The real cure for Britains political malaise
Author: Philip Stephens, Financial Times |
We have heard enough of mortgages and moats. There are better explanations than the chicanery over parliamentary allowances for sinking trust in British democracy. Those eager to find culprits for the collapse of faith in politics would do better to revisit the clash between two figures who defined the politics of the 1980s. Step forward Margaret Thatcher and Ken Livingstone.
For now, the din of righteous rage at MPs’ expenses competes with evermore extravagant pledges from political leaders to remake Britain’s constitution. On one side the running to ground of individual MPs has acquired the look and feel of mob justice. On the other, so desperate are the political elites that they are ready to say anything to escape the baying hounds.
The welter of proposals for political reform falling from the lips of ministers and their shadows smacks largely of diversionary tactics. Gordon Brown thinks (rather conveniently for Labour) that voting reform might do the trick. If not, the prime minister says, how about a written constitution?
David Cameron trips over his own hyperbole in calling for “massive, sweeping and radical” change in the way the nation is governed. Save for the usual tirade against the tyranny of Brussels, the substance amounts to not very much. The Conservative leader will “think about” fixed-term parliaments and mechanisms to unseat miscreant MPs. Wow.
As it happens, there is an easy test of all these pledges to reinvigorate democracy. Are the two big parties (I will come back to the Liberal Democrats) ready to undo the damage wrought by the then Mrs Thatcher and Mr Livingstone? If the answer is no, and it seems so, then the promises about rebuilding trust and accountability are idle talk.
The battle during the 1980s was between a prime minister with a mission to snuff out socialism and a leader of the Greater London Council determined to sustain the hard left’s control of the capital. Between them, these two politicians set in train the destruction of civic engagement.
For Red Ken, as he was known then, the good governance of London came a poor second to the ideological struggle. The GLC was a pulpit for personal ambition. His reign thus gave motive and excuse to the Thatcher government’s assault on local democracy.
She, of course, went too far. The abolition of the GLC was followed by the introduction of the poll tax. Both spoke to an authoritarian mindset that said locally chosen leaders could not be trusted to run their own communities. She always knew best.
The poll tax was the lady’s nemesis. Her insistence that it was perfectly fair for a duke to pay at the same rate as a dustman persuaded the country, and much of her own cabinet, that she had left reality behind.
The legacy outlived the poll tax. Revenues from local businesses that had previously been gathered locally still go straight to the national exchequer. Town halls have been left with representation without taxation.
Cities, boroughs and shires are dependent on central government for some 80 per cent of their spending. As Whitehall has provided the money – capping councils’ right to raise extra funds locally – it has micro-managed spending. Voters have been stripped of the right to make local choices. Only the other day the citizens of Surrey were told by Whitehall that they are simply not allowed to spend more of their own money to improve policing.
During more than a decade in office, Labour has occasionally flirted with the idea of restoring more local power. London got a mayor (initially a slightly mellower Mr Livingstone), Scotland a parliament and Wales an assembly. But local government has been left to wither.
Labour and Tory politicians alike are still haunted by fear that they could be blamed for the tax and spending decisions of locally elected politicians. They would prefer to strangle local democracy than risk their own popularity.
This fundamental antagonism to decentralisation has never been shared by the Liberal Democrats. Nick Clegg’s party has long argued that the right to tax must sit alongside the duty to represent. It campaigns for a local income tax – a proposition that seems entirely unremarkable to most Americans and continental Europeans, but one from which Britain’s two big parties recoil in horror.
As it happens, there are other, less radical, ways to hand back power to local communities. A restored right to set local business taxes would be a big step in that direction. For all his talk of sharing power, Mr Cameron, like Mr Brown, will not countenance it. The Tories find it easier to pretend that parents can run the schools than to cede authority to elected councillors.
Exposed here is the fundamental contempt for local democracy of Britain’s governing elite. And there lies the problem for Messrs Brown and Cameron. As long as these leaders refuse to trust communities to run their own affairs, people will rightly scorn their efforts to rebuild faith in national politics.