dictator (what an “executive mayor” is REALLY about) by saying “but the people have spoken in favour of it through the Citizens Jury, so how dare you oppose them?”. Later, CentreForum published a pamphlet written by a then newly-elected Liberal Democrat MP in praise of executive mayors, and repeating Labour line’s about how the Citizen’s Jury they used showed how popular it was. The fact that the author of that pamphlet couldn’t see through Labour’s propaganda, didn’t have the instinctive reaction against ending representative democracy and installing an all-powerful elected dictator, and didn’t even think to ask the leader of his own party group in the borough about what was really happening there told me that MP was someone I couldn’t trust to do what I would want a Liberal Democrat MP to do or think in the way I would want a Liberal Democrat MP to think. His name – Nick Clegg.
“Government, as often, has been slow to recognise the problem”
Government did not (and seemingly does not) agree that clearing their own from any misdemeanors is a problem for them.
Elisabeth Butler-Sloss is a case in point. Whether cock up or conspiracy, no-one in ‘the establishment’, seemed to have grasped that despite her impeccable credentials, she was ( as also was her brother), ‘the establishment’, and was never in any position to have a credible stab at hosing out the Augean stables of her own class. So why did it take only 48 hours for it all to go belly up forcing her to resign from the appointment.?
The growth of the internet in the last 10 years means that there is nowhere to hide your past, although vague attempts via Google are being made to do so!. And here’s the thing. Whichever politician or establishment figure pops their head over the parapet, I and millions of others, are just a few click away from building up a ‘history profile’, on that particular individual ; what they said, what they did, what they wrote, who are their friends, who they have allegiance with etc. The NSA frankly, has nothing in comparison to the hundreds of blogs, watchers and scrutinizers such as Guido Fawkes, or Zero Hedge etc., plus the thousands of minor whistleblowers that feed them data and information. If some politician, or other establishment figure tries to spin the story or even worse, bulls**t their way through a speech from the rostrum, we WILL!! find you out, within 4 or 5 clicks of a mouse.
Crude attempts by individuals to shut down their past history searches via Google will ultimately fail, because information like water, finds the tiniest of flaws to pass through.
It is a sad fact of present life, but the default position is that [Politician = Liar] in the public psyche . And it is the fault of politicians that that is the case. Trust in politics can only be healed with time, truth, and promises made good. But beware, because we are all watchers and whistleblowers now.
Great post Matthew. Perhaps we do need a little more of the “Real parties don’t all sing from the same hymn sheet; if you’re a liberal, join us and add your ideas to the tune.” lines to encourage new members and to change that idea that you have to throw away your own views if you join in.
Whether cock up or conspiracy, no-one in ‘the establishment’, seemed to have grasped that despite her impeccable credentials, she was ( as also was her brother), ‘the establishment’, and was never in any position to have a credible stab at hosing out the Augean stables of her own class
Perhaps you would like to try suggesting someone qualified to lead such a high-profile inquiry (which pretty much has to be a senior judge) who is not part of the establishment (which pretty much rules out all senior judges)?
Sorry Dav, WHY does it have to be a senior judge??? Surely this is the sort of thing the legal establishment would say. Break out of the box.
I’ve just logged on to see who has responded to my points. I’m a bit struggling to find anyone who has actually addressed them – as opposed to picking up on the tangential things I mentioned in passing, and talking about those. To summarise, my main points were a £10,000 cap on donors (silence so far), a “Truth and Reconcilitation Commission” (silence so far), and Citizens’ Juries (relevant comments from Matthew, which I will address in my next post).
Why, I wonder, the total silence from all our loyalist commentators about the donor cap and the Truth commission? Is it that they are too scared of the consequences if they say “These are lousy ideas”, and they are too scared of the consequences if they say “These are good ideas”? So, perhaps they think the best thing to do is keep quiet and hope LDV quickly buries this article underneath other stuff about party awards, committees, etcetera?
Now to respond to Matthew: Yes, Citizens’ Juries can be abused, which is a drawback. Then again, we could decide to adopt them and decide not to misuse them – it’s an option for us, isn’t it?
Matthew says “we ARE the Citizens’ Jury. Or we should be. The whole idea of mass political parties is that they are composed of ordinary people which is the assurance that what they do is in line with what ordinary people would want.” Fine words Matthew, but I think you and I would agree that we are not living up to them right now. Since we are not living up to them, I have made a proposal to do something qualitatively different, which the public would notice, and which amounts to more than just preaching.
What is Matthew’s proposal to do something specific and different? (Apart, of course, from “sack Clegg”, which I would certainly agree with, but which isn’t going to be enough on its own.)
David Allen, I wrote out a reply that addressed both the idea of a cap and the citizen’s juries, but I thought I might get dragged into a debate and I’m trying not to debate much until I’m on my feet more and can help the local party.
Unfortunately, I think the problem with a donation cap is first of all it is unilateral disarmament, but most importantly I think it is easy to go down an authoritarian route where the government introduces lots of prescriptive rules for society. I would rather tackle overall wealth inequality and allow rich people to donate to pretty much who they like, but I do agree the super rich need to be challenged. I understand why they do it, but we can’t allow everything to be bought up by the 0.1%.
When it comes to citizens juries I am concerned that a minority would hijack the policies for their own political preferences. I don’t think we really have this problem with criminal juries because they have to follow the law.
However, one of the most interesting lines in your article is your last one: “Have we the strength to make necessary reforms? Or will only a new party be able to do that?”.
I think the current state of the party is pretty flawed, albeit the least flawed of all the major parties, but after the next election we definitely need to define what we believe in more. I think this is very important, I am afraid of people wanting to pick fights with Russia and we need to tackle such ideas in the party. I would probably end up going a separately way to most people, but at least we can agree we need to challenge some right wing ideas in the party.
Regards
Slightly off topic, but in response to Dav’s question.
“Perhaps you would like to try suggesting someone qualified to lead such a high-profile inquiry”
I would be confident that someone like Shami Chakrabarti could handle such an important task. She may of course require some technical / legal support, but a civil servant and barrister to aid her work would (to me), seem perfectly reasonable, do-able, and I think the public would have confidence of no establishment interfering in her investigations?
In addition to my previous response to Dav.
The more I read about Shami Chakrabarti, and her capabilities, she seems to me to be the obvious shoe-in for the inquiry job?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shami_Chakrabarti
David, you want a comment on your suggestion that the LibDems “will not accept donations from individuals exceeding £10,000” – it strikes me as being like unilateral disarmament, or a shot in the foot if you prefer. The other parties, and the kippers in particular, will rolling in the aisles laughing. It would confirm many people in their opinions that LibDems are naïve fools.
I’m not saying the idea is bad in principle. I just don’t see how it could be implemented and enforced. Funding a democratic process is a hard problem to solve. Even if something like that was the law for all parties, the 1% would find a way to channel their contributions to the Tories.
David Allen – The “Farage approach” is of course as old as the hills. Thatcher played the outsider challenging the establishment “them” and carried on doing so long after she and her fellow travellers had become the establishment.
In contrast one of Lib Dems’ main aspirations is to join the establishment. Hence the party is keen to show it is ready for government which I think is part of the reason (though not the only reason) the official party so carefully avoids having any views that might be seen as challenging the status quo. I’m not aware of any successful party that has ever adopted this approach and I don’t see how this squares with the self-belief in being radical or different but then perhaps that commitment went out of the window along with the policies.
The trouble with a £10,000 cap on donations is that people subvert it by running campaigns which just happen to be very similar to a particular party policy and the parties become even more reliant on the media to get their messgaes over – which often means they are filtered, ignored, dummed down or given graveyard slots.
The second problem is that Nick Clegg is in charge of politcial reform and has achievedly diddly squat despite once threatening to not let people out of westminster until reform was secured.
To show we have changed, we have to change – sadly we haven’t. I think L. George had the right approach in selling honours – the people got no policy concessions, they got no access to ministers, it was a much cleaner approach to fundrasing than the parties use today.
Citizens’ Juries are emphatically not the answer to Lib Dems’ policy weakness. That’s partly because, as Matthew’s anecdote illustrates, they are far too easily fixed but partly for an even more serious drawback. The idea rests on the assumption that the answer, whether on Trident, the economy or whatever, is ‘in the system’ – i.e. that people are actively aware of the alternatives and so can choose between them.
That’s patently not so. We all now live in an intellectual environment that is entirely dominated by neoliberal thought. While this isn’t entirely monolithic, we are all familiar with its core tenets – that markets are the optimal institutional form for just about everything, that they naturally deliver the best possible outcomes, that competition is the key to improving efficiency, that humans are rational calculating machines, that government debt must be reduced at all costs, that maximising economic freedom for companies is necessary for national prosperity and so on. Since Thatcher no government has operated with a different mindset despite the inescapable evidence that it has failed by any normal measure. And it’s not just governments; opposition too, both inside and outside Parliament, effectively subscribes to the neoliberal paradigm so TINA rules. There is no alternative ‘in the system’ – i.e. no alternative in peoples’ heads.
Citizens’ Juries is, in effect, an appeal to common sense. But in a world where neoliberal TINA rules then the common sense of the majority is inevitably – and by definition – neoliberal and wrong. So most people really do think that, for example, the government has to cut spending as its top priority despite the fact that it’s a policy that rests on a monstrous logical fallacy or that markets are always beneficial when in fact that’s plainly wrong. Both these errors just happen to be immensely advantageous in subtle but important ways to a certain small subsection of society. If you think that’s just a coincidence you probably also believe in the tooth fairy.
The limitations of common sense are why great paradigm shifts are never down to a committee. Rather they depend on an individual to think the unthinkable, to risk ridicule and go out on a limb. Think Galileo or Darwin.
We desperately need a paradigm shift in politics now but it’s not clear to me who is tackling this problem. What is obvious though is that it’s a problem that won’t be solved by any number of policy working groups. What it does require is an ability to take the best thinking irrespective of its source and combine it in new ways and to sustain debate that goes outside the familiar ruts it tends to stick in.
GF:
“Citizens’ Juries are emphatically not the answer …because ..the idea rests on the assumption that …people are actively aware of the alternatives and so can choose between them. That’s patently not so.”
The version of Citizens’ Jury I would advocate is one in which a randomly selected jury are (modestly) paid to listen to the detailed case put to them by both the supporters and the opponents of a specific proposal. Then, as informed jurors, they vote.
(A useful variation may be to ask them to vote both before and after hearing the arguments. That can identify occasions when “popular opinion” is not to be trusted, because people change their minds when given the facts – though they don’t necessarily change in the direction you would like them to!)
Admittedly this works better for questions that are not too dependent on fundamental attitudes. “Do you believe in God” is not a question on which half-and-hour’s argumentation from a vicar and a Dawkins is going to change anybody’s mind. “Should we let Tesco build a store in Little Wotting?” works better. An issue like the bedroom tax also plays well. Lots of people think it sounds a great idea until they hear the facts about how those penalised can’t find anywhere smaller to move to.
Several people have made comments on the donation cap:
“Unilateral disarmament” “a shot in the foot”: Yes, but like Obama, we could make a virtue of our reliance on small donations and appeal for them, maybe even “text ***** to give £3 to the Lib Dems”. In turn this could generate real voter support. Against that we would have to give up the glossy literature and the slick PR stuff and go back to soapboxes and village halls. This might go down well with voters who are fed up with rich glossy politics. I think we could gain votes, not lose them.
“Hard to enforce”: We don’t try to enforce this on our opponents. We just do it ourselves, and then contrast what our opponents are doing.
That’s my proposal, anyway. Clearly nobody wants to grab this lifebelt, because it scares them. They would rather just carry on swimming, in the middle of the ocean, with about ten months’ stamina left….
‘Lots of people think it sounds a great idea until they hear the facts about how those penalised can’t find anywhere smaller to move to.’
Well as an idea the bedroom tax is a great idea in the way that the poll tax was a great idea. It all works wonderfully well until it doesn’t. Juries are juries of facts, not bodies that look into the future. The fact is that all policies if unintended (of not perhaps unforeseeable) side effects. I imagine on the facts the bedroom tax is a wonderful idea until you are the one that finds you have to pay it.
What do you think a citizens jury would have made of the right to buy?
LJP: Good question. I think a citizens jury would probably have decided that the right to buy was a wonderful idea, because those opposing it would have had only hypothetical objections to raise. Twenty years later we now know that those objections were very valid, but at the time we would not have known that. So yes, I think the citizens’ jury would have failed to find the flaws in right to buy. Well, but look, I never said that citizens’ juries would be a panacea for all our ills. I just said I thought they could help!
With the bedroom tax, we are better placed. We do have evidence that most people cannot readily downsize to avoid the tax, they just get clobbered. We could put that evidence before a jury (I have a memory that it has in fact been done, but can’t recall where), and expect to to change minds. So in some cases, citizens’ juries will make a real difference.
Mind you, if we are to advocate a more vigorous democracy, community politics, etcetera, we do have to be careful what we wish for. We would no doubt get pressure to bring back hanging, pressure to toughen up against immigration, pressure to be tough on crime and terrorism, as well as pressure for fairness, and pressure against the excessive power of the media, exploitative employers, and bought-up politicians.
If we are real democrats, I think we should accept these things. People should exercise democratic power, find out what happens, and learn from their experiences, good and bad. Better real democracy than rule by billionaires, corporations, lords of intelligence gathering, and a tiny political elite!
What a jury does in any sort of trial is listen to several well-prepared views of the issue before them and choose between those views. Usually they are told NOT to consider anything outside what that have been given.
This doesn’t seem to me a likely way of getting novel or innovative policies. It could put a brake on the sort of policies which, several years down the line, everybody says “I can’t imagine why we ever thought THAT was a good idea.” But surely this only requires conferences and policy comittees to have some sensible members who can argue effectively with single minded policy wonks.
It is not a crime to be seen on a person’s yacht. Don’t blame the host, blame the public officials who can’t seem to steer clear of scandal.