The FishTank

With political reform at least on the agenda for discussion at the moment (I remain unconvinced we’ll actually see any) now seems like a good time to start a series of pieces looking at what is wrong with our politics and, more importantly, what we can do to fix it. We start with one of the core problems of the last ten years – manifesto pledges.
Two accusations you will frequently have heard levelled at New Labour over the last ten years are that manifesto pledges have been broken or, conversely, that the Government has introduced a policy that, had it been in their manifesto, would have lost them votes. Sometimes these accusations are independent of each other, as with the fox hunting ban that took so long to enact, or the reform of the House of Lords that is still being promised now; sometimes the two are inately linked as with the imposition of student top-up fees – a policy in direct contravention of a specific manifesto pledge, or the rise in National Insurance that was used as a way of side-stepping a specific promise not to raise income tax. What is little understood is that the latter of these two accusations is not always true. Manifestos are huge bulging documents, deliberately designed to be too dense to read, allowing governments to claim a mandate for enacting policies that most voters will not have realised they have tacity endorsed.
In the real world, of course, politicians cannot restrict themselves to legislating only what they have promised. Had Iraq genuinely been on the verge of attacking us in 2003 it still would have required a parliamentary decision to take military action and it would have been wholly impractical to be forced to a general election or a referendum first. There is something to be said for true democracy being political impotence.
But there is also much to be said for politicians’ inability to distinguish between representing the electorate and ruling them. The deliberate obfuscation of policy promises is used, not because politicians are bound by their manifesto commitments, but because they want to claim a semblance of legitimacy for policies they are determined to enact regardless of public opinion. To the Browns and Blairs of this world it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether voters are opposed to a given policy – if the Labour Party could get them through the Commons soon enough after an election, the hope is that they will have become lost in spin before people had a chance to vote their endorsers out of office. The failure of the protest marches to prevent the Iraq war demonstrates just how little public opinion matters in the shaping of government policy.
So why make such chubby manifestos? The obvious answer is to deal with the real enemy – the enemy within. For political parties like Labour, the danger comes not from the public – or even the opposition benches, but from their own backbenches. Whilst many MPs are content to pass the time rubber-stamping whatever policy comes their way, never bothering to listen to – much less consult – their constituents, there are some who have that rarest of attributes – a political conscience. These are people who will stand with the opposition when they feel their government is doing the wrong thing. And it doesn’t matter how much the media smear them as rebels, they are actually doing what they are employed to do.
The trouble, of course, is that most MPs don’t read their own manifestos. When they go round canvassing for your vote, what an MP is technically doing is promoting the vision set out in their manifesto. Vote for me, they say, and this is what you get. Which means that if an MP is returned at a general election they are tacitly committing themselves to support anything their party leadership cares to put in the manifesto document – even if they haven’t read it. This is, in most cases, enough to deter rebellions.
It isn’t, however, enough to protect the public from bad policy. Parliament’s role is supposed to be to scruitinise and debate legislation. When a government floods the house with dense legislation, often smuggling extra details through in appendices which don’t even get debated; when they restrict the time in which MPs are allowed to argue the points; that’s when they strip away our liberties. A piece of legislation going through the house at the moment, for example, gives the police the power to confiscate personal property prior to a charge being brought, thus effectively allowing the police to commit smash and grab raids without so much as suspicion of guilt. Earlier legislation has allowed baliffs automatic access to property with much the same effect. This kind of politics, fundamentally, is the cause of the gradual decay of our civil liberties in recent years. We need constitutional measures to prevent it.
How do we do this?
Firslty, we need smaller manifestoes. A manifesto should be a statement of a party’s direction in broad terms the public can understand. It can make specific pledges, but these should be in language that is clear, simple and not subject to misinterpretation. MPs should be able to view the manifesto before deciding whether or not they are prepared to stand on the basis of what it contains, and be able to make the choice to leave their party if agreement cannot be reached.
Once an election has been fought and won, the next important element is that backbench MPs should be given proper time to consult and debate. Acts of Parliament should be presented to the house in their entirety – not with supplements sidestepping the debating chamber – and MPs should be allowed to send back legislation on which they cannot achieve clear agreement – without the threat of the whips. If something was clearly in the manifesto, then there needs to be a clear reason why an MP who endorsed it should vote against it, but there should be allowance made for fresh information or changes of circumstance.
Finally, all legislation should have the chance of recall. If, after going into the field a piece of legislation is found to be ineffective or open to abuse, backbench MPs should be free to table motions to repeal them. Such debates would have to take their turn, but if a government isn’t filling time with pointless legislation this should be perfectly possible.
Finally, we need to change our thinking about government. It is not good government to pass laws every day of the week, to create thousands of new criminal offences that are impossible to police. Scott Adams makes a good point in his Dilbert books when he says that if a company is running well there should not be much management to be done. The same is true of a country. We need a shift in our perception to realise that if a government is legislating endlessly it probably means it doesn’t know what it is doing. Good government is lite government and we should be wary of MPs with too many promises.