Westminster model? Lessons for Britain from the Everyday Democracy Index.
| Author | Skidmore, Paul |
| Position | Features - Critical essay |
As she tumbles down, down, down the rabbit hole at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland, Alice decides she must be getting near the centre of the earth, and wonders what Latitude or Longitude she has got to. 'Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.'
Something similar is happening in British politics. As they tumble towards the centre-ground, political parties are starting to borrow so many 'nice grand words' from each other that it is increasingly unclear what any of them mean. Take the word 'progressive'. For the last four years, Gordon Brown has repeatedly expressed his desire to forge a 'progressive consensus' in Britain, a new conventional wisdom rooted in social-democratic values yet resilient enough to outlast the lifetime of Labour in power. But last December, two Conservative MPs declared that it was time to end Labour's monopoly on the word 'progressive', claiming it now belongs to the Tories (Clark and Hunt, 2007). Not so fast, said new Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg (2008) a month later: 'Our party will always be on the progressive side of the argument.'
Perhaps the most flagrant example of this political cross-dressing surrounds the concept of 'empowerment'. The opposition parties decided early on that power would be the stick with which they would seek to beat Gordon Brown, exploiting his reputation for centralising decision-making authority in the Treasury. Both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have sought to paint Brown, his government and indeed the left as a whole as instinctively statist, preferring to place power in the hands of the centre rather than the local, of bureaucrats rather than ordinary people, while casting their own parties as natural champions of individual and community empowerment. 'My politics is about empowering people', Conservative leader David Cameron declared at the launch of the Power Inquiry's report into the state of British democracy.
Not in a vague sense of making them feel better. I'm talking about something much more specific. The right to make decisions about the things that affect their lives. (Cameron, 2006)
In his early speeches as party leader Nick Clegg has struck a decidedly similar note, calling on Liberal Democrats to embrace
a wider understanding of empowerment: not just of local authorities and politicians, desirable though that is, but of pupils, patients and parents too. Individual power must be an everyday thing, not just reserved for the moment a vote is cast in the ballot box. (Clegg, 2008)
The result is that the fight for the centre-ground is increasingly a battle to define the terms of what might be called 'a politics of empowerment'. Drawing on new cross-national research recently published by the think-tank Demos, my purpose in this essay is to briefly sketch out how we have got to this point, why it matters, and what lessons the left in Britain can learn from abroad.
How we got here
Over the last thirty years, citizens have become increasingly disengaged from formal democratic politics and disillusioned with politicians. This is by no means a uniquely British phenomenon: it has occurred to a greater or lesser extent in virtually all advanced democracies. Britons may be less likely to vote, trust politicians, or join political parties than they were thirty years ago. But so too are Italians, Germans, Finns, Austrians and many others (Dalton, 2004).
The causes of this decline are hard to pinpoint. But the similarity across countries in the timing and the magnitude of the public's growing disenchantment with representative democracy helps to rule a few things out. In particular, it casts doubt on explanations which locate the source of the problem in specific events, crises and scandals thought to have been particularly toxic to public confidence: the Westland affair in the 1980s, 'cash for questions' in the 1990s, the David Kelly/Iraq Dossier scandal and 'cash-for-peerages' in the 2000s. Commentators in other countries reach for their own list of headline-grabbing scandals. As Dalton (2004) notes this is precisely what makes such 'proper noun' explanations unconvincing: the similarity of the cross-national trends points to cross-national causes.
The same logic appears to rule out explanations which focus too heavily on the character of particular political institutions. More proportional voting systems, more accountability of the executive to parliament, and more power devolved to local government are frequently touted as solutions to Britain's democratic malaise. Whatever arguments there may be in favour of such reforms, and there are many, there is no escaping the fact that...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
