Do we want politicians of principle?

The discussion on what it is we are fighting for seems to be going on extremely well on the forum. There will, I expect, be a part 2 from me and, if our readers are particularly unlucky, part 3 as well.

Predictably, as soon as I posted the screed or rant I remembered many other points I wanted to raise but either forgot or found no room for. Some of them are being raised by our readers and some remain in my head until I post them on the blog.

One point, not necessarily the most important but one that is continuously brought up, is that of the personality of politicians. There is, clearly, a problem with the ones we have but does anybody really know how to solve it through personality changes?

It is, of course, very frustrating to see the political world of Westminster become packed by nothing but professional politicians. The House of Commons has virtually reached that stage, the various think-tanks are packed with young people who do not want to go out into the big bad world and the only chink of light is the House of Lords where people sit either because they have achieved something (often in politics, alas) or while they keep down other jobs and interests. For that they get abused but, as it happens, they are closer to the population of the country as a whole.

As it happens, most politicians have always been professional politicians but until they started receiving their ever higher salaries, this fact had to be disguised by private income or employment as a journalist, lawyer or, very rarely, businessman.

One must admit that the perennial cry of “we want more successful businessmen at the high levels of politics” is unmitigated tosh. Running a business is not the same as being a politician and there is no particular evidence that businessmen, however good they are at making money or, more likely, rising within the corporate structure, understand anything about politics of economics.

Think of the businessmen we have seen dabbling in politics recently: Archie Norman, Lord Sainsbury, Lord Levy. Not a very edifying spectacle for various reasons.

What of the notion that Ministers should have had experience in the field they are lording it over? The suggestion was, I believe that the Secretary for Health should have started as a nurse and gone on to doing all sorts of medical matters. Fine, though why a nurse should know anything about the health service as a whole is not clear.

But what happens when the said Secretary is shifted to transport or education? What use will the medical experience be then?

The point of our system is that it is politicians who become ministers not experts. The expertise is supposed to lie with the permanent civil service who do not change with elections and with outside advisers ministers might consult or employ. Advisers advise and ministers decide.

There are many advantages to this system and a number of disadvantages, the latter having become a good deal more important. The most obvious disadvantage is that it gives enormous powers to the civil service and as we now have governance by management not by politics, that power is almost impossible to control. Civil servants have an agenda of their own and, if in position to do so, will implement it.

Another disadvantage of government consisting of parliamentarians, that is politicians, is the poverty of the gene pool. There is no particular reason, constitutionally speaking why the Prime Minister should not allocate one of the great offices of state or important positions to someone in the House of Lords but it would be decried as being “undemocratic”, democracy being equated with elections in too many people’s minds.

Worst of all, this system does not provide us with true separation of powers or with checks and balances. Parliamentary supremacy, in effect the supremacy of the party that has won the elections to the House of Commons is little more than elected dictatorship, particularly within the flexible constitution that this country has had over the centuries.

There are other systems. The American President is elected separately from Congress and appoints his cabinet according to his own wishes (soon it may be according to her own wishes). Other countries have other ways of electing or appointing leaders. There is a good deal to be said for a Prime Minister being elected separately from the House of Commons and being able to appoint ministers outside it. But until we have such a system we are going to have Secretaries for Health who probably have never worked in a hospital or a doctor’s surgery.

As it happens when we did have a Secretary for Education who had been a teacher, the result was an unmitigated disaster in the form of Gillian Shephard. Someone who is thick with the teachers’ unions is the last person we want to run our education system. (Now that I think of it, any politician is the last person we want to run our education system.)

Then again, do we want a professional diplomat to be our Foreign Secretary?

Which brings me to my last point (for the time being) and that is the question of integrity in politicians. What do we actually want from them? To be like us or to be above us in any intellectual and moral sense?

As various stories of the DPP and the Attorney General having affairs with younger lawyers hit the papers there is a good deal of tut-tutting, often from people whose own private lives would not bear too much scrutiny. Even more tut-tutting comes from people who have somehow decided that nothing like this could have happened in the past.

The only thing that would not have happened in the past was the newspaper exposés. There was just as much infidelity and sexual misdemeanour in the past. The clothes were nicer.

In any case, does it matter that a politician or the Director of Public Prosecution has an affair? Is it not more important that these people get appointed for the dubious reasons that they are chummy with the Prime Minister’s wife or have set up chambers with her?

At this point I had better explain why I do not think the Lord Goldsmith story, about to hit the newsstands is of any importance while Ruth Kelly sending her child to private school is.

Really, it is very simple. Ruth Kelly is part of a government that actively prevents the vast majority of the population from having any choice whatsoever. To its eternal shame the Party Formerly Known As Conservative seems to share these opinions.

In those circumstances the politicians’ own behaviour does matter. Sending their own children into the private sector indicates that they do believe in individual choice – for themselves and those rich enough to afford one. The rest of us can go to hell in a handcart educationally speaking.

All right, let us limit integrity to just politics and not personal behaviour, which is still very hard to define. If we start testing people before they go into politics we really are not going to get anyone except sad dysfunctional weirdos.

In any case, integrity about what? Political parties are necessarily coalitions of several shades of opinion, often widely apart, that coincide on some basic general idea. In the process of fighting elections, possibly winning them and forming a government or fighting that government from the opposition benches, a good many compromises have to be made.

What would happen if they were not made? Nothing much. We would have a parliament that resembled nothing so much as a particularly badly behaved primary school. (Oh wait, that is exactly what we do have in the Commons quite frequently.) It would not be a political system and there are times when we need one.

Clearly, when we say political integrity we mean on a few important issues. Unfortunately, we cannot stop there. Even on those issues, integrity might not be very popular and yet we are told, often by the same people, that politicians should listen to the electors and follow their instruction. What if a particular politician is firmly convinced that the people who elected him or her are completely wrong on some important issue? Where does integrity lie then?

Let me go back to Edmund Burke, he, whose portrait graces this posting. In 1774 he was elected to be Member for Bristol, a position he loved and relished. In April 1778 he found that his strongly held principles that trade should be opened up to Ireland on the same terms as it was in England displeased his electors, the good burghers of Bristol.

During his correspondence with one of his most prominent supporters, Samuel Span, of the Society of Merchant Adventurers, he tried to persuade him that free trade would benefit Bristol as well, because it would benefit the whole of the Kingdom.

In one of the letters he outlined how he saw the role of an elected representative and it is not one that will appeal to many people even now:

Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him, their opinions high respect, their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs – and above all, ever and in all cases to prefer their interest to his own.

But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure – no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.

Burke, incidentally, was a professional politician, earning his money by serving various political nobles and writing pamphlets.

I imagine many people, reading those stirring words will say that few if any of our modern politicians have unbiased opinions, mature judgement or enlightened conscience. In fact, they seem to have acquired the worst of all worlds – not having any integrity of their own but not listening carefully to the electors either.

For all of that, the problem of what constitutes politics of integrity remains. Burke, eventually found that he could not expect to win in Bristol and withdrew from the election of 1780. Luckily for him and the country, he was returned within a few months for the borough of Malton which was more or less in the Marquess of Rockingham’s gift.

It was, perhaps, the American Founding Fathers who understood the conundrum most clearly. You need people of good intent and honest politics but you cannot rely on them alone. They, too, need to be constrained within structures.

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What is it we are fighting for?

It is usually easier to define what it is one is fighting against, which is why countries who have been historically on the losing side are better at defining some kind of national identity than those who have, on the whole, been on the winning side.

Being somewhat interested in films and propaganda, I find, as I have written on various occasions (too numerous to refer to) films of various countries in the Second World War very instructive. The most interesting, though not always completely successful British ones are those by Michael Powell and Emerich Pressburger (the latter being a Hungarian) because they attempt to create a positive image of the country, society and social ideals that Britain was actually fighting for. Often these ideals are old-fashioned and, at times, there is an ambiguity about their desirability though their attractiveness is never in question.

I shall leave the question of social ideals and national identity aside for the moment, though, as I pointed out in a previous posting, the only way we can fight the various battles we are facing is by recreating those identities.

Let me concentrate on the question of democracy, for it is the lack of it that we (or some of us) so dislike in the European Union and it is because the United States and other Anglospheric countries are democracies that we want to be allied with them. Similarly, our support for Israel in the Middle East rests on the main argument that it is the only democratic country in that region at the moment.

Only people completely ignorant of history, in particular of the history of the European Union from its beginnings (ably discussed by my colleague and Christopher Booker in “The Great Deception”) think that the EU is somehow a German plot to create a Fourth Reich. Au contraire. As I pointed out before, the EU and its ideology desperately needs a suppression of German national identity in order to succeed.

So, let us go back to basics, as a certain not very successful Prime Minister is supposed to have said once. If it is democracy we are fighting for, what do we mean by it?

Elections, free and fair and a government formed by the majority. Fine. But what is a free and fair election? The Soviet argument was that theirs was the only free and fair election because it represented the people’s wishes in the selection of the only candidate in each constituency.

We, of course, do not think that and believe that opposition parties should exist and independent candidates should stand as often as possible. Errm, do we? How often do we hear people harrumphing about silly single-issue candidates simply cluttering up the ballot papers. And if those single-issue groups and candidates grow into a force possibly to be reckoned with, as the Greens did temporarily some years ago, UKIP has done recently and the BNP is threatening to do, great is wailing and gnashing of teeth from the main-stream parties.

So, maybe, we should do without parties. Just have candidates we vote for. In a way, that is the system they have had in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union and it prevents that country from developing into a mature democracy. The politics of Russia reminds one of eighteenth century political intrigues across the continent of Europe, in Britain, but above all ….. in Russia. The great leaders rise and fall, at the whim of the top man (some were women in Russia) and with them rise and fall all their followers.

One of these great men has been Anatoly Chubais, who has had many falls and many rises. (At the moment he is up, being the Chairman of the Board of the Unified Energy System of Russia and in charge of its forthcoming privatization.) After one of his falls from grace under Yeltsin he spent various of his followers to the West to drum up support. I asked the one who had been detailed to come to Britain whether there was any sign of Russian politics developing political parties, based on certain political ideas or ideologies to replace the personalized struggle. After much humming and haing, he admitted that there was not sign of that.

Years have gone by and Yeltsin is out of the limelight. But the basic problem has not been solved. Russian politics still revolves round personalities not political parties. It has since then become far less of a democracy by any standard.

Clearly, then, dispensing with parties is not really the solution and, some might argue, that the existence of parties as well as the constant formation of new ones that might or might not develop are prerequisites of a democratic system.

Some might but the leaders of the existing political parties do not. Using the pretence of fighting corruption they (Labour, Conservative and Lib-Dim) want to introduce a system of state financing for existing parties, thus ensuring that they are part of the machinery of government rather than expression of political views and opinions. Once a party is subsidized by the state, it cannot be said to be an opposition. A move of that kind would also make it impossible for new parties to emerge and grow. Would we have had a Labour Party if there had been state funding of parties in the early twentieth century?

(If we want to talk about corruption, what about the following. How do we feel about the wife of the Prime Minister setting up Chambers with a colleague who subsequently becomes the Director of Public Prosecution and gets into some trouble over surreptitious wining and dining a young and blonde colleague, in the full expectation that said PM will push through a contentious piece of legislation, to wit, the Human Rights Act?)

Well, we are getting somewhere. We need elections with a multitude of candidates and we need parties though we do not need them to be funded by the state.

What else? A free and unfettered media, probably, but here we run into another difficulty. The point of that free and unfettered media is the provision of information. What happens when out of laziness it does not bother to provide information that is hard to get or hard to analyze? What happens, furthermore, when the media has an agenda of its own?

It is only with the appearance of the blogs that it became possible to challenge a certain world view that the MSM in this country and in the United States, Australia and Western Europe assiduously propagated. What would have been the outcome of the Vietnam war and the subsequent surge of Communism throughout the world if there had been blogs in the sixties and seventies who could challenge the less than truthful or accurate “reporting” by the MSM of those years?

Let us go further then: we need a free and unfettered media but we also need a way of challenging that media, an ability to recognize that it has an agenda of its own, which may not be helpful to the country that hosts it.

Here is where we run into real difficulties. Free and fair elections, political parties, freedom of the media but also freedom of conscience and opinion (within reason, I am afraid, because even libertarians believe that other people exist and need to be taken into account). But what happens if the parties do not differ all that much from each other, do not provide any real choice at election and do not respond to the popular will between elections?

Well, no, let us go back a little. How is that popular will to be measured? I keep hearing about petitions and the disgraceful way the government ignores them and about the way Tony Blair ignored the million or so (at least half of whom were not British) demonstrators against the Iraqi war but find it hard to understand why I should get indignant.

A democratically elected Prime Minister is the person, according to the present constitutional set-up, who decides whether this country goes to war. There is a good deal to be said for changing that arrangement and ensuring that Parliament has more of a say, though Blair did actually have a debate on the Iraqi war. But what one cannot have is the notion that the foreign policy must be decided according to what the people who happen to turn out on a day to march through London want.

As I said before, the war may not have been in their name, but they were not marching in my name.

Similarly, and irrelevantly to the subject of the petition, it is hard to see why government policy should be decided according to what a large number of signatories, some of whom openly admit to signing as many times as they can, want. The problem with the road charging (yes, that is the one I am talking about) is not that the government was not paying any attention to a petition, which was still signed by fewer people than those who had voted for them, but because the Minister in question was lying in a way that is destructive of a democratic order.

As it happens, I do not believe that there is anything new about politicians lying. They have done so ever since there were politicians, going on for several millennia. One reason for that is that most people could not cope with the truth if anyone told them.

One of the truths the population of this country cannot cope with for any length of time is that eighty per cent of our legislation comes from the European Union and our elected representatives have no right to oppose it. The reason why so many of us go into denial over this is because it undermines the concept of Britain’s democracy and, above all, her independence.

NATO does not legislate in this country; the WTO draws up trading rules but does not insist on domestic legislation; the European Union is the primary source of most of our laws and regulations. That is not a happy thought and most people prefer to ignore it.

That is, at least, one reason for Douglas Alexander’s barefaced lie about road pricing. He said that there was a need for a debate and there is. But there is hardly any point in having a debate if the issue has already been decided. That kind of a debate one could have in the Soviet Union.

The truth is that what we are fighting for is not so much democracy, though that is part of it, but constitutional liberty. Individual freedom to life, liberty and justly acquired property that is protected under clear constitutional rules; the right to express one’s opinion but, also, the right to disagree, even if the expressed opinion is part of a consensus; the right to religious observance but not to repression of other people and criminal behaviour (threats of violence, honour killings, genital mutilation, kidnapping and forced marriage etc) supposedly in the name of a religion; government decided on by the majority with legitimate minority rights protected; and, above all, legislators and regulators who are accountable for their decisions.

As the Meryl Streep character says in "The Devil Wears Prada", am I reaching for the moon?

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