the ministerial gene pool

There is now a distinct impression emerging in British politics that the current collection of our political leaders - of all parties - is of very low quality. A clear reason may simply be, of course, that they are too young. They simply could not have picked up enough political experience to be able to govern soundly. The fact that they tend to listen to adisers who are even younger and have less exeprience only serves to exacerbate the problem. But I'd like to explore the problem a little more deeply. In periods when politics in Britain has been more ideological, more partisan in nature, it was logical and understandable that leaders should emerge from the parties and from parliament, for those were the places where political ideas and policies were being honed and developed. I would characterise the 1960s - 80s plus the New Labour era as appropriate examples of this. In the past ten to fifteen years, however, British politics has beceome increasingly managerial and technical in nature. How we deal with the financial crisis and the recession is a classic example of this, as is the issue of the freeing up of labour markets by dismantling employment protection legislation. Indeed the conflict over employment rights is particularly interesting. John Prescott - an ideological politician if ever there was one - sees it as a moral question, an issue of rights and personal welfare. Miliband, Balls and the coalition, on the other hand, argue about the economic merits of such a policy, ignoring the effect it might have on workers and their families. So certainly all current leaders can be described very much as 'managerial' in style. The fact that they tend to use think tanks, policy units and advisers to devlop policies is, therefore, perfectly logical. Yet, despite this, we are locked into the traditional mode of leadership selection. By limiting the potential field to MPs from the governing party who have the ambition to join the government, we find only a couple of hundred candidates, many of whom have no relevant experience. Contrast this with the US or French presidents. They have a much freer hand in selecting governments. Indeed the US President MUST look outside the Legislature as the Constitution does not allow individuals to sit in both the executive and the Congress. How much talent are we ignoring through the anachronistic notion that ONLY MPs should be considered for ministerial posts ? To be fair, it is possible to ennoble extra-parliamentarians (Andrew Adonis is a good example of the success of this device)and place them in the government. Even then, though we have the absurd practice of not allowing such ministers to appear in the House of Commons. And it is rarely used. To take a darwinian perspective on this, we have an extremely limited gene pool from which to find political leaders and any biologist will tell you that this practice will lead to too many inherited defects. To pursue the metaphor further, we also have a Conservative leadership who come LITERALLY from such a pool, as so many were brought up in families who are members of what we might call the 'petit aristocracy'.

The separation of powers

On the subject, again, of the malaise of British politics, I think we should be looking at some fundamentals, rather than short term, superficial problems. I met Speaker Bercow recently and he suggested that ignorance lay behind the typical alienation from politics that people are feeling. I rather agree, but suggest that citizenship education - one of bercow's interests - is just a sticking plaster answer. Why is there so much ignorance ? It does not seem like rocket science and it is certainly not short of drama, as PMQ demonstrates every week. Nor are the issues difficult to comprehend - social equality and mobility, educational opportunity, health provision, whether the economy needs austerity or growth, how to combat crime etc. are not hard to comprehend. The solutions may be far from simple and beyond most people's compass, but there is little excuse for not understanding the nature of the problems themselves. Furthermore, many of these issues lend themselves to a relatively simple choice between two alternatives. Obviously they are more complex than that, but they certainly can be reduced to such choices for general public consumption. Having taught politics for many years I have found that the most difficult thing about British politics for young people (and indeed adults)is understanding the relationships between government and parliament, the differences between the two, and the distinctions between MPs and ministers. And when you analyse it, we have developed a rather bizarre system of government formation in the UK. Think about it. We are asked, on the whole, to vote every few years for our local MP. Most of us then hear nothing about them until the next election. OK, some people are represented by ministers and opposition front benchers, or by flamboyant characters like Denis Skinner, Louise Mensch or Tom Watson, but most of us are represented by anonymous lobby fodder. Now of course we know we are electing a government in reality, but that merely begs the question, why should elections not be more explicit on the subject ? In other words, if we are being asked to elect a government, that is exactly what we should do. But no, we take part in a charade of electing MPs. MPs have virtually no power or influence. This is one of the reasons why they tend to behave so loutishly in the Chamber. Virtually all votes in plenary session or in legislative committees are ritualistically determined by the party whips. The public are, on the whole, not stupid and understand this reality. What they have difficulty with is the relationship between voting and the nature of government formation, the selection of ministewrs and the reason why some individuals rise to the top. Why, for example, has David Cameron become prime minister when he is not supported by the majority in the House of Commons, or in the House of Lords and whose party attracted the votes of about one quarter of the electorate ? Furthermore, it remains baffling why the prime minister should also be a constituency MP. In short, there is a complete disconnect between the act of voting and the nature of government we get after an election. The culprit is our lack of separation of powers, in other words, government remains IN parliament, not separate from it. This means that government is accountable to the body - the House of Commons - even though it leads and dominates that body. It is as if the defendant in a criminal trial were also foreman of the jury ! Were government to be separate from parliament, as is the case in the USA, there might be far a greater understanding of the separate and distinct roles of government and parliament. Better still, we might achieve a more coherent outcome of elections if the voters were able to identify the leaders, specifically, by whom they wish to be governed. Freed from its slavish attachment to patronage, parliament could then do its job of scrutiny and making government accountable in an independent and meaningful way. The doctrine of the electoral mandate is a further absurdity. Politicians ritualistically argue that the elected government (elected by a minority of the electorate) has a mandate to implement every one of its manifesto policies. Not some. Every one. How confusing is that to those who do not follow politics closely ? Of course governments do not have a democratic mandate. Voters certainly do not know what manifesto they are told they are voting for, most of them do not vote for the government and even those who do clearly will not support EVERY ONE of its manifesto commitments. To be truly democratic government need to be forced to earn a mandate for each of its policies separately. In broad terms this is, again, how things are done in the USA. The business of earning such a mandate has to be acrried out either by referendum, a practice used in a handful of countries such as Switzerland, but more likely through a genuinely independent parliament, not the supine institution which we unwittingly elect every few years. The degraded nature of parliament and the political parties also devalues the process of leadership selection. It is through parties and parliament that leaders emerge. The poor quality of our current collection of political leaders, of all parties, must be partly the result of such degradation. But that, as they say, is another story.

Vince Cable's morality

I was listening the other day to an interview with Vince Cable by Jeremy Paxman. The subject was executive pay. At one point Paxman asked him whether he considered excessive executive pay to be a 'moral' issue. Now I have had several conversations with Vince Cable and know that he does. He is, after all, from the social democrat tradition of the Lib Dems, and a former member of the Labour Party. Cable chose to evade the question. 'Yes', he said to Paxman, 'it is a moral issue', but he refused to be drawn on his view of the issue. He simply reiterated the coalition policy. He then said that his own moral outlook had nothing to do with it. I felt my hackles rising instantly, and had a good view of Paxman's, who looked aghast at this response. The implication is clear. Cable belives that his own moral outlook should not inform policy. Taking this one stage further, it implies that morality has no place in politics. What a state British politics finds itself in if a politician's moral compass does not influence policy! Cable's clear fear - that he should not contradict the coalition's morality-free zone - was greater than his own visecral reaction to the subject. The fact that contemporary British politics is largely 'managerial' in character should not be in dispute. Currently the obsession with 'managing' the budget deficit has overwhelmed any idea that government should promote welfare and justice. Contrast this with the French presidential campaign which presented a genuine choice betrween this managerial approach and a new contract with the public sector. The Americans, too, will shortly be presented with a a clear ideological choice. All we British can hope for is a choice between two teams who compete on the basis of effectiveness and efficiency. Vince Cable represents that degradation of the political process.

Mid term blues

Yesterday I discussed the low turnout in the recent UK elections (contrast, incidentally, with nearly 80% in France when the choice was between a deeply unopular incumbent and an opponent widely considered to ne terminally boring, and when a losing candidate had recommended abstention). Today, I am more interested in the mantra that govering politicians trot out on such occasions that 'this is normal, governments in mid term always get a kicking etc. etc.'


Why should it be normal ? Why should governments not be popular ? After all, politicians claim a mandate for their policies on the grounds that the electorate elected them on the strength of those policies. If they carry them out, why should they be unpopular ? It is an admission either that they are no good as politicians or that they are not carrying out the policies that brought them to power.


An alternative explanation is, of course, that the British public are so disillusioned with politics and political activity that they only vote in general elections under sufferance and then take the first opportunity to rehearse their disdain for politicians.


Either explanation is a terrible indictment on British politics. Even Alex Salmond, perhaps Britain's most effective and popular politician cannot encourage the Scots to turn out in significantly higher numbers than the English.

In the next two blogs I am going to look at two possible reasons for disillusionment OTHER than the obvious one  - that our politicians are very low calibre and the the voters recognise this. That is for a later date. The two explanations I shall look at are, first  why the electorate may be acting (or rather not acting) out of ignorance and confusion. Second it may be that the people they are electing are pretty much powerless so voting for them is futile.

What price apathy ?

There has been much discussion and dismay over the low turnouts at the recent UK elections. Much of this has centred on a belief in a 'crisis of democracy', suggesting that it represnts an alarming degree of ignorance, as well as disillusionment among voters. I'd like to offer an alternative perspective. I'd like to suggest that the electorate has, in fact, acted with great intelligence.

Obviously ignorance, apathy and alienation have played a part, but the low turnout may well be a logical reaction to the reality that local government and politics are irrelevant. Local government has very little freedom of action, possibly as little as 10% of its activities are determined by the policies of elected councillors. The rest lies in the hands of central government or local permanent officials. Why should we bother to vote for candidates who will have virtually no power. At the risk of opening up old wounds, Margaret Thatcher was quite right in claiming that the problem of local government is its lack of accountability. Of course her solution - the poll tax - was a disaster, but she underatood the nature of the malaise.

The stay-away voters perhaps understand the futility of voting - they are not even holding local councillors to account by voting them in or out of office because the results of local elections are universally seen as a verdict on central politicians. Why bother, therefore, if those politicians ignore such voting ?

The Liberal Democrat leadership was right when they apologised to the hard working councillors who had lost their seats as a result of ther poor performance of the coalition. How frustrating an experience it must be to work your socks off to improve the state of local communities, only to be thrown on the political rubbish heap because their political masters are so inept.

More to come in some, hopefully thoughtful, pieces on the real crisis and its causes