Who wins from this boundaries fiasco? Fanatics and fringe activists
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Version 0 of 1. Some rules of politics are so widely observed that their existence only becomes apparent in the breach. So it was when the Conservative Ruth Davidson told an audience in London on Monday that the capital should count itself “very lucky” to have Labour’s Sadiq Khan as its mayor. They had met as pro-European debating partners in the referendum campaign. “He’s the real deal,” Davidson added. It was the present tense that made the remark stand out. Standard procedure for praising politicians from another party is to wait until their careers are over. It is relevant that Davidson is not a Westminster MP. She belongs to a new class of devolved politician, unbound by protocols of the ancient parliament. So now does Khan. His escape from that airless chamber was one of the most shrewdly executed career moves in recent memory. He and Davidson are still 100% political animals, but there is something free-range about their manner that casts a sad light on the battery-farming style of the Commons. Dread of the cage prompted David Cameron to quit his seat in parliament. There is a high-minded attack on Cameron’s decision that paints him as a selfish coward abandoning public service when it ceased to be glamorous: all constituency surgeries, no Chequers. In this view, former prime ministers should pin themselves to the green benches like campaign ribbons on a war veteran’s tunic, signalling wisdom acquired in bloody service. Cameron knows that such a role is either disruptive or ceremonial. He could speak his mind, in which case every intervention would be deconstructed as a harsh verdict on Theresa May; stay silent; or stay away, in which case he would be damned for bunking off. He could be candid or stay in parliament, but not both. The last thing MPs need now is to be forced into a brutal game of musical chairs against their colleagues Observing the rule about saving generosity for retirement tributes, Jeremy Corbyn warmly endorsed Cameron’s choice. “We should respect someone who moves on to do something else with their lives,” the Labour leader said, adding that he had always got on with his old adversary “on a human level”. Corbyn would spend less time in the Commons too, if he could. His best years as a parliamentarian were spent in maverick rebellion, saluting no leader. But conscientious objectors do not make great commanding officers. Corbyn’s preferred milieu these days is the open-air rally of willing supporters, not the claustrophobic cockpit of dissent, some mastery of which is inconveniently contained in his job description. Meanwhile the emergence of a grassroots movement on the left that venerates the Labour leader and vilifies most of his MPs is accelerating a flow of political energy away from parliament. The Corbynite ethos demands an adherence to lines of doctrine that is both more onerous than old-fashioned whipping, and less interested in the realities of the legislative process. A similar dynamic was unleashed by the EU referendum. The result hangs over MPs as a general order to satisfy the popular will, with no clarity about specifics. This puts the majority, who voted remain, in an invidious position. Their duty as legislators is to act in what they believe is the national interest, but if that impulse steers them towards a milder flavour of Brexit they will be accused by hardliners of traducing democracy. There is a paradoxical conflict between the constitutional primacy of MPs and the plebiscitary mandate that grew out of a Eurosceptic fixation on parliamentary sovereignty. The last thing MPs need in this context is a process that rips up their existing mandates, scraps 50 constituencies and forces them into a brutal game of musical chairs against their colleagues for the remaining seats. Yet that is what the boundary review, published yesterday, achieves. There is logic to the reform: voters move around, and to equalise the numbers represented in each area the map needs periodic redrafting. But the latest application of that principle has been contaminated by partisanship from the start. Its aggressive promotion alongside a slapdash change to the voter registration system came about under the coalition government because the combined effect was sure to tilt the balance of newly allocated seats towards Conservatives (the Liberal Democrats tried to kill the reforms for the same reason). An unforeseen consequence is the opportunity that boundary changes now afford to pro-Corbyn activists, who can use a flurry of candidate selection contests to purge refusenik incumbents and replace them with loyalists. If Corbyn retains the leadership, as seems likely, Labour politics will retreat even further from the realm of wider public engagement and plunge into recesses of dark factional combat. Tory selection contests might be more civil, but they will not be immune from equivalent pressure on candidates to flatter members’ obsessions – a mechanism that ratchets the party to ever greater heights of impractical Europhobia. At a time when parliament badly needs to speak for the lay voter, MPs will be doubly deferential to the atypical voice of full-time activism. When the legislature needs to keep its eyes on the wider European horizon, its members will be haggling over minute slivers of domestic turf. When MPs need to lead from the front, they will be watching their backs. The process could hardly be better designed to make Westminster politics less attractive and less relevant to the challenges of the moment. Appropriately, the boundary review was first advertised as an indulgence to anti-politics rhetoric. David Cameron said a reduction in the number of seats would “cut the cost of politics”, as if MPs are best understood as a burden on the taxpayer. The unfashionable truth is different. There is no more vital a component in British democracy than the diligent constituency MP. The duty to serve everyone in a seat regardless of political allegiance affords a depth of perspective and sensitivity to the contours of public opinion that refutes caricatures of an out-of-touch elite. And committed public servants in parliament outnumber the idlers, carpetbaggers and expenses-gobblers, most of whom have been weeded out in recent elections. You don’t hear this often because of another unwritten rule: the busiest, most conscientious MPs are often the ones who are least complacent about a need for politics to change. So those who work hardest in Westminster do not dare to say in public that Westminster works at all. |