Critics of Westminster politics are wrong to say things couldn't be worse
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Version 0 of 1. Jack Straw was already going. Now Malcolm Rifkind is leaving the Commons too and taking with him decades of hard-won experience of the kind the country needs in such dangerous times. It seems appropriate to ask how the new generation is shaping up. Not too well in Natalie Bennett’s case, it seems. The Greens are surging well in the polls, ahead of the Lib Dems in some, as disaffected left-leaning voters turn against Nick Clegg and the mainstream. She had a bad wobble yesterday. It’s not the end of the world; Greens place less stress on leaderism, but it doesn’t help the cause. Today’s Times (paywall) has dug up some evidence that Boris Johnson, London mayor and arch-leaderist – witness his quickie biography of wartime leader Boris Churchill – is the answer to David Cameron’s problems. We can be sceptical about that, but it’s tempting and unwise to underestimate Boris, I concluded reluctantly several years ago. We know all about him. By coincidence, yesterday I popped into a Politeia thinktank session to listen to a very different kind of self-appointed visionary. Douglas Carswell is the Tory MP who quit his party and resigned his Clacton seat to win it back – handsomely, too – for Ukip. He is bursting with ideas and one of the most wholesome MPs I know. What did he say? That the Westminster political model is broken (surprise, surprise), that nine out of 10 seats are safe ones in most elections (three in 10 changed hands in Tony Blair’s landslide win in 1997), that the big parties no longer represent ancient sectional interests – business class or working class – but their own career interests. It is the 21st-century equivalent of the pre-1832 “rotten boroughs” with their handfuls of voters, a political elite of Westminster insiders saddled with outdated ideas. I think most of the above is tosh, but I have been listening to romantic politicians of both left and right – from Enoch Powell to Tony Benn – making versions of it most of my life. As I told Carswell, I want him to keep on making it because it’s important that the system is always being challenged, so that it responds and adapts to rapid change more quickly than it otherwise might do. He’s certainly not wrong to insist on the central importance of ideas to driving politics. British shoppers thought they got a good deal from Tesco and co until Aldi and Lidl came along (“I know they’re German… many good ideas come from abroad”) and shook them up. Our Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum parties need the same shakeup and Ukip is the radical alternative to do the job, says Douglas, who cites energy policy, banking, trade, Europe and immigration (he’s not a basher) among those areas in need of fresh thinking. Ok, if you say so. But I happened to read Ukip’s new health policy yesterday morning and it is not a radical document. Nigel Farage has retreated from his insurance-based NHS idea (hey, it’s unpopular), so Ukip is going to bash bad management and spend lots more of the money we will – in theory – save from leaving the EU. Job done. Carswell goes further. He wants a parliament free from “being run by the whips”. That means more voter participation – in picking topics for debate and recalling MPs who misbehave – as well more power to the backbenches and open primaries, not small party cabals, to pick candidates. Sarah Wollaston, the Totnes GP to MP selected that way in 2010, is a fine example of independence, he says. So the Tories dropped the idea (the open anyone-can-vote primary did cost them £40,000, Douglas). You get the picture. Carswell rejects the idea that “there is something authoritarian and illiberal” about Ukip. He admires the Swiss constitution of 1848, which borrowed heavily from the then-fresh Jacksonian Democracy in the infant USA, and thinks the elections for police complaints commissioners (PCCs) will be less of a disappointing exercise in participatory democracy next time, especially if they are not held in November and dominated by party candidates. New technology will help. It helps break the “priesthood of the pundits” – he means Fleet Street – and its stranglehold on the agenda. It lowers entry (and printing) costs, allows new parties to crunch voter data at local level in a smarter way than the granular approach favoured by overpaid, Obama-ite US consultants whom the big parties hire. He means you Jim Messina ( Tories) and David Alexrod (Labour). Fascinating stuff and useful, some of it. But what prompted me to speak from the back of the room was the obvious fact that the 2015 election looks set to deliver what Carswell wants without him appearing to notice. It’s most unlikely we will vote for a majority government, so there will be another coalition or a minority government, fragile and potentially unstable – at the mercy of small parties and events. The whips’ power of patronage will atrophy along with much else. The “breath of fresh air” school will welcome this as the harbinger of future change. Clever Raphael Behr has a Guardian column today arguing that electoral reform – voters rejected it in the 2011 referendum – is the answer, though when I look at the grand-coalition politics so common in Germany or the dire choices facing Israel in its coming election I do wonder why. If Bibi Netanyahu is the answer, someone is surely asking the wrong question. I left the Carswell talk holding contradictory thoughts. It’s always good to hear a notably sincere MP thinking outside familiar boxes, though it’s hard to imagine Nigel Farage enjoying Carswell’s thoughts as much as I did. But his performance also resonated with bright-eyed inexperience at a dangerous time in our affairs when experience counts. Look how clumsily ministers have handled the Ukraine crisis. Ah, you may say, decades of experience didn’t stop Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkind making themselves look shabby and greedy in the Daily Telegraph/Channel 4 sting. No, it didn’t, I have to concede. Nor did it prevent the Iraq war of 2003. All good points, but it is a basic error to say: “It couldn’t be worse.” It usually can be. |