Riddell In Defence of Politicians

In Spite of Themselves
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-84954-155-8
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

In a lively and gripping essay on contemporary politics, Peter Riddell remakes the case for representative democracy but concludes that it desperately needs to be strengthened. The effect of the expenses scandal has been to turn off both existing and potential representatives and voters. Naive reformers believe the answer is wholesale constitutional reform, but the result of that is likely to be stalemate and rule by powerful and well-funded vested interests. Instead, Riddell calls for a balance between popular participation and clear-cut decision making, underlining that political parties are necessary for decent as well as strong government. A timely and considered defence of the political process at a time when they are relentlessly under fire, this book will realign the way we look at our politicians.

PETER RIDDELL is Assistant Editor of The Times and was previously Washington Bureau Chief for the Financial Times. His books include Hug Them Close: Blair, Clinton, Bush and the 'Special Relationship' and The Unfulfilled Prime Minister: Tony Blair's Quest for a Legacy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Riddell, Peter

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

Politicians have never been popular. Their motives and behaviour have always been questioned. They have been seen as devious, factional and self-interested, pursuing sectional rather than national interests. Shakespeare referred to ‘scurvy politicians’ in King Lear. We all know Henry Carey’s words from 300 years ago in the national anthem: ‘Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks.’ In a non-democratic age, this reflected a particular, royal and court view of the national interest above the intrigues of aristocratic factions. In the following century, Robert Cecil, the future late-Victorian Prime Minister, and, admittedly, never an optimist about the political scene, in 1860 complained about the ‘incompetence and laziness of MPs’. There was never a golden age and it is possible to find quotations in almost any decade deploring the low standing of politicians. They are seen as corrupt and selfish as well as figures of fun: just look at the wonderful tradition of caricature and satire from Swift and Hogarth, via Gillray and Rowlandson, up to the puppets of Spitting Image in the 1980s and the biting political cartoons of Peter Brookes and Steve Bell. But politicians have not just been seen as ridiculous.They have also, increasingly, been regarded as ineffective.

Criticism of the political class, and Parliament, has, if anything, intensified since the creation of a mass electorate after the extension of the franchise in 1918. During the 1920s, MPs were seen as ineffective and of low quality, unequal to the task of controlling the big expansion of the state bureaucracy as central government took on more economic and social responsibilities.

This led during the 1930s to demands from many on the left for an even stronger executive to tackle the problem of mass unemployment. Elected politicians in Parliament should be relegated to a secondary, almost rubber-stamp, role approving enabling legislation which would confer wide-ranging general powers on ministers and civil servants. Even the most successful of democratic politicians recognise their isolation. Take a saying from the other side of the Atlantic:

Politicians are a set of men who have interests aside from the interests of the people, and who are, taken as a mass, at least one long step removed from honest men. I say this with the greatest freedom because, being a politician myself, none can regard it as personal.

The speaker was a young Illinois lawyer politician, no not Barack Obama, but that master politician, Abraham Lincoln, in 1837.

Lincoln summed up the paradox of the politician as someone seen as apart from the mass of the people, even though, in a democratic age, a politician is dependent for success on the votes of those same people. We love criticising politicians but we cannot do without them. Politicians as a class are integral to representative politics. You cannot have one without the other. It is essential also to throw political parties into the mix: they provide cohesion and direction, despite the views of some who now favour direct democracy without politicians and parties in their current form. Politics is inherently a rough and messy business, and I have no wish to pretend otherwise.

Two apparently contradictory trends are operating, both working against the current generation of politicians. The first, and most widespread, is to denigrate all politicians as a class. This involves an implicit, and often explicit, statement of superiority by the critics. The People, often with a capital P, know best and they are invariably duped by wrong-headed and self-serving politicians. Second, contemporary politicians are seen as inferior to more enlightened, and purer, ones in the past. They are seen as pygmies compared with the alleged giants from a golden age. Something has happened inbetween to produce a decline in standards and conduct.

Peter Oborne brought these strands together in a fierce attack on the new generation of politicians in his 2007 book, The Triumph of the Political Class. Oborne argued that they form the new ruling elite of Britain, a group characterised by its professional attitude to politics rather than old-fashioned ideology, and which has made party political differences non-existent in its pursuit of power and patronage. The new political class is not only set apart from the rest of society, with its own manners, morality and habits, but is also actively hostile to ordinary people and common modes of life in defending its special privileges, regulations and pay. ‘British politicians have sought to govern in a novel way, obliterating the organisations and methods of representative democracy and instead using the press and broadcast media as the key method of communication between ruler and ruled.’ You can, however, also argue the reverse case that politicians are too supine towards the pretensions of the press and broadcasters.

Oborne is an acute journalist and a formidable polemicist, but often goes 10 to 20 per cent too far in his sweeping judgements. He tends to claim that a government or a politician is the ‘most corrupt ever’, or that an event spells ‘doom’ or ‘triumph’. In reality, politics is more shaded and nuanced. But his view of a self-contained, and out of touch, political class is widely shared as part of the populist attack I discuss in the next chapter.

A variant of this argument is that politicians start off well but are then corrupted after being elected or once they accept ministerial office. But, just as hero worship inevitably leads to disappointment and disillusion, so pretending politicians are better than they are, or ever can be, is a fatuous exercise. So I am careful to talk about politicians, not statesmen, a pompous term liked by golden ageists and those who mistrust the political process and who falsely try to raise leaders out of the rough and tumble of the daily political battle.

Some of the most respected, and successful, past leaders – Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher – were instinctive politicians to their fingertips. To pretend otherwise, to canonise them, is to do them a profound disservice: retrospective hagiography invariably distorts their real contributions. The way that the names of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are still regularly invoked on the right in the hope of scoring points in current debates – they would not have done this or that – is both depressing and misleading. They were both formidable leaders during the 1980s in changing the terms of the political debate, and had many achievements to their credit. But, like all politicians, they were of their times, and had well-known strengths and weaknesses. Above all, they were mortal. Reagan was fortunate in the post-FDR constitutional amendment limiting a US President to just two terms, or eight years.

Thatcher tempted the fates and was forced out in November
1990 by her own Cabinet and MPs after eleven and a half years. The first signs of hubris came more than three and a half years earlier in spring 1987 while returning from a highly successful pre-election trip to the Soviet Union to meet, and argue with, Mikhail Gorbachev. This success was reinforced by the contrasting embarrassment of Neil Kinnock’s brief visit to the White House just a few days earlier (a failure partly orchestrated by Charles Powell, her foreign policy adviser, with Reagan’s own staff). Talking to reporters, including me, crammed in the back of the RAF VC10 returning to London, Thatcher made her first reference to ‘going on and on’. Standing next to me, Bernard Ingham, her devoted press secretary, said to me, only half complaining: ‘Now, I will never be able to retire.’ He could, and did, but it would have been better for her if she had not gone on for so long.

The attempt by Thatcher’s more fervent supporters, in the No Turning Back group and elsewhere, to maintain the myth of betrayal ignored how dangerously out of touch she had become, as well as alienated from former close allies such as Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe. By failing to treat her as a mortal politician, these Thatcherite ultras tarnished her own reputation and fatally undermined the government of her successor, John Major.

Politicians should not aspire to be saints, or treated by their followers as saints – that is the way to disaster. They are mortal and flawed. Their role is not to create an ideal society – that illusion can be left to fanatics whether fascist or communist – but, rather, to help reconcile different interests in a peaceful way.

Politics recognises, even celebrates, the clash of views and of groups, but within a framework of broadly agreed rules defined by regular elections within a representative democracy, underpinned by the rule of law. This requires mutual respect, and mutual constraints, between not just political leaders and their MPs but also their members and supporters. All have to accept the legitimacy of an election result. The other side may be wrong, but it has every right to its opinions and to implement its policies if it has won a free election. Equally, the winning side should accept constraints: the need for proper scrutiny of its proposals and the right of the opposition, and of minority and outside groups, to express their opinions.

Bernard Crick’s In Defence of Politics set out many challenges to politics, and therefore politicians: from authoritarians and ideologues, from what he vividly called the ‘saints’ or ‘student politicians’...