Politics isn't working, so don't reform it

“Public dissatisfaction with politics has never been greater: a national debate is needed on what must change.”

The Guardian is launching a discussion thread on its website entitled “A New Politics” with the above statement. The public can respond there on the contributions by the paper’s commentators. Trawling through the reader’s responses, there seems little chance of any kind of consensus on just what reforms of the political system would actually work.

Most respondents call for some kind of restraint on MPs, either with new bodies, a constitutional limit set on their powers or in many other ways, some funny, some bloody.

It’s all very well to encourage discussion and invite new ideas, but the job of politicians is not just to represent the people but to lead them. The sovereignty of Parliament is a very old idea but a good one. The representatives of the people, the MPs, are not constrained by anything that a previous Parliament, or monarch, has done in the past. This tradition is part of Britain’s unwritten constitution because it means that the body that runs the country looks only to its own people and their future. It can reverse or abolish anything that has gone before and it can drop or revive a tradition if it decides to.

Calls for a written constitution are understandable when one looks at those democratic countries that have enshrined certain rights and freedoms in their constitutions. Abolishing the Lords and the Monarchy are also great ideas. Unfortunately, to embark on such a project right now would be counter-productive.

Any constitution enshrining our rights for ever, written now, would be profoundly affected by mistrust of political parties and their politicians and the mutual suspicion of the public and their representatives. Rights of all kinds have been undermined in several ways recently. To fix them permanently now, in a constitution that must be designed to be difficult to change, would probably result in more control of people’s activities and more surveillance of their lives, not less.

To limit the power of MPs also would be a backward step. They are elected by the people and anything that constrains their power constrains the will of the people, quite literally. A constitution written now, without some corresponding input of genuine public opinion that is refined and discussed, would not have the support or consensus that a constitution needs to be workable. It would not be representative of the interests of the people. Without a long, hard discussion throughout society of what the principles of a written constitution should be based on, anything produced would be a knee-jerk reaction to the current preoccupations of the political class and the commentariat. It could not represent the people unless they were involved.

Perhaps a constitution might seem to be a good thing to reinvigorate a process of political engagement by the public. The underlying reason for the problems experienced by the political class (and media organisations, too) is that they have become the technical managers of a system that required no real public debate.

The public is certainly ready for change, A New Politics and a national debate, but the politicians and the parties and the gatekeepers of national discussion, the media, are certainly not. With hard-won consensus comes real leadership and nobody is ready to risk that yet.

A process of the reintegration of the public into politics and debate would be off to disastrous start if we jump straight into the deep end with a written constitution. The political classes and their communication facilitators need some practice before working up to a constitution.

Let’s all start with a relatively simple one – sort out the economy. If any politicians can rise to this challenge they will have engaged the people and learned to lead them. Then we could start the hard stuff.