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.

Attacking MPs is journalistic cowardice

Billions have been spent on banks that will not lend. The crisis in finance means the next government, whether under David Cameron or Joanna Lumley, will have to make savage cuts in public expenditure. But no politicians are talking about any of that until after the next General Election while the champions of the people in the media are letting them get away with it. They are checking receipts for second homes and moats.

Shaken politicians and excited reporters say public anger and disgust may destroy the foundations of trust that underpin democracy. Except that opinion polls don’t support this view. Support for all parties has hardly varied during the course of the affair so far.

The public is imagined in the minds of politicians and Westminster journalists as an unstable and unpredictable rabble. They fear the anger of the mob, but how, exactly, has this anger been expressed? A satirical website planted a pound-shaped flowerbed in an MP’s garden and some more were booed on Question Time. The public may be revolted, but it is not revolting. Some polls say people see the expenses issue as peripheral.

The media, led by The Daily Telegraph, has been humiliating MPs as part of a long-running feud. There is a strong blame culture involving the politicians we vote in to represent us directly and the media that scrutinise, edit and communicate what they do in our name. “Village” is an apt description of Westminster if it describes a parochial, paranoid place where scandal results from everyone knowing your business.

Both antagonists have trust and legitimacy problems. The media, especially its biggest British organisation, the BBC, can’t do anything right. Newspapers are declining, commercial TV is going broke and local media are endangered species. Journalists collecting and editing information on behalf of the public are representative, in fact, of the organisations that sell and exploit that information. Reporters must chase circulation and eyeballs, not the big picture.

Politicians are suspicious of the reporters’ agendas and try to channel and control communication through to their voters. The reporters must be seen to work under Jeremy Paxman’s maxim: “Why is this bastard lying to me?” The public, endowed with the many eyes and arms of the media, becomes capable of bringing about the downfall of politicians without recourse to the voter.

The politicians’ refusal to discuss the near future is cowardly.  The Tories, as the probable next government, are particularly craven. they are not trying to win the next election, ther're just sitting back, waiting for Gordon Brown to lose it. They spinelessly waffle about austerity while keeping quiet about unpopular policies.

Political journalists cannot even prod the Prime Minister-in-waiting to say what he will do in power. The media, led by that vanguard of the people, the Telegraph, take the government to task for its decoration bills while it runs up the biggest public debt ever – after a 15-year boom.

MPs’ expenses have taken a long and winding route to become a strange form of public property. Investigative journalist and author Heather Brooke tried to use the Freedom of Information Act to publish MPs’ expenses in 2004 and received such a run-around she ended up in the High Court last year, where she won. The Commons still had not published the information before it started to be incompetently hawked around Fleet Street and partially leaked last month. Then the Telegraph somehow obtained the data and fearlessly published the choicest morsels via a circulation-boosting daily drip feed.

Poorly performing politicians deserve to be kicked out of office. They have all performed badly on the economy, wars and much else. But it is not the public that is venting its anger now. The public does not express its opinions through the media, much. Public opinions are only directly revealed by elections. 

Mainstream parties are right to fear the wrath of the public but wrong to assume there will be apathetic lynchings. Politicians that cannot give you a reason to vote for them do not deserve your vote. Give us something to vote for in a plan for the future. The political journalists will investigate the persons of MPs if they are not given any policies to scrutinise. The Westminster press pack might even start asking politicians the questions people really want answered.