This article starts philosophically enough but ends with a bombshell. I suspect Mt Lloyd shares my view that the Editor of the Telegraph may have destroyed democratic politics in this country for a long time. Will Lewis’s influence has been malicious and malign leaving us with a vacuum in political life. Nature - as we are often told ‘abhors a vacuum’. Something or someone will fill the gap for that again produces another truism ‘that power is a powerful aphrodisiac’ .
One man’s nihilistic ambition may have poisoned our future.
Christina
FINANCIAL TIMES 11.8.09
Democracy cannot wait for the ‘new generation’
By John Lloyd
The dangers that we face are only too well known. Globally, there is the increasing likelihood of a nuclear exchange; or the steady deterioration of the biosphere, with flooding of cities, wars over water, clamouring refugees. At the national level, the great issues are how to raise the poor; how to keep people in work; and how to preserve health systems, social services and pensions when so many societies are ageing so quickly. Our times could be dubbed the Age of Contraction.
We know this because experts have produced libraries of reports and studies, specialist journalism and advocacy. The issues are at the centre of debate and polemic. That is what democracies do: clarify the issues, debate them and then have a government chosen by a majority take action.
There is a flaw there, and it can be illustrated by the case of the British House of Lords. For much of the 20th century, it was a democratic disgrace. It was dominated by men and a few women who owed their position to the nobility of their name, their wealth or sometimes to a distinguished political, administrative or Anglican career. Only a minority were chosen on the basis of their experience and knowledge. New Labour fired most nobles, who must shuffle on without a club in which deferential servitors paid by the public are on hand to bow them in. In their place came appointed life peers. But the Lords was too convenient a reward for long service or open purses – and, indeed, for real distinction – for New Labour to go further. It remains, of course, wholly unelected.
When he assumed the premiership two years ago, Gordon Brown gave notice that the Lords would be properly and democratically reformed. He has no hope of doing so before an election. If the Conservatives win, reform will be no priority: too much else of greater importance must come first.
Why? The need to reward political benefactors, the convenience of having somewhere to put the inconvenient, and distaste for an upper house with a public mandate all play their part. But equally to blame is a loss of confidence among the political class – in their status, popularity and mandate. Listening to an (off the record) conversation among leading lords and ladies last month, I gathered that some believed election would make the Lords worse – and actively unpopular. “People,” said one lady, “don’t want more democracy. They want things to work”. That view is not confined to Britain: the democratic glories of the past century or more – political parties, universal suffrage, an end to male and other privileges in parliaments – are scorned. The institutions and actors of democracy – in short, democracy – are held in contempt.
The European Union, the most potent political project of the postwar world, excites less and less interest, expressed either in votes or in journalism. Its senior functionaries and more thoughtful parliamentarians – the latter knowing well that most of their constituents know them not at all – are increasingly insecure. In its largest state, Germany, the two large parties that have stabilised German politics since the war are now waning, from commanding some 90 per cent of the vote in the 1970s to under 70 per cent now. No current European leader is strongly supported – the one partial exception being the populist Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, in part because, his opponents say, the private television channels he controls say little about his scandals. Barack Obama’s election, to be sure, showed that democratic politics still has superstars. But in two areas that may come to define his presidency – universal health insurance and cap-and-trade rules to cut carbon emissions – Mr Obama is finding it fearsomely hard to make progress. If, in half a year, a president so lauded can be (democratically) stymied, then the process of passing from campaign promise to administrative fulfilment is in trouble.
Among the major states of Europe, the politicians of Britain seem to have suffered most this year. The Daily Telegraph’s long spring roasting of the political class – through publication of details of expense claims that were sometimes questionable – produced apparent public revulsion. Will Lewis, who as editor of the Telegraph became the most powerful journalist in the country [a very dangerous promotion -cs] , told the BBC that MPs “had lost any moral authority” before the revelations appeared. Parliament, he said, would now be opened up to “a new generation of people who understand what it means to be a representative of British citizens”. That Mr Lewis should so easily claim that an entire political class should be replaced, and that a new class of a wholly different stamp is available, shows the febrile and hyperbolic level at which the affair was played out – and to which, when the political season resumes, it may be cranked up again. [There’ll be very few that will want to expose themselves to the off-hand, casual attitude to the facts that Mr Lewis and his team from the McBride School of Smears specialised in. Anything was grist to their mill and guilty and foolish were all lumped in with the totally innocent. What decent person would willingly submit to such a flawed Star Chamber -cs]
Everywhere, the political classes are uncertain of their mandate and unsure in the exercise of their power. Yet however we elect them, whatever tests we insist they undergo to enter into a life of hectic, insecure activity, politicians are now being called on to master the gravest of issues. From their number emerge those who are, by democratic rules, the only people permitted to lead national and international efforts to shape a habitable, sustainable, secure world. We must hope Mr Lewis is right: that a “new generation”, blessed with a superior understanding, is available, everywhere. Otherwise people might look to the Communist party of China as a better bet.
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