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.