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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In a lively and gripping essay on contemporary politics, Peter Riddell remakes the case for representative democracy but concludes that it desperately needs to be strengthened. The effect of the expenses scandal has been to turn off both existing and potential representatives and voters. Naive reformers believe the answer is wholesale constitutional reform, but the result of that is likely to be stalemate and rule by powerful and well-funded vested interests. Instead, Riddell calls for a balance between popular participation and clear-cut decision making, underlining that political parties are necessary for decent as well as strong government. A timely and considered defence of the political process at a time when they are relentlessly under fire, this book will realign the way we look at our politicians.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
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Table of Contents
In Defence of Politicians
(In Spite of Themselves)
Peter Riddell
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Biteback Publishing Ltd
Westminster Tower
3 Albert Embankment
London
SE1 7SP
Copyright © Peter Riddell 2011
Peter Riddell has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the publisher’s prior permission in writing.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 9781849541558
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
For my most discerning critics and my most loyal supporters – Avril and Emily
PREFACE
This book is a polemic laced with autobiography – a reflection on the nature of politics and politicians based on more than three decades of observing them. It is also a restatement of the case for representative politics, and hence for politicians, at a time when both are widely seen to be in crisis. The book has grown out of the first Parliamentary Affairs annual lecture of the same title, which I delivered in February 2010, and which was then published in a revised form in the July 2010 issue of Parliamentary Affairs. This journal is produced under the auspices of the Hansard Society, a charity which promotes representative democracy, with which I have been involved for more than a decade and a half, chairing its executive committee and council since mid-2007.
But In Defence of Politicians develops the argument much further than the original lecture and article. At the time of preparing the lecture, I was still chief political commentator of The Times. Since then, I have ceased to be a journalist after nearly forty years, including nearly thirty writing about politics, which was long enough both for me and my readers. I am still doing some freelance writing and broadcasting. But I have taken one step back from day-to-day politics in my work as a Senior Fellow of the Institute for Government, a non-partisan charity aimed at improving the effectiveness of government. That involves looking more at procedures, systems and governance rather than immediate political events at Westminster. (Incidentally, I should stress that nothing in this book has any relevance to, or is any way affected by, the Privy Counsellor inquiry into the treatment of detainees on which I am serving.)
So my perspective on the political world has changed – from the pit to the circle. With my career as a daily journalist over, I have injected many more of my personal observations and insights from my privileged position writing about politicians at close quarters, first on the Financial Times up to September 1991 (including nearly three years in Washington DC), and from then until mid-2010 on The Times. Political journalism is a form of voyeurism: it offered me an opportunity to observe the powerful at close quarters. I was there with Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev in St Catherine Hall in the Kremlin, the Prime Minister at her most defiant after the Brighton bomb, and saw her interrupting a joke by Ronald Reagan (and getting away with it) at a grand dinner at the British Ambassador’s residence in Washington. I saw George Bush Senior gently patronised by Deng in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, and heard Bill Clinton deliver one of the worst political speeches I have ever heard (at the Atlanta convention in 1988) and then attempt to brazen out the Monica Lewinsky affair in early 1998 at a White House press conference, with a much more nervous Tony Blair by his side. And, along the way, I travelled the world at my employers’ expense, and fell off a camel at the Pyramids.
It will be clear from my choice of title and from the subsequent chapters that, on the whole, I like politicians, though with the crucial caveat expressed in the subtitle of this book: in spite of themselves. They can be, and often are, vain, self-obsessed, narrow and blinkered. But most have a genuine commitment to public service, by which I mean helping their constituents and the public, as well as naturally themselves and their careers. So I start with a prejudice, based on close contact and knowledge, in favour of politicians as a group, and of many as individuals. In the eyes of some, as discussed in later chapters, this would class me as too much of an insider, a member of that clichéd but well understood term the Westminster village, someone who is too closely bound to its inhabitants to be able to recognise their failings. But I hope that the following chapters show that I am able to stand back and view politicians ‘warts and all’, as Oliver Cromwell said. Westminster, defined as the world of Parliament, can certainly be cosy like a village and inward-looking, as the expenses row and its aftermath have shown. But most MPs are well aware of how they look to outsiders. They hear complaints, often exaggerated, every day from their own constituents.
Personally, and here the confessional of the autobiography intrudes, I have instinctively sought to understand rather than instantly condemn and criticise. That has advantages for a journalist, in trying to perceive politicians’ motives and viewpoints, and also what they may do next. This is not just about seeing both sides of a question, but instead mistrusting those who regard any new development in stark either/or terms. I dislike absolutes and prefer a sense of detachment and perspective. I do not regard compromise as betrayal. No aspect of life is ever 100 per cent – and those who believe it is generally come unstuck. At best, it is 80 per cent. That is one reason why the perfectionist Gordon Brown never struck a chord with voters.
Moreover, we have generally always been here before. Few policies or events are ever completely new. A ground zero mentality is both illusory and dangerous. That was what was so tiresome and vacuous about the early ‘Cool Britannia’ and ‘young country’ phase of New Labour in the mid-to-late 1990s. Few politicians or governments in democratic societies – and that qualification is obviously crucial – are either as good or bad as they are often portrayed. I am inherently suspicious of hero worship as much as the assertion that politicians are all scoundrels, and in it for themselves. This can be dismissed as being too sympathetic to politicians, but, rather, it reflects a belief that politics is both a necessary and desirable activity.
My defence of politicians is therefore not primarily a matter of personal preference. It is based on a deeper philosophical belief about how we should be governed, as I discuss in the first chapter. This involves a conscious acknowledgment of the influence of the late Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics, produced nearly half a century ago in 1962. My other debts are to MPs who have championed Parliament and sought to improve it, notably recent MPs such as Dr Tony Wright, Martin Salter, Mark Fisher and David Howarth (all of whom retired at the May 2010 general election) and current ones such as Sir George Young and David Heath (at the time of writing the Leader and Deputy Leader of the Commons in the coalition respectively) and Andrew Tyrie (already making a big impact in chairing the Treasury Committee of the Commons). These MPs, and peers such as Lords Norton and Tyler, do not agree on many key issues, such as electoral reform and Lords reform, but they kept alive the flame of reform over many years. In particular, in early 2009, Tony Wright delivered the Political Quarterly lecture, which he had originally intended to call ‘In Defence of Politicians’. But he was persuaded to abandon this title as too implausible – a caution which I have rejected. When told of the title of my lecture, many politicians, and then fellow journalists, commented that ‘it needed saying’, while immediately adding, in the language and tones of Sir Humphrey Appleby, you have been ‘brave’ and ‘courageous’. However, as Tony Wright argued, ‘If we want to defend politics, then we also have to defend politicians. The class of people is intrinsic to the activity.’
Depressingly few journalists have taken up this argument, preferring the easy, and populist, path of condemnation to the less popular and trickier one of understanding. However some academics, notably Andrew Gamble, Philip Cowley, Colin Hay, Gerry Stoker and Matthew Flinders, have escaped the all too frequent myopia of the world of political science and have addressed this question. Professor Flinders delivered his inaugural lecture at Sheffield University under the title of ‘In Defence of Politics’ just over two months after my lecture. While taking different approaches, we broadly agree on the main issues involved – and I have addressed some of the ideas in his lecture, notably on voter expectations.
I could easily have added another chapter about how many academic political scientists prove a barrier to understanding politics. To read many political science journals is to enter an enclosed and often narcissistic world of academics writing for each other – where success is marked by a mention in another academic journal. It is self-referential, as well as self-reverential, and often unreadable to anyone but a narrow group of specialists. Authors feel that they have to back up any comment, however uncontentious, by a list of citations of the work of other commentators, the disease of footnotitis. Real politicians seldom feature in their article, far less than mathematical analyses. The authors seem to feel they would be corrupted by contact with politicians. But politics is not about regression equations or neo-Marxist jargon. Some political scientists, such as the ones mentioned above and in the following pages, do try to bridge the gap with the real world of politicians and voters. But they are a minority.
The challenges to politics and politicians which form the central theme of this book are not new, but they have resurfaced in an acute form in the past two years. Recent developments potentially threaten the way that representative politics is conducted and its legitimacy, not only in Britain but also in other Western democracies. The challenge to politicians now is different both in kind and in scale. I am not seeking to defend the conduct of specific politicians: indeed their weaknesses are a major part of the problem.
The original lecture was, in part, though only in part, a response to the expenses row which engulfed British politics in the late spring of 2009. This was in itself a third wave of an anti-politician mood, the first being associated with the cash-for-questions scandal in the mid-1990s, and the second with the strong opposition to the Iraq War and the claims that Tony Blair had misled the public. However, the revelations about expenses produced an outpouring of anger and criticism of MPs generally and demands for them to be constrained and limited, and not only in their finances. So we have had not just the hurried creation of the controversial (at least with MPs) Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority but also proposals made by all the main parties at the May 2010 general election to cut the cost of politics and give voters a greater say over what their elected representatives can do.
Much of the political and constitutional reform agenda being put forward by the coalition government is a direct result of the anguished debate over the role of MPs and Parliament ignited by the expenses row. A common theme is the attempt to show that Parliament is responding to voters’ desire to control and influence their members more directly. For instance, the suggestion that MPs who are seriously in breach of ethical rules should be subject to a recall vote by their electors is intended to prevent a repetition of the Derek Conway affair in early 2008. The former Tory MP was able to remain in the Commons for another two years, despite having been found to have paid his son out of his office expenses for work which he probably did not undertake.
However, some of the proposals which emerged from the Tories’ election slogan about ‘cutting the cost of politics’ have amounted to a muddled, and at times knee-jerk, response to the public anger over expenses. And initiatives such as reducing the number of MPs and capping the number of special advisers have produced unintended consequences and difficulties for the coalition.
Indeed, since I delivered the original lecture in February 2010, we have had the further twist of the formation of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government. The creation of the coalition has challenged many widespread preconceptions about how politics operates. Most MPs, party activists and journalists have been so accustomed to adversarial, winner-takes-all politics that they have found it hard to adjust to the bargaining and compromises inherent in multi-party politics.
That has been epitomised by that most fatuous of all complaints ‘we didn’t vote for that’; no, but the failure of any single party to win an overall Commons majority has meant that no one can claim the endorsement of the electorate for their platform.
Politicians have to operate in less than a winner-takes-all way. This has provoked many of the challenges which I describe in the following chapters.
This book starts with an introductory chapter setting out the main issues. It is followed by six chapters discussing the principal challenges to politicians, and then two concluding chapters discussing the implications, and outlining proposals to reinvigorate representative democracy. References to other books include the name of the author and the date of publication, with details in the bibliography. I have used the names of people as they were known at the height of their political activity, and not with any later honours or titles.
I am indebted to a very large number of politicians, journalists and friends from the past three decades. It would be invidious to single some out while excluding others. So I hope most will forgive me if I refer mainly to groups of colleagues, starting with editors and colleagues at the Financial Times during the 1970s and 1980s; then the varying characters who made life in The Times political team so such fun for nineteen years until mid-2010; the stimulating company both of my fellow council members and of the hard-working staff of the Hansard Society; and, most recently, my lively colleagues at the Institute for Government. However, I would like to mention the influence on me, and the support for me, of my two predecessors in chairing Hansard (David Butler and the late, and much missed, Richard Holme), as well as the many thought-provoking conversations over the decades with my good friends Andrew Adonis (to whom I am very grateful for reading a draft of this book), Helene Hayman, Peter Hennessy, Roger Liddle, James Naughtie and Andrew Tyrie. I always gain fresh insights from talking to them. On the publishing side, I am, as always, grateful to Sean Magee, my ever-patient editor in various guises over nearly thirty years, and to Iain Dale, the moving spirit behind Biteback who has done so much to stimulate public debate about politics in his various publishing and other activities.
Finally, I am indebted, as always, to my family, my wife Avril and my now teenage daughter Emily for their support and love – indulging my strange obsession with politics (only rivalled by cricket) and tolerating, most of the time, the associated accumulation of books and paper.
Peter Riddell
February 2011
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Politicians have never been popular. Their motives and behaviour have always been questioned. They have been seen as devious, factional and self-interested, pursuing sectional rather than national interests. Shakespeare referred to ‘scurvy politicians’ in King Lear. We all know Henry Carey’s words from 300 years ago in the national anthem: ‘Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks.’ In a non-democratic age, this reflected a particular, royal and court view of the national interest above the intrigues of aristocratic factions. In the following century, Robert Cecil, the future late-Victorian Prime Minister, and, admittedly, never an optimist about the political scene, in 1860 complained about the ‘incompetence and laziness of MPs’. There was never a golden age and it is possible to find quotations in almost any decade deploring the low standing of politicians. They are seen as corrupt and selfish as well as figures of fun: just look at the wonderful tradition of caricature and satire from Swift and Hogarth, via Gillray and Rowlandson, up to the puppets of Spitting Image in the 1980s and the biting political cartoons of Peter Brookes and Steve Bell. But politicians have not just been seen as ridiculous.They have also, increasingly, been regarded as ineffective.
Criticism of the political class, and Parliament, has, if anything, intensified since the creation of a mass electorate after the extension of the franchise in 1918. During the 1920s, MPs were seen as ineffective and of low quality, unequal to the task of controlling the big expansion of the state bureaucracy as central government took on more economic and social responsibilities.
This led during the 1930s to demands from many on the left for an even stronger executive to tackle the problem of mass unemployment. Elected politicians in Parliament should be relegated to a secondary, almost rubber-stamp, role approving enabling legislation which would confer wide-ranging general powers on ministers and civil servants. Even the most successful of democratic politicians recognise their isolation. Take a saying from the other side of the Atlantic:
Politicians are a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men. I say this with the greatest freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal.
The speaker was a young Illinois lawyer politician, no not Barack Obama, but that master politician, Abraham Lincoln, in 1837.
Lincoln summed up the paradox of the politician as someone seen as apart from the mass of the people, even though, in a democratic age, a politician is dependent for success on the votes of those same people. We love criticising politicians but we cannot do without them. Politicians as a class are integral to representative politics. You cannot have one without the other. It is essential also to throw political parties into the mix: they provide cohesion and direction, despite the views of some who now favour direct democracy without politicians and parties in their current form. Politics is inherently a rough and messy business, and I have no wish to pretend otherwise.
Two apparently contradictory trends are operating, both working against the current generation of politicians. The first, and most widespread, is to denigrate all politicians as a class. This involves an implicit, and often explicit, statement of superiority by the critics. The People, often with a capital P, know best and they are invariably duped by wrong-headed and self-serving politicians. Second, contemporary politicians are seen as inferior to more enlightened, and purer, ones in the past. They are seen as pygmies compared with the alleged giants from a golden age. Something has happened inbetween to produce a decline in standards and conduct.
Peter Oborne brought these strands together in a fierce attack on the new generation of politicians in his 2007 book, The Triumph of the Political Class. Oborne argued that they form the new ruling elite of Britain, a group characterised by its professional attitude to politics rather than old-fashioned ideology, and which has made party political differences non-existent in its pursuit of power and patronage. The new political class is not only set apart from the rest of society, with its own manners, morality and habits, but is also actively hostile to ordinary people and common modes of life in defending its special privileges, regulations and pay. ‘British politicians have sought to govern in a novel way, obliterating the organisations and methods of representative democracy and instead using the press and broadcast media as the key method of communication between ruler and ruled.’ You can, however, also argue the reverse case that politicians are too supine towards the pretensions of the press and broadcasters.
Oborne is an acute journalist and a formidable polemicist, but often goes 10 to 20 per cent too far in his sweeping judgements. He tends to claim that a government or a politician is the ‘most corrupt ever’, or that an event spells ‘doom’ or ‘triumph’. In reality, politics is more shaded and nuanced. But his view of a self-contained, and out of touch, political class is widely shared as part of the populist attack I discuss in the next chapter.
A variant of this argument is that politicians start off well but are then corrupted after being elected or once they accept ministerial office. But, just as hero worship inevitably leads to disappointment and disillusion, so pretending politicians are better than they are, or ever can be, is a fatuous exercise. So I am careful to talk about politicians, not statesmen, a pompous term liked by golden ageists and those who mistrust the political process and who falsely try to raise leaders out of the rough and tumble of the daily political battle.
Some of the most respected, and successful, past leaders – Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher – were instinctive politicians to their fingertips. To pretend otherwise, to canonise them, is to do them a profound disservice: retrospective hagiography invariably distorts their real contributions. The way that the names of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are still regularly invoked on the right in the hope of scoring points in current debates – they would not have done this or that – is both depressing and misleading. They were both formidable leaders during the 1980s in changing the terms of the political debate, and had many achievements to their credit. But, like all politicians, they were of their times, and had well-known strengths and weaknesses. Above all, they were mortal. Reagan was fortunate in the post-FDR constitutional amendment limiting a US President to just two terms, or eight years.
Thatcher tempted the fates and was forced out in November 1990 by her own Cabinet and MPs after eleven and a half years. The first signs of hubris came more than three and a half years earlier in spring 1987 while returning from a highly successful pre-election trip to the Soviet Union to meet, and argue with, Mikhail Gorbachev. This success was reinforced by the contrasting embarrassment of Neil Kinnock’s brief visit to the White House just a few days earlier (a failure partly orchestrated by Charles Powell, her foreign policy adviser, with Reagan’s own staff). Talking to reporters, including me, crammed in the back of the RAF VC10 returning to London, Thatcher made her first reference to ‘going on and on’. Standing next to me, Bernard Ingham, her devoted press secretary, said to me, only half complaining: ‘Now, I will never be able to retire.’ He could, and did, but it would have been better for her if she had not gone on for so long.
The attempt by Thatcher’s more fervent supporters, in the No Turning Back group and elsewhere, to maintain the myth of betrayal ignored how dangerously out of touch she had become, as well as alienated from former close allies such as Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe. By failing to treat her as a mortal politician, these Thatcherite ultras tarnished her own reputation and fatally undermined the government of her successor, John Major.
Politicians should not aspire to be saints, or treated by their followers as saints – that is the way to disaster. They are mortal and flawed. Their role is not to create an ideal society – that illusion can be left to fanatics whether fascist or communist – but, rather, to help reconcile different interests in a peaceful way.
Politics recognises, even celebrates, the clash of views and of groups, but within a framework of broadly agreed rules defined by regular elections within a representative democracy, underpinned by the rule of law. This requires mutual respect, and mutual constraints, between not just political leaders and their MPs but also their members and supporters. All have to accept the legitimacy of an election result. The other side may be wrong, but it has every right to its opinions and to implement its policies if it has won a free election. Equally, the winning side should accept constraints: the need for proper scrutiny of its proposals and the right of the opposition, and of minority and outside groups, to express their opinions.
Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics set out many challenges to politics, and therefore politicians: from authoritarians and ideologues, from what he vividly called the ‘saints’ or ‘student politicians’ who believe that the cause of the moment is all that matters (like many single-issue pressure groups), from technocrats and mandarins who see themselves as superior to politics and from those who condemn any deviation from their ramrod principles as betrayal. The essence of politics is recognising imperfection; we can do better but cannot create a perfect society. All these challenges set out by Crick remain, but there are many newer ones, created both by the collapse of deference towards an established political class (on the whole a healthy development except where it slips into destructive cynicism) and by technological developments such as the growth of the internet which have opened up access to political debate (again healthy in itself but subject to abuse). The end of deference has fuelled calls for increased transparency and created a more uninhibited, and critical, attitude towards politicians. That has been reflected in lower levels of trust in politicians, as well as in other public figures and institutions. There is an intriguing question about which is symptom and which cause.
Politicians are therefore on the defensive, and prickly, as reflected in the widespread anger of MPs about the much tighter rules imposed by IPSA. They feel misunderstood and misjudged. Despite their many failings, they have a strong case. By and large, most politicians are not in public life just for themselves, or to become better off. Of course, ego and vanity play a large part – often a large part – as they do in any occupation involving public performance. Many journalists are hardly lacking in ego and vanity, even more so than many leading politicians since media stars are mostly in a less vulnerable position. But there is also a large measure of public service, not least because of their direct contacts with constituents, which are more regular than in the past.
