Collapse of an honourable profession

Politicians are – and have long been – a good scapegoat for a society’s problems. 

Spineless and avaricious…So what’s new?

Well, quite a lot actually. Fifty years ago, politics was important in Europe at any rate – ideas and choices mattered. 

It was actually almost an honourable profession – people like Bernard Crick argued thus in 1962 in a classic and highly eloquent “In Defence of Politics” which probably played some part in my own decision to go into (local, then regional) politics in 1968. (Daumier clearly had a different view of politicians in the early 19th century - which is why I've been using his caricatures to head this series of posts)

After a couple of years of community initiatives and three years of chairing an innovative social work committee, I found myself playing for 16 years a rather fascinating but unusual role – nominally the Secretary of a ruling group of politicians (responsible for some 100,000 local government professionals), I was actually trying to create a system of countervailing power - of advisory groups of councillors and junior officials challenging various conventional policy wisdoms; and of community groups in the huge swathe of poor neighbourhoods of the West of Scotland -  trying to demonstrate what “community enterprise” had to offer. 
Political studies had been one of the key parts of my Master's Degree - so I was aware of the literature about democracy (such as it was then) - and, more particularly, elites (Mosca; Pareto; Schumpeter; Lipset; Dahrendorf; Michels - interestingly none of it british!). 
But it was the experience of representing a low-income neighbourhood in a shipbuilding town which showed me the deficiencies of actual democracy and the reality of bureaucratic power. The local, working- class politicians who were my colleagues were pawns in the hands of the educated, middle class professionals who ran the local services. As a young middle class graduate, I saw an opportunity to challenge things - using my social science words and concepts - if not knowledge! 
I had been inspired by the community activism of people like Saul Alinsky (and also by the early years of the American War on Poverty) and indeed wrote in 1978 two 5,000 word articles for Social Work Today (on multiple deprivation; and community development). The latter critiqued the operation of democracy and appeared in a major book on community development.

Straddling power systems was not easy (part of the important balancing process I have spoken about) – but, because I was seen as honest (if eccentric), no one could unseat me from the post (for which I competed every two years - from 1974-1990) as Secretary of the ruling Cabinet and Group of 78 Regional Councillors.

I was also lucky also to have access in the 1980s to various European working groups – and get a sense of how politicians and officials interacted there. And, most of the time, still an academic. I was in the middle of a complex of diverse groups – political, professional, local, national and European. It was the best education I ever had!

But by the late 1980s I was beginning to see the writing on the wall – Thatcher was privatising and contracting out local government functions – and abolishing any elected agency which tried to stand up to her. Greed was beginning to be evident. Thereafter I have watched events from a distance. I left British shores in late 1990 and became a bit of a political exile! 

Despite my unease with Blair and the New Labour thing, I was still excited by their arrival in government in 1997. And able to draft, even in the early 2000s, papers which extolled the apparent openness and creativity of British policy systems. 

But most of it, I now realise, was sheer verbiage and spin. Yesterday's post summarised the key points of the 1995 paper which superbly analysed the various phases political parties have gone through to reach their present impasse.

George Monbiot’s 2001 book “The Corporate State – the corporate takeover of Britain” - exposing the extent of new Labour’s involvement with big business - was my first real warning that things were falling apart; that the neo—liberal agenda of market rather than state power was in total control. And a wave of urbane, smooth-suited and well-connected young wannabe technocrats powering through the selection procedures.

The scale and nature of political spin – not least that surrounding the Iraq war - destroyed government credibility like a slow poison. 

The global debt crisis and bank bail-outs shattered the myth of progress. 

And then the media made sure to rub politicians’ noses in the petty excesses of expenditure claims. 

Both political parties haemorraged members – and then electoral support.

There are still some lone voices prepared to defend the political class - but it is a pointless task.

The political party as we know it has exhausted its capital – but still controls the rules of the game. They decide the laws; who is allowed to run; what qualifies as a party – with how many nominees or voter threshold; with what sort of budget; and with sort of (if any) television and radio coverage…

Parties should be abolished – but it is almost impossible to do so because they will always come back in a different form…….

I’m just looking at a book which focuses on the fringes of the European party system – the populist parties – and which does a good job of setting them in the wider context.

We have governments that no longer know how to govern; regulators who no longer know how to regulate; leaders who no longer lead; and an international press in thrall to all those hapless powers. Political parties no longer represent, banks no longer lend……Current political and social conditions are paradoxical: as citizens and individuals we live lives that reflect the fact that we have more information and more access to information than ever before – while at the same time we have a great deal less certainty about our futures, both individual and collective. We are, some would argue, increasingly living in conditions of ‘radical uncertainty’. …..

Uncertainty returns and proliferates everywhere.’ As a result, one of the key variables that needs to be factored into how we understand both demands and mobilisation on the one hand and policies and institutions on the other is anxiety.Not the niggles and worries of everyday life, but rather the surfacing of deep turmoil in the face of an uncertain future whose contours are barely perceptible and thus increasingly frightening.

And, though the condition of radical uncertainty might have existed, objectively, in the past, it existed at times when there had been no experience or expectation of the predictability of the future beyond that imagined in the context of religious or magical beliefs. No experience of the desirability and possibility of controlling our fate. Radical uncertainty in a world in which everyone has come to prize autonomy and control is a different proposition all together 

The digital revolution provides an impetus for the transformation of populism from a set of disparate movements with some shared themes and characteristics into something that has the force of a political ideology. The accelerated quality of political time and social media’s capacity to broadcast failure and dissent mean that the digital revolution gives populist movements a steady supply of political opportunity that reinforces its coherence. ...

And in the face of the rather colossal set of forces and transformations that fuel populism’s growth, curbing its destructive potential is about more than fiddling with an electoral manifesto here and changing an electoral strategy there. Those things need to be done, but they are minimum survival tactics rather solutions. The problem is the manner in which populism as an ideology is capable of marshalling the uncertainties and anxieties that characterise our era and responding in ways that provide the illusion of reassurance. Illusory though it may be, it fills that gap between the expectations of redemptive democracy on the one hand and the lacklustre manoeuvring of panicked policy-makers on  the other. A gap otherwise filled with uncertainty and anxiety becomes  filled with populist reassurance.

Political Parties as Parasites

It was in Bulgaria where I first encountered the phenomenon of proportional voting which has become such a dominant feature of Europe’s political system. Two colleagues on my project were at the same time local councillors – but not elected. They had simply been put on the party list. 

Grounded as I have been in both the political theory and practice of accountability, they were not real politicians. They owed their position entirely to their party bosses (which they could as quickly lose). 

More to the point, they had not campaigned and sought the votes of local constituents; nor held “surgeries” to hear people’s complaints and problems and thereby get a sense of public feelings. I do realise that there are a variety of PR systems available, including the mixed -member system - but my basic point stands.

In various countires I have used a diagram with a quadrant – to show the 4 very different pressures (audiences) which good politicians needed to have regard to – the local community; the party; the officials (and laws) of the particular government agency they had entered; and their conscience.

Politicians differed according to the extent of the notice they took of each of the pressures coming from each of these quadrants. And I gave names to the 4 types which could be distinguished – eg populist; ideologue; statesman; maverick. I tried to suggest that the effective politician was the one who resisted the temptation to be drawn into any one of these roles. 

• The "populist" (or Tribune of the people) simply purports to gives the people what (s)he thinks they want - regardless of logic, coherence or consequences. 
• The "ideologue" (or party spokesman) simply reflects what the party activist (or bosses) say - regardless of logic etc. 
• The "statesman" (or manager) does what the professional experts in the appropriate bit of the bureaucracy tell him/her - regardless of its partiality etc
• the "maverick" (or conviction politician) does what they think right (in the quiet of their conscience or mind - no matter how perverted) 

Each has its element of truth - and it is when someone blends the various partialities into a workable and acceptable proposition that we see real leadership 
All this came back to me as I read a paper (from 1995) which, looking at the relationship of the political party to both society and the state, nicely tracks the historical trajectory of the politician. First “grandees” (above it all); then later “delegates” (of particular social interests), then later again, in the heyday of the catch-all party, “entrepreneurs”, parties, the authors argued, have now become “semi-state agencies”. The article has some simple but useful diagrams showing how the three entities of political party, society and state have altered their interactions and roles in the last century.

     

We are told that proportional representation gives citizens a much stronger chance of their preferences being expressed in the final makeup of a Parliament. 

But that fails to deal with the reality of the party boss. 

Politicians elected for geographical constituencies (as distinct from party lists) have (some at least) voters breathing down their necks all year round. 

Not so those from the party lists who only have to bother about the party bosses who, in the past few decades, have got their snouts increasingly stuck in the state (and corporate) coffers.

The classic mass party is a party of civil society, emanating from sectors of the electorate, with the intention of breaking into the state and modifying public policy in the long-term interests of the constituency to which it is accountable. The "catch-all" party, while not emerging as a party of civil society, but as one that stands between civil society and the state, also seeks to influence the state from outside, seeking temporary custody of public policy in order to satisfy the short-term demands of its pragmatic consumers. In short, despite their obviously contrasting relations with civil society, both types of party lie outside the state, which remains, in principle, a neutral, party-free arena…..In the third model, parties are less the agents of civil society acting on, and penetrating, the state, and are rather more like brokers between civil society and the state, with the party in government (i.e. the political ministry) leading an essentially Janus-like existence. On one hand, parties aggregate and present demands from civil society to the state bureaucracy, while on the other they are the agents of that bureaucracy in defending policies to the public….. 

Looking at the three models as a dynamic rather than as three isolated snapshots, suggests the possibility that the movement of parties from civil society towards the state could continue to such an extent that parties become part of the state apparatus itself. It is our contention that this is precisely the direction in which the political parties in modern democracies have been heading over the past three decades. 

(We have seen a massive) decline in the levels of participation and involvement in party activity, with citizens preferring to invest their efforts elsewhere, particularly in groups where they can play a more active role and where they are more likely to be in full agreement with a narrower range of concerns, and where they feel they can make a difference. The more immediate local arena thus becomes more attractive than the remote and inertial national arena, while open, single-issue groups become more appealing than traditional, hierarchic party organizations.

Parties have therefore been obliged to look elsewhere for their resources, and in this case their role as governors and law-makers made it easy for them to turn to the state. Principal among the strategies they could pursue was the provision and regulation of state subventions to political parties, which, while varying from country to country, now often constitute one of the major financial and material resources with which the parties can conduct their activities both in parliament and in the wider society.

The growth in state subvention over the past two decades, and the promise of further growth in the coming years, has come to represent one of the most significant changes to the environment within which parties act……subventions which are generally tied to prior party performance or position - whether defined in terms of electoral success or parliamentary representation – and therefore help to ensure the maintenance of existing parties while at the same time posing barriers to the emergence of new groups.

In a similar vein, the rules regarding access to the electronic media, which, unlike the earlier printed media, are subject to substantial state control and/or regulation, offer a means by which those in power can acquire privileged access, whereas those on the margins may be neglected. Again, the rules vary from one country to another, and in some cases are clearly less restrictive, and less important, than others; nevertheless, the combination of the importance of the electronic media as a means of political communication, on the one hand, and the fact that these media are regulated by the state, and hence by the parties in the state, on the other, offers the parties a resource which was previously inconceivable.

This is one of several posts I intend to produce to deal with the widespread public unease with and distaste for democratic politics as currently being practised globally.

Bulgarian Hopes

I was ashamed to find myself responding cynically at the weekend to Bulgarian friends who had expressed surprise at my lack of recent comment on the continuing Bulgarian protests and standoff. They’ve lasted a year - and had the President suggesting last week making voting compulsory.  
“No protest movement ever achieves anything” I announced in worldly tones.

“Any momentary progress is immediately clawed back – or numerous distracting stratagems (like war) brought into play” I might have added.

Shame on me! To forget and thus to denigrate the power of the working class efforts of the 20^th century - or those of present-day Chinese – or of the social movements of the last quarter of the 20^th century in Latin America (against fascist murderers and corporate America) – let alone the mass protests in Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany which led to the breaching of the Wall; and the “hopes of spring” in North Africa in recent years.

Of course it always seems to be a question of one step forward – and three back. But since when did we expect life to be easy?

The Feudal class is always with us – rubbing our noses in it……..looking greedily for opportunities for exploitation. Here we are, 25 years after the Fall of the Wall – and any serious retrospective would have to make it a disastrous call. People’s lives have been seriously blighted – and moral corruption seeps through everyone’s veins. Little wonder that more than half of the population in all the countries of central and Eastern Europe regrets what was let go…..

Gene Sharp has been one of the most quoted champions of the change process (after, that is, people like Gandhi; Martin Luther King; and Saul Alinsky. 

The American Sharp has come late to stardom - see the latest version of his From Dictatorship to Democracy  His work has clearly been useful to the activists of the various Occupy movements globally.

But can we really separate process from content?  A lot of foreign cash has actually gone into supporting these “revolutions” and the hand of corporate power is clearly evident in the agenda of privatising public resources which is now being pushed by the European Commission as part of a wider and scandalous WTO effort. 

The Violence of Non-violence is an article which suggests that this is an inevitable consequence of Sharp-like emphasis on process. And this is certainly borne out by my own experience 20 years ago in Romania when I took part in several weekend schools for young politicians. The young Americans leading these courses put all the emphasis on developing electoral skills, on marketing – and absolutely none on policy issues.

The Bulgarian protests will be a year old next week. They started over anger at the hiking of electricity prices and led quickly to the collapse of the Government but were fuelled by disgust over the behaviour of the political class as a whole. In the past few months, students and academic staff seemed to take a more prominent role in these protests and I don’t know how much the thinking has changed in the past year. A year ago I wrote that -

On the political side, demands have gone even further to seek an overhaul of the political system in Bulgaria. They have made clear that the system has to be changed in such a way that when the next party comes to power, it can no longer behave the way all governments in Bulgaria have for the past 24 years. There have to be checks on political power and mechanisms to prevent collusion between politicians, private economic interests and organised crime. Protesters are currently calling for a Constituent Assembly to be formed to change the constitution and develop mechanisms of direct involvement of citizens in government matters. There have been proposals of specific measures to be taken such as: cutting the number of members of parliament to 240; stripping them of immunity; establishing procedures for early dismissal; establishing 50 percent citizens' controlling quota in state institutions.
In short, a new system has to be established in which elected officials do what they are elected to do, and citizens are close enough to them to make sure they do it.

The idea of a Constituent Assembly smacked to me of the French Revolution but comes, Iunderstand, more from the Icelandic aftermath to its financial crash and utter loss of faith of the Icelandic people in its system of government. A Constitutional Council put a new constitution to a referendum at the end of the year - but it does not contain the radical proposals which Icelandic citizen groups suggested The Bulgarian proposals seems to draw on the work of the Icelandic citizen associations but Bulgarians should be aware of the limitations of the Icelandic process - and of the basic fact that constitutional debate and new settlements cannot be rushed if the people are to have any trust in the outcome.

Ivan Daraktchiev is the brains behind the Zaedno website (it means "Together" in Bulgarian) which gives one angle on the issues from someone who is Bulgarian but has spent most of his recent life in Belgium. He has just uploaded a key paper - The Revolution within Democracy - onto the English part of the Zaedno website and a comprehensive statement of the requirements of a radically different type of constitutional settlement can be found on page 6. To many it will seem utopian - and I hope to do it justice in a future post.

Fightback

I admit to being at the moment, quite literally, an armchair critic – sitting comfortably in my armchair and critiquing the world.

Focusing on the inanities and criminalities of our various elites requires little effort – there is so much of it and copiously (if not lovingly) described. I came across two recent British examples yesterday – a small book about the neo-liberal crisis produced in 2012 and an update bearing the name The Kilburn Manifesto. Both promised a lot but quickly, for me, got lost in their own rhetoric. Much more interesting was the renowned Trans National Institute’s State of Power 2014 released, rather courageously, a few weeks back in the stronghold of corporatism – Davos. It does look a worthwhile read – and, generously, contained a reference to the website of another avid student of corporate evil - Occupy which put me on to yet another – SourceWatch 

But finding a coherent statement about “What is to be done” seems to require a lot of effort – and almost impossible to find one which cross-references other work. Too many prophets going their own way – and jealous of others. The World Social Forum (still attracting thousands of visitors to its annual get together) and OccupyWall St are both very broad-based; whereas  the Zeitgeist movement seems to be a quasi-religious movement.

But where are the handbooks – let alone the annotated bibliographies – to give us a real sense of what can be done? The only one I can think of is Paul Hawken’s 2007 Blessed Unrest which someone has very helpfully summarised here and reviewed here. 

And I liked the look of Occupy Wall St – a global roadmap for radical economic and political reform by Ross Jackson (2012) but it does not seem easy to track down

A website simply called Corporations did give a useful post on How to Overthrow Corporate Rule – in 5 Steps which reminded me of a very useful four pages of tactical advice given in a 1990s book on the New Zealand experience with neo-liberal programmes 

For more individual efforts we have the inspiring example of 93 year-old Stephane Hessel who died just one year ago still articulating his vision of a better world. Or the Dutch activist Joost van Steenis. Both give clear analysis and clarion calls (I particularly liked van Steenis' 21 statements) – but are light on bookish references or recognition of other relevant movements. And neither can give any real answers to those who struggle in the political and commercial mire that is contemporary Bulgaria – or the other ex-communist states who don’t have the same values or traditions to draw on – only a numbing alienation.

Consumerism as the new political force

It’s appropriate that the first book I picked from my shelves after Denis Healey’s gripping insights into the issues confronting the UK from the late 1930s to the 1980s was JG Ballard’s last novel Kingdom Come (2006)

I am not a great fan of novels – biographies and histories have for me much more depth and integrity - although I do admire various proponents of the short story (such as William Trevor and Carol Shields. Recently I came across a beautiful (American) edition of the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis - examples of which you can find here 

But Ballard was a real original – “dystopian” is the adjective used to convey the apocalyptic element of his themes. 

As someone who has wanted to bomb the new gigiantic shopping malls which have been sprouting all over Sofia in the last 5 years and slowly killing the lively local shops, I really take to the theme of Kingdom Come 

Ballard's central idea is that consumerism slides into fascism when politics simply gives the punters what they want, becoming a matter of consumer-style choices, choosing not to have a mosque next door, for example. Along the way, there's an almost satirical indictment of contemporary life…... 'This was a place where it was impossible to borrow a book, attend a concert, say a prayer, consult a parish record or give to charity,' says Richard Pearson (its central character – an advertising agent - whose father has been shot in the Mall): 'In short, the town was an end state of consumerism. I liked it and felt a certain pride that I had helped to set its values.'

If the (shopping) mall is evil, its nostalgic opponents - a secretive cabal of locals, one of whom bombs Pearson's car - are little better. Their leading light is a fascistic reactionary of the 'kingdom of Surrey' variety. Pearson himself, although relieved to find his father isn't the Nazi sympathiser he seemed, puts his talents behind an actor turned politician to whip up the new mall fascism, regretting the racist attacks but loving it all as an exercise in PR and marketing.

The book is mired in ambivalence and the only things it takes a clear line against are racism and sport. Sport is 'the big giveaway' of dangerous boredom: 'Give them violent hamster wheels like football and ice hockey. If they still need to let off steam, burn down a few newsagents.' Ballard's characters are prone to improbable speechifying: the new landscape of retail parks, airports and motorways might seem like hell to the old middle class, but 'that's the Hampstead perspective, the view from the Tavistock Clinic. The shadow of Freud's statue lies across the land, the Agent Orange of the soul'.

The book is a vehicle for concepts, one-liners and poetic fragments: 'elective psychopathy' will replace war and sex; 'Violence is the true poetry of governments'; 'Think of the future as a cable TV programme going on for ever'.

My favourite is excerpt is -

People accumulate emotional capital as well as cash in the bank. And they need to invest these emotions in a leader figure. They don’t want a jackbooted fanatic ranting on a balcony. They want a TV host sitting with a studio panel, talking quiety about what matters in their lives. It’s a new kind of democracy, where we vote at the cash counter, not the ballot box. Consumerism is the greatest device anyone has invented for controlling people. New fantsasies, new dreams and dislikes, new souls to heal. For some reasons its called shopping. But its really the purest kind of politics……..

Ballard itemises a modern Britain of Malls, barcodes, CCTV, stores and barbecues, but the book has a less human engagement with ordinary life than this suggests. It's the idea of modern reality invoked in abstract, conjured up as the background for more obsessive rituals of Ballard's own. Hi-tech surroundings lead to violent behaviour, until the mall is overtaken by apocalyptic .

Some good quotes from the book are here - Best reviews are here and here 

This time not Daumier - nor Gillray - to head the post but Georg Grosz's "Riot of the Insane"  

The managerial revolution

Denis Healey’s Memoirs (Time of my Life) may be almost 25 years old but have not lose their power to inspire with age - 4 posts so far from me this week trying to identify exactly why our political class no longer seems “fit for purpose” or able, at any rate, to “hold a candle to” the 97 year-old Healey (He’s a lot thinner now than this 2006 video shows).

It is some three years since I addressed myself seriously to the issue of the “impotence of our democratic process” – some of the relevant posts are here. 

My concern then was the failure of most of the books to analyse seriously the efficacy or capacity of the “governance  process” as a whole 

We have, of course, countless academic studies of the operation of the political parties, of voting systems, of the British Parliament, of the Executive or Cabinet, of local government, of devolved arrangements, of the civil service, of public management (whether Ministries, core exectuve, agencies), of the Prime Minister’s Office, of the European dimension etc – and a fair number of these are reasonably up-to-date. But most of it is written for undergraduates – or for other academic specialists who focus on one small part of the complex jigsaw. There is so very little which actually tries to integrate all this and give a convincing answer to the increasing number of citizens who feel that there is no longer any point in voting; that politicians are either corrupt or hopelessly boxed in by global finance and corporate interests. 

The recently published Blunders of our Governments seems to offer such a larger picture but is little more than a rather breathless tour of policy disasters by two political scientists – with results which show up the basic shortcomings of such a specialised academic approach

We are left with a central question – is the British problem one of political centralisation? of government overreach? A failure of the political class? Adversarial politics? Civil service incompetence? Corporate takeover? Or is it, as post-modernist academics tend to argue, one of unrealistic expectations and misunderstanding?

We have certainly become more demanding citizens in Europe as a whole….showing none of the deference which senior politicians could expect in the immediate post-war period.

We view politicians such as Denis Healey as giants now, I suspect, simply because, in the 1960s they were giants – with an experience and education few could then challenge, certainly not those slaving in industrial plants. It was the 1964 Labour government which started the opening up of university experience from about 5% of the population in my day to its present figure of almost 50%s - many of them imbued with a highly rationalistic belief in “modernisation” – becoming “experts” in various social sciences designed to change the world for the better.

I should know because I was one of them – and well remember the sentiments I had then of being one of a select band with a mission to clear out the dead wood.

Management and Social science has become the new religion with its nuspeak language - not only from politicians (who now have little experience beyond that of politics) but in the new batallions of banks, communications and services (private and public) – and yet has become the real reason for the dissatisfaction we all have these days. We just don’t seem able to accept that the complexity of the modern world (and sophistication of the multifarious discourses) make it impossible to “solve” most of the “problems” we experience.

The French used to talk of La Pensee Unique – to describe the uniformity of thinking and discourse about the market used by the powerful on both sides of the Atlantic. In many ways it was a better phrase than “The Washington Consensus” or “Neo-liberalism” since it identified the propagandist nature and poverty of what passes for thinking of our global elites.

We thought that the global collapse spelled the end of neo-liberalism. Instead a new form has become entrenched – not least amongst the new “insecuritat” which forms the bulk of working people in Europe… 

postscript; I have to confess I struggled with this post, having a feeling that there was an important insight approaching but not quite able to grasp it... That, it should be said, is generally a good sign - of something contradictory or original trying to get out......

Ruling a Void

OK - the last 2 posts gave the 10 golden rules for corrupting the political class – at least according to Anthony Jay the highly successful scriptwriter of the "Yes Minister" television series of 35 years ago.

The question is whether these in fact give us the basic reasons for the “hollowing out” of British (and European) democracy……during that period. 

Voters and citizens no longer consider that parties and politicians represent their concerns – they vote in decreasing numbers and with increasing cynicism. 

Let’s remind ourselves that Jay identified the following stratagems for the powerful to retain power  -

• Centralise revenue
• Centralise authority
• ensure the Prime Minister is captured
• Insulate the Cabinet
• Enlarge constituencies
• Overpay MPs
• Appoint rather than elect
• Ensure that civil servants are permanent – but Ministers highly temporary
• Appoint more staff
• Keep state affairs secret – whatever the laws about Open Government may say

I’ve read a hell of a lot about democracy during this period. You might indeed say that its been my bread and butter since, between 1970 and 1990, I got my cash variously from state coffers - a combination of Polytechnic and local government sources - operating as a local government politician and writing about the various efforts to improve its practice.

My (much better) fees since then have come overtly from commercial sources – but all of the companies I have worked for since 1991 have been under contract to the European Commission. And the focus of my work in the last 20 years has been the building of the capacity of local and central government systems in central Europe and Central Asia…….Its ironic that the democratic models we held up to those “transitional systems”  for emulation proved to be disintegrating even as we spoke……Talk about hubris!

I find it curious, first, that I seem to have been the first to upload Anthony Jay’s piece – and therefore to subject it to analysis. The academics who write about democracy (and there are thousands!) clearly view the satire as beneath their dignity….

But Jay score 8 out of 10 in my reckoning for his analysis – I would fault only his points about staffing. Civil servant contracts have actually become highly contractual – and also the subject of fairly severe cutbacks. But the fact still remains that it is the senior (rather than junior) staff who have been laughing all the way to the bank…….with inflated salaries and pensions.  

The question remains, however, whether his points (however satirically meant) actually capture the true reasons for the collapse of political legitimacy? 

One point, for example, commonly made in discussions is that the political class has now become younger and very incestuous – moving quickly from academia into think-tanks and positions as aides to politicians before themselves becoming politicians. In short, they accumulate favours and networks which make them highly dependent and malleable….. And they use a managerial language which not only alienates but reflects a consensual ideology about the limits of state action enshrined in “neo-liberalism”.

Peter Oborne is a British journalist who wrote a critical book on this subject in 2008 called The Triumph of the Political Class. A month ago he enthused about a new academic book about the “hollowing of democracy” and it is to his views I want to devote the rest of this post. The basic question about the reasons for the degeneration of politics will be continued in future posts.

Every so often one comes across a book, a poem or a work of art that is so original, perfectly crafted, accurate and true that you can’t get it out of your head. You have to read or look at it many times to place it in context and understand what it means.In the course of two decades as a political reporter my most powerful experience of this kind came when a friend drew my attention to a 20-page article in an obscure academic journal.Written by the political scientists Richard Katz and Peter Mair, and called “The Emergence of a Cartel Party”, it immediately explained almost everything that had perplexed me as a lobby correspondent: the unhealthy similarity between supposedly rival parties; the corruption and graft that has become endemic in modern politics; the emergence of a political elite filled with scorn and hostility towards ordinary voters. My book, The Triumph of the Political Class was in certain respects an attempt to popularise that Katz and Mair essay.

Several months ago I was shocked and saddened to learn that Peter Mair (whom I never met) had died suddenly, while on holiday with his family in his native Ireland, aged just 60. However, his friend Francis Mulhern has skilfully piloted into print the book he was working on at the time of his death. It is called Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, and published by Verso. In my view it is every bit as brilliant as the earlier essay.The opening paragraph is bold, powerful, and sets out the thesis beautifully: “The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.” 

The first half of Mair’s new book concentrates on this crisis in party democracy. He tracks the sharp fall in turn-out at elections, the collapse of party membership (the Tories down from three million in the Fifties to scarcely 100,000 today, a drop of 97 per cent) and the decay of civic participation. Mair shows that this is a European trend. All over the continent parties have turned against their members. Political leaders no longer represent ordinary people, but are becoming, in effect, emissaries from central government. All of this is of exceptional importance, and central to the urgent contemporary debate about voter disenchantment.

However, I want to concentrate on the second half of Mair’s book, because here the professor turns to the role played by the European Union in undermining and bypassing national democracy.He starts with a historical paradox. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 was in theory the finest moment for Western democracy. But it was also the moment when it started to fail. Mair argues that political elites have turned Europe into “a protected sphere, safe from the demands of voters and their representatives”.This European political directorate has taken decision-making away from national parliaments. On virtually everything that matters, from the economy to immigration, decisions are made elsewhere. Professor Mair argues that many politicians encouraged this tendency because they wanted to “divest themselves of responsibility for potentially unpopular policy decisions and so cushion themselves against possible voter discontent”. This means that decisions which viscerally affect the lives of voters are now taken by anonymous, unaccountable bureaucrats rather than politicians responsible to their voters.

Though the motive has been understandable, the effect has been malign, making politicians look impotent or cowardly, and bringing politics itself into contempt. The prime ministers of Greece, Portugal and Spain are now effectively branch managers for the European Central Bank and Goldman Sachs. By a hideous paradox the European Union, set up as a way of avoiding a return to fascism in the post-war epoch, has since mutated into a way of avoiding democracy itself.In a devastating analogy, Mair conjures up Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th-century French thinker who is often regarded as the greatest modern theorist about democracy. Tocqueville noted that the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy fell into contempt because they claimed privileges on the basis of functions that they could no longer fulfil. The 21st-century European political class, says Mair, is in the identical position. To sum up, the European elites have come very close to the abolition of what we have been brought up to regard as politics, and have replaced it with rule by bureaucrats, bankers, and various kinds of unelected expert. So far they have got away with this. This May’s elections for the European Parliament will provide a fascinating test of whether they can continue to do so. 

The European Union claims to be untroubled by these elections. A report last month from two members of the Jacques Delors Institute concluded that “the numerical increase of populist forces will not notably affect the functioning of the [European Parliament], which will remain largely based on the compromises built between the dominant political groups. This reflects the position of the overwhelming majority of EU citizens”. I wonder. In France, polls suggest that the anti-semitic Front National, which equates illegal immigrants with “organised gangs of criminals”, will gain more votes than the mainstream parties.

The Front National has joined forces with the virulently anti-Islamic Geert Wilders in Holland, who promises to claim back “how we control our borders, our money, our economy, our currency”. Anti-European parties are on the rise in Denmark, Austria, Greece and Poland. These anti-EU parties tend to be on the Right, and often the far-Right. For reasons that are hard to understand, the Left continues enthusiastically to back the EU, even though it is pursuing policies that drive down living standards and destroy employment, businesses and indeed (in the case of Greece and Spain) entire economies. In Britain, for example, Ed Miliband is an ardent supporter of the European project and refuses even to countenance the idea of a referendum.

Like Miliband, Peter Mair comes from the Left. He was an Irishman who spent the majority of his professional life working in European universities in Italy, the Netherlands or Ireland. And yet he has written what is by far and away the most powerful, learned and persuasive anti-EU treatise I have come across. It proves that it is impossible to be a democrat and support the continued existence of the European Union.

His posthumous masterpiece deserves to become a foundation text for Eurosceptics not just in Britain, but right across the continent. It is important that it should do so. The battle to reclaim parliamentary democracy should not just belong to the Right-wing (and sometimes fascist) political parties. The Left and Right can disagree – honourably so – on many great issues. But surely both sides of the ideological divide can accept that democracy is still worth fighting for, and that the common enemy has become the European Union.

The painting is Daumier's "Belly of the Beast"

The hollowing out of Democracy

Re-reading Denis Healey’s memoirs brought home to me how puny and spineless (“hollowed out” is perhaps the appropriate phrase) our current politicians now seem – compared with the generation of Healey and his friend Helmut Schmidt (who celebrated his 95th birthday just before Christmas). How has such degeneration happened? It was that question which prompted me to look again at Anthony Jay’s essay “Democracy, Bernard? It must be stopped!” and to reproduce parts of it yesterday. 
I was also prompted (by Healey's mention of "politics as a vocation") to look again at Max Weber’s classic talk on “Politics as Vocation” delivered in the heat of revolutionary Germany of 1919 - and to discover that a major talk on this subject was given just a week or so by the Head of a British Think Tank. For the moment, however, let me finish with the excerpts from the satirical piece from the Head of the Civil Service about the tactics for castrating the political process

5. Enlarge constituencies.  Our present electoral system derives from the 1832 Reform Act. It was a very dangerous system. The average number of voters in a constituency was only about 1,200, which meant that an MP could personally know virtually all of them. This meant that, if he was liked and respected locally, he would be re-elected, even if he disobeyed the whips and voted in accordance with the demands of his constituents and his conscience rather than the instructions of his party. This severely weakened the Prime Minister's control on which the system depends.But, since then, we have contrived, in the name of democracy, to increase constituency sizes to 50,000 or 60,000, so that no MP can be elected on voters' personal knowledge of him. They vote for the party, and if the party does not endorse him, he will not be elected. His job, therefore, depends on the Prime Minister's approval and not on the respect of his constituents; a splendid aid to discipline. Equally, we have increased the typical urban constituency ward to about 25,000, with some four councillors. Since one councillor to 6,000 people might have led to an undesirable independence of thought and action, we have arranged matters so that a group of four councillors jointly represent the whole ward, so that householders are unlikely even to know the name of their democratic representative. They, therefore, vote (the few who take the trouble) according to their party preferences, thus reinforcing the hold of the national parties on local government.

 6. Overpay MPs.  Even when MPs depend on the party machine for re-selection and re-election, some are occasionally tempted to step out of line. This risk can be significantly reduced if rebellion means not only loss of party support but also significant loss of income. Few will risk forfeiting the now generous emoluments and allowances of an MP and reverting to the humble salary of a school teacher, social worker or minor trade union official simply on a point of democratic principle. It is, therefore, our duty to encourage all increases in MPs' pay

 7. Appointments, not elections. Parliament, of course, has to be elected, but, as we have seen, this causes little problem so long as the government maintains its firm central control of the MPs. The system, however, is deeply flawed: it can substitute craven capitulation to the ignorant and irresponsible mob for sensible control by a cultivated and experienced elite.It is our duty to resist this with all our strength. The preservation of civilised values in a country of some 60 million people cannot be entirely discharged by a few of us in Whitehall: much of the task has to be delegated to people such as BBC governors, the ITC, the Arts Council, the Commission for Ancient Monuments, National Heritage, the Fine Arts Commission, magistrates, the Bank of England and a host of authorities, commissions, councils, tribunals, regulatory bodies, agencies, working parties, advisory committees and quangos of every description. The only sensible way to fill all these posts is by government appointment, so that proper care can be exercised in their selection and so that the incumbents, when chosen, will know to whom they owe their new eminence, while those hoping for such posts (as with honours and peerages) can be trusted to behave responsibly in the hope of favours to come. 

8. Permanent officials, rotating ministers. The task of preserving a cultured and enlightened nation requires continuity. That continuity must rest with those of us who know what we are fighting for and fighting against. It cannot possibly be entrusted to politicians. We have, therefore, built an excellent system of a few transient amateur ministers who are coached, informed, guided and supported by a large department of permanent, experienced officials who enable them to take the correct decisions.You have now served our department for 30 years; your present minister has held his job for 10 weeks and cannot, on average, expect to be there for more than another 12 or 18 months if he has any ability. If not, there is no problem. You will, therefore, I am sure, be able to prevent him making any foolish popular decisions before the music stops and he scrambles desperately for an empty chair. Furthermore, our electoral system ensures that when the populace becomes dissatisfied with the system, they can be deluded into thinking they are changing it by replacing one lot of inexperienced amateurs with another, leaving the professionals to continue uninterrupted, and relieved of the burden of the few ministers who were starting to understand their job. The new arrivals can quickly be helped to realise that the purpose of government is not to carry out the will of the electorate, but simply to secure its consent to the measures proposed by its betters. 

9. Increase the number of public employees. “Public ignorance is our ally".Any government must employ staff, if only in the Armed Services, the police, the judiciary, the Diplomatic Service and the Exchequer. But those basic functions on their own cannot justify the level of taxation and degree of control that we need to fulfil our historic function. We, therefore, need to increase the number of public employees whenever the opportunity presents itself.
There are three reasons for this: it increases the volume of government revenue, it extends the area of government control, and it enlarges the pool of voters who have an interest in preserving the system that employs them. 

10. Secrecy. One of our greatest allies is public ignorance. It is, therefore, imperative that the minimum amount of information be disclosed to the press, parliament and the public. Our success is based on the principle that no information should be disclosed unless there is a good reason why it should be.From time to time, opposition parties press for a freedom of information Act, but oppositions become governments and it does not take long for a government to discover that real freedom of information would make their job impossible. It is, however, a good idea to pass the odd freedom of information Act, so long as its provisions do not actually free up any important sensitive information. It is significant that the only party that has consistently argued for real freedom of information has not held office since 1915. 

Beyond this, I can only point you towards the breathtaking achievements of our colleagues in Brussels. To be frank, I do not see any prospect of our rivalling them. Their commissioners, like our permanent secretaries, do not have to endure the ignominy of grubbing votes from the plebs, and, unlike us, do not have to pretend to be subservient to a political master. 

Being answerable to 15 ministers from different countries, most of whom are hostile to each other, and would be even more hostile if they could understand each other's languages, gives them almost complete independence of action. They have also ensured that only the Commission can bring forward legislation, thus avoiding the tedious, irritating and ill-informed ministerial scrutiny we have to endure drafting Bills. 

And since the European electorate speaks so many different languages, it is impossible for genuine European political parties to form, thereby making any serious danger of democracy quite inconceivable.
Obviously, success on that scale is out of our reach, but we can look on Brussels as a guiding star which we must follow, even if we know we cannot land on it.