The long, long goodbye: Cameron or Miliband?

It’s 29 days until the General Election but it does seem as if the campaign has been going on in earnest since the beginning of the year.  And what a lack-lustre campaign it has been so far.  The essence of the arguments from the three major UK parties seems to be: ‘don’t elect Labour, let us finish the economic job we’ve already started’, ‘we’ll basically continue with the Conservative austerity measures but do it a little more slowly and with more humanity’ and ‘if you elect us and we have another coalition government, we can prevent the excesses of the other parties’.  With the Conservatives focussing on the economy, Labour on the NHS and the Lib-Dems, well focusing on surviving I suspect, there is really little new in what has been promised so far…that is if you believe politicians’ promises in the first place.  Labour bangs on about creeping privatisation in the NHS forgetting that there was more privatisation before 2010 than after.  The Conservatives keep talking about how poor Miliband would be as Prime Minister and they are perhaps right though, as Tony Blair pointed out yesterday in a passionate and well-argued defence of the EU, he did have the courage to resist calls from within his own party to commit himself to a referendum on Europe.  The Lib-Dems’ message seems to be, please don’t punish us for being in the coalition.  Given this negative campaigning, it’s hardly surprising that the polls have moved little since the campaign began with both Labour and the Conservatives neck and neck around 33 per cent.

Yes, it’s breakfast at Tiffany’s!

This election is being spun as the most important election for a generation—aren’t all elections—but the indications seem to be that there will be a hung parliament.  Neither Conservative nor Labour have yet made the electoral breakthrough suggesting that they will form a majority government.  But what is significant is that Labour look like being massacred in Scotland by the SNP and their position in Wales, though perhaps less precarious, is coming under sustained fire from Plaid Cymru.  If the polls are right, then it is unlikely that Labour could form a majority government or, in fact, end up being the largest party in the new parliament.  It simply looks tired in Scotland where its natural right to rule had been increasingly questioned since the mid-2000s while in Wales it has failed to deliver effective government in the National Assembly particularly in the NHS and education.  The first past the post system makes it difficult for the Greens and UKIP to make electoral headway but any MPS at all could make them influential in a hung parliament.  It is, however, UKIP that is making heavy weather of the election largely because it needs the oxygen of publicity to get its message across and  during an election that is diluted.  The only way it can grab the headlines—and it has failed to do so—is to make outlandish claims that may well appeal to their core voters but are liable to put everyone else off.

So two weeks in to the campaign proper, the Conservatives and Labour are constantly recycling their rather worn mantra, the Lib-Dems are praying for forgiveness for supporting an increase in tuition fees while the smaller parties are desperately seeking votes to give them a say in a hung parliament.  So little new there then.

Is the ‘Westminster system’ discredited? My thousandth post!

Looking back over the posts I’ve written over the last few years it seems appropriate, that having spent a great deal of time writing about the nature of and reasons for radical change in Britain, Canada and Australia and about how women and men struggled to get their voice heard by the political establishment, my thousandth post should be on the challenge facing contemporary British politics.  Nicola Sturgeon, perhaps the most thoughtful of the party leaders—and I mean this as a compliment-- today promised that her party would reform the discredited ‘Westminster system’ to meet the demands of ‘ordinary people’ across the UK. Though her agenda remains Scottish independence, she has articulated something that is blindingly obvious to anyone beyond the ‘Westminster village’—the current Westminster system is in need of radical reform.  Since devolution was introduced in Scotland and Wales in 1998, the major political parties have failed to address this issue.  Yes, they’ve tinkered round the edges but this has been largely cosmetic rather than ‘real change’.

There have been moves on House of Lords reform but they appear to have stuttered to a halt.  Attempts at electoral reform and changing constituency boundaries foundered with the proportional representation referendum and party politics in Parliament.  Belatedly, the Conservatives have come to the conclusion that things like the NHS and local government cannot be managed from Westminster.  But, and it was exemplified on the debate on the use of the secret ballot in relation to the Speaker, many politicians do not recognise that what they do appears petty, corrupt and out-of-touch with the lives of ordinary people.  Insulated in their ‘bubble’, they only emerge when they need your vote and even then tardily if it’s a ‘safe’ seat.  Is the system ‘discredited’ in the eyes of many voters?  Well, if voter turnout is a good indicator, and I think it is, the falling number of people who bother to vote in any elections—local, national or European—makes clear just what people think of politicians.  Now, politicians have never been the most popular of individuals but in the last decade there has been a shift from indifference to what politicians do to one of visceral dislike.  They give the impression of a disregard for the electorate, in the public imagination borne out by the expenses scandal, and complete unawareness of the needs and plight of their fellow citizens.  We increasingly have a career cadre of politicians in all of the major parties whose experience of work is limited to being research assistants or running their own business, who have been educated in high-flying public or state schools and universities and whose motivation appears less concerned with helping the public than with helping themselves. 

Although there is a crying need to reform our public institutions—and I’m not just talking about the political ones—we should be clear that institutions are not in themselves the cause of the discredited system, it’s the people who inhabit and run them and it’s this as much as anything that explains why reform has not taken place.  Those within any political system have a marked unwillingness to reform it: it might affect them.  Take the House of Lords as an example.  Getting rid of the ‘hereditaries’ or at least most of them, was not a real problem as their position was and is indefensible in a democratic system but turning it into an elected House now that’s another matter.  Labour may call for this but, it appears, with little enthusiasm to push the matter through—it had thirteen years to do so and failed.  Having the ‘gift’ of being able to appoint life peers is, whatever your party, an important tool for managing Parliament.  Am I surprised that calls for a federal UK, something discussed at length in the aftermath of the Scottish referendum, have declined from an overwhelming shout to a quiet whimper in the past months?  Not really even though it is an obvious solution to the growing crisis in the constitutional legitimacy of government.  Whether it’s further devolution, Britain’s place in the European Union, austerity politics or the NHS, the fires of discordance are being stoked by politicians who want to scare us into voting for them because, as far as they’re concerned, everything will be fine if you elect their party into power.  The point, and Nicola Sturgeon recognises this, is that it won’t and before long the public, not easily roused from its constitutional apathy, will assert its democratic voice.

And the official campaign hasn’t started yet.

The most recent BBC Poll of Polls puts both Conservative and Labour on 34 per cent with UKIP on 14 per cent, the Liberal Democrats on 8 per cent and the Greens on 5 per cent.  The narrowness or non-existence of a Labour lead before the campaign proper gets under way is confirmed across all of the major polls with a lead not exceeding 3 per cent.  Generally it is expected that, where a government is unpopular the opposition has a good lead as it goes into the campaign and that, as the incumbent party often improves its position during the campaign, it is often a case of the opposition trying to hang on to its lead up to Election Day.  In the more volatile, less two party oriented nature of British politics today, there seems to be less interest in the election itself than on the possible variations of what all the pundits believe will be a hung parliament and on the ‘honest’ but politically inept admission by the Prime Minister that he will only serve for one more term should he be elected spawning a feeding frenzy in the ‘Westminster village’ about his successor.  This is going to be an intensely negative campaign by the coalition parties and Labour.  The basic premise appears to be…we’ve had the pain of five years of austerity and, for the Conservatives, its a plea to ‘let us finish the job’ while from Labour ‘there are more cuts to come but we’d do it more slowly’.  So little innovative political thinking here.

If the assumption of a hung parliament is correct, and it’s far from clear whether this will be the case, the question is what form government will take beyond May.  Did the coalition represent the natural 'next step' in party dealignment and the evolution of multi-party politics? Was coalition in practice a historic innovation in itself, or did the essential principles of Britain's uncodified constitution remain untroubled?  The horse-trading has already begun.  Let’s assume that Labour is the biggest party but without an overall majority—likely given its parlous position in Scotland if the polls are right—it’s already ruled out a coalition with the SNP but a week is a long time in politics and the realities of its position after May may change things.  The problem with the SNP is that its agenda is clear—independence—and Mr Salmond has already said that he could bring down the government if Labour joined in, with David Cameron ‘locked out’. The Conservatives accused him of ‘trying to sabotage the democratic will of the British people’ though in reality this means the ‘English people’.  It is part of their continuing attempt to portray Mr Miliband as a weak leader whose strings are being pulled by Mr Salmond but it could well precipitate further moves towards Scottish independence.  The question is whether English voters—a demographic majority of the UK--would be prepared to accept Scottish voters and SNP MPs gaining benefits for Scotland at the expense of England, a case of the historical boot being on the other foot. 

The problem for the Conservatives if they form the largest party is equally fraught.  Perhaps the easiest option would be a continuation of the coalition with the Liberal Democrats.  Although it is likely that there will be fewer Lib Dem MPs—they will take the brunt of voter dissatisfaction with the coalition—the existing coalition has probably worked better than many people initially thought and the need for their support may well have blunted some of the more ideological policies of the Conservatives—well at least that’s the Lib Dem narrative.  It is also likely that the Conservative would have the support of UKIP, the only way it will get the referendum it craves, and also support from the more conservative Northern Ireland parties.  Although in the past, Irish MPs have determined whether a minority government could govern effectively, today the question is not whether this is possible—there’s no constitutional obstacle—but whether it would be acceptable to the electorate.  The issue is that without a federal constitutional structure that could legitimate this type of coalition, it appears simply as a pragmatic and somewhat crude way of achieving power.  But then this is a consequence of a multi-party state where small parties can punch above their numerical weight.

I say vicar…it’s a farce.

To say that the current state of play over TV debates before the General Election is a complete farce is an under-statement.  No one has come out of this slow-motion disaster with any real credit.  The broadcasters clearly did not think through their plans sufficiently by initially excluding the Greens but, having addressed that issue, they are still denying the Northern Irish parties any role in the planned debates.  So they still haven’t got it.  Either you include all the political parties with MPs in Parliament or just forget it.  The DUP is still considering taking legal action and I think—based on even the tightest legal definition of ‘reasonableness’—that they have a good chance of winning.  If it is ‘reasonable’ to include the Greens, then it is undoubtedly reasonable to include the DUP which had many times more MPs. 

I can’t see how the group of broadcasters responsible for coming up with the plan for the debates failed to appreciate just how unfair and unreasonable their decisions have been, when the solution was blindingly obvious.  The critical distinction is not whether political parties have MPs in Westminster but whether those MPs are members of a UK party.  This means that the UK debates should be between the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens and UKIP.  This does not mean the other national parties are excluded from debate but their involvement should be confined to televised debates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.  This is so obvious a distinction that I’m surprised that no broadcaster appears to have come up with it. 

Politicians have been equally culpable.  David Cameron, a staunch advocate of the debates in 2010, had done just about everything he can to stymie them in 2015.  His argument appears to be that if the debates are held during the campaigns, then they’ll ‘suck the air out of them’.  The threat of the empty podium, one response from the broadcasters, is simply childish and is something that equally might be challenged in the courts.  Ed Miliband, the Martini man…any time any where, any place…is little better and was quite prepared to accept that the Greens not be included…he can hardly claim the moral high-ground on the issue. 

The problem is that politicians of whatever party want the debates to be structured to benefit them while the broadcasters want good television and neither should, on the basis of the fiasco that has evolved, be left in charge of anything to do with it.  Far better for a body like the Electoral Commission to draw up the structure of the debates and that political parties and broadcasters have no right of veto over them.  Having the debates is something that the electorate overwhelmingly support but I fear that the issue has become so toxic that it might be better if they did not take place at all.

Reaching a thousand

I’ve been blogging regularly since July 2007 on my two blogs Looking at History and the History Zone, putting the posts I write on both.  Both sites are designed to promote history as a subject as well as providing me with a vehicle for putting forward my own ideas on the subject as well as on current political issues.  History Zone began life as a blog on Windows Live before migrating to WordPress at the beginning of October 2010; Looking at History has used the Google blog platform from the outset.  The only reason for having two blogs with broadly the same material is the result of a comment from a friend who said it would allow me to maximise audiences.  He was right…Looking at History has had over 830,000 hits in the intervening years while History Zone  has had a mere 71,000…such is the influence of Google as a search engine. In many respects the blogs acted as first drafts of material that later found its way into some of my published books and though marketing was not one of the reasons why I began blogging, it is now an integral part of my marketing strategies. 

Both blogs are now within spitting distance of a thousand posts, an average of 125 posts a year or just over two a week.  This reinforces the point made by many professional bloggers that the key to building and retaining an audience is to post regularly and, in the case of political comments, make them current…little point in commenting on the question of tuition fees two weeks after politicians proposed to reduce them from £9,000 to £6,000 should they win the General Election.  That, and their subject matter, has resulted in building a large audience in the UK, United States, Canada and Australia but also in Germany, France, Ukraine, Russia, Spain and India.  At this moment, the blog is being looked at in the UK, Australia, United States, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Algeria, Kenya, the Netherlands and the Philippines using computers, phones, tablets and iPads.  The blogs have become truly global in their audience, have been referred to on other blogs and have even found their way into several academic books.

Many people begin blogging with good intentions only to fail after a few posts or the posts become so irregular that the blog ends up lacking an real coherence.  I was lucky in that I had a pretty good idea about what my intentions for the blogs and, though they have evolved over the years, those intentions remain largely unchanged.  So I plan to continue doing what I’m doing and what I enjoy and hope that my audience agrees. 

Why not get rid of tuition fees?

I was one of the lucky ones.  When I went to university there were no tuition fees and, depending on parental income, there was a maintenance grant.  My parents were not high earners but I still only got two-thirds of the grant, not an enormous amount but, combined with working during every university vacation, it was enough to get through four years doing a degree and PGCE without any student debt.  When I went to university perhaps 5 per cent of my age cohort followed suit; today it’s heading for 50 per cent.  I was the first in my family to go to university and came from what I suppose was a non-manual working-class background.  Was I at a financial disadvantage at university?  Of course I was…on my landing were two scions of local business families who could easily have afforded to pay the running costs of the hall of residence without drawing breath.  They had cars…very noisy sports cars I remember…could afford all those expensive things that an eighteen year old craved at the time.  Wealth, of course, did not buy intelligence and they were not the brightest individuals…mannered rather than cultured, on occasions annoyingly patronising (though they would not have recognised it as such) but also considerate and grateful when given assistance with their work.  It was a learning experience for all of us: me from grammar school, them from minor public schools.  But then, that’s what university was about in the late 1960s and early 1970s when a degree was your passport into the professions and a reasonable, though rarely excessive, income.

It was taken for granted that, although maintenance costs were the individuals’ responsibility, tuition fees should be paid through national taxation.  Everyone, at least in theory, had the opportunity of going to university—though in practice the numbers remained stubbornly low—and so financing this was the responsibility of society as a whole which would benefit from the expenditure.  Doing a university course, irrespective what the subject, was a ‘good thing’ that would contribute to the ‘commonweal’ of society.  Universities were already beginning to recognise the untapped human resources in areas where university admission was never considered an option and started a process of evangelising and popularisation that still continues.  By the 1990s, this ‘benefit to society’ view was increasingly questioned as the costs of higher education burgeoned and universities increasingly looked to the free-market approach to university funding evident in the United States and elsewhere.  Should the state be funding the costs of higher education or the individual who benefits, in terms of greater earning-potential, from having a degree?  The free-market won the argument with the introduction of tuition fees in 1998.

Today it is almost taken as read that students should pay tuition fees either during or after their courses and is rarely challenged lest you raise the ire of Vince as an ‘economic illiterate’.  The argument is not about whether but how much…£3,000, £6,000, £9,000!  In which case, vote for me and you’ll pay £6,000 and for them £9,000 but never we’ll abolish them.  A 1p rise in income tax raises £3 billion so, assuming that universities need £10 billion to operate that’s just over 3p to make university education free.  If, and all political parties go on about the need for an educated workforce, a university education is essential to society’s well-being, then there is a case for society funding at least the cost of the courses.  This does not eliminate student debt—cost of living during the courses remains—but it does remove the debt to the state that is increasingly being written off anyway.  Individual students will have to negotiate their own overdrafts with their banks to fund term-time expenditure while holiday jobs can then pay it off.  This leave living costs, which you would have to have paid anyway, the responsibility of the individual.

The reality is that the free-market in university education has not really worked.  The question, ‘what is university for?’ is today answered not as a place for the development of learning, but in accounting terms.  Value is defined not in terms of value to the individual or to the broader common good but almost entirely in terms of its contribution to the development and continuance of the free-market enterprise economy.  Yet there is no reason why what is of value about university education should not be both individually and socially enhancing.  In the increasingly competitive jungle of higher education, academics are only as good as their last piece of research—and that research must accord with political priorities—not the service provided for the paying undergraduates frequently taught in large groups and often by post-graduates dependent on the patronage of their supervisors.  Whether they get value for money is debatable though there is probably little difference between contact times for Chemistry and History today than there was in the 1970s.  Chemistry courses cost more than History courses, so why should history students pay the same as Chemistry students?  The answer is that money from cheaper courses is used to supplement more expensive ones.  This reinforces the argument that the free-market  is an illusion, a valuable construct to defend fees but without recognition by universities of the financial implications that it implies. 

Rising tuition fees and student debt.

I can remember when the Labour government introduced tuition fees making the announcement just before the end of the summer term in 1997 to be applied to students taking A Levels and going to university in 1998.  The students finished their first year thinking that their fees would be paid at university and began their second year knowing that this was no longer the case.  Did it put people off from applying to university that year?  Well, two people who I would have expected to apply decided not to.  Did it affect which university they applied to?  Again slightly, with two or three students applying to universities nearer home so they could reduce their living costs and keep part-time work.  For these students, there was to be no student debt at the end of three years…they earned sufficient to cover tuition and other costs.

If the average student debt today is £44,000 then the issue is not living costs as universities seem to be arguing but tuition fees: £27,000 fees and £17,000 living costs.  It suits universities to divert attention away from tuition fees.  Many students who I’ve spoken to about this suggest that their courses did not provide value for money.  For instance, a History student who has a seminar a fortnight and two lectures a week in the second and third year of her course is not getting value for money…and that was at one the Russell Group universities.  In that respect, Ed Miliband’s proposal to reduce fees from £9,000 to £6,000 makes some sense.  The response has, however, been predictable: universities are concerned that their loss of revenue will impact of what they can deliver while the Students’ Union is all in favour of the proposal.  To argue as Mr Miliband is expected to say that ‘the government has designed a system which is burdening students with debt today and set to weight down the taxpayer with more debt tomorrow.’, implying that it’s all the Conservatives’ fault takes a little swallowing.  Was it not Labour that introduced tuition fees in the first place?  Student debt was an implicit feature of tuition fees from the outset…the question is what is an acceptable level of student debt?  So too was writing off that debt after thirty years.

What is being suggested is a blatant piece of electioneering.  If you vote Labour in the election then you’ll pay £9,000 less for tuition fees over three years…it’s a good ploy but will it work?  Labour's private polling suggests that tuition fees isn't just an important issue for young people, but that older voters too dislike the idea of the next generation apparently being saddled with debts.  Now I’m not really cynical about polling—oh yes I am—I can see the question ‘do you like/dislike the idea of the next generation being saddled with debt?’  No self-respective individual is going to say that she ‘likes the generational debt.  It rather like the now almost forgotten promise to cap fuel bills…it’s all smoke and mirrors.  Today’s headline is tomorrow’s forgotten promise. 

Dah, dah, di, dah: yes I know the tune.

There is a very old educational joke that begins with a teacher dealing with times tables in her classroom.  ‘We’ll do the five times table today.’ The lesson begins and the class begins the tables…one five is five, two fives are ten, three fives are fifteen, four fives are twenty…  She then stops the pupils.  ‘George, what are you saying….you’re only saying dah, dah, di, dah.’  ‘Yes, miss’.  ‘Why?’  ‘Well I know the tune, I just haven’t got the words yet.’  Today, the Education Secretary, Nikki Morgan, announced that pupils should know up to the twelve times table by age 11, that they should have lessons on punctuation and grammar and teach ‘British values’, whatever they really are.  The problem with each of these initiatives is that you really can’t disagree with them: by aged 11 pupils should know their times tables, be able to punctuate and write in grammatically correct ways and have some understanding of the values that underpin our society.

This is motivated, in large part, to the desire of the educational establishment to push Britain up the international league tables.  The problem is that league tables, whether domestic or global, are inherently biased tools through which to measure educational performance.  It all depends on what is being measured—what is being left in and what is excluded.  So the Pisa tests showed the UK as a middle-ranking education performer, overtaken by high-achieving systems in Chinese cities such as Shanghai and ambitious, hungry improvers such as Poland and Vietnam, an unimpressive performance that provided proof of the need for radical improvement.  However, the latest international league table, published by Pearson and compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit, places the UK in sixth place overall and  only beaten by Finland in Europe.  The Pearson tables includes university-level information as well as school-level tests - and to get really specific, it measures entry to a type of academic university path which is likely to boost the UK's position rather than some other countries. There are shorter, vocational higher education courses--more popular in some other countries--that are not included in these rankings.  So which is a more accurate reflection? Pisa has more international status, but the Pearson rankings use a wider range of indicators. 

The problem is that there is no one agreed test for determining how a successful education system should be measured.  In many respects it’s a case of smoke and mirrors. Some things can be easily measured such as whether students are better or worse at solving mathematical problems or whether an individual has reached a particular level of reading or not.  The Pisa tests, for instance, measure reading, but not writing. It's much harder to measure the handling of ideas rather than numbers. How would you compare written analytical skills across so many different cultures and languages? How would you compare creativity or innovation?  The same problem applies to measuring a sense of individual or collective well-being or really anything concerned with socialisation.  The issue is how these tests are used and that comes down to political priorities: not surprisingly teacher unions have jumped on the Pearson tests to show that teaching is doing quite well while the government highlighted the inadequacies illuminated (or not) by the Pisa tests.  Remember the phrase allegedly coined by Benjamin Disraeli, though it first appeared after his death and is not found in any of his writings: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.’ 

Coalitions, zombie parliaments and elections

In 2011, the new coalition government introduced five-year, fixed term parliaments in legislation passed on 15 September.  This ended the incumbent’s advantage of being able to call a general election when it suited the government best as Margaret Thatcher did in 1983 or delaying it until the last minute as John Major did in 1997 and Gordon Brown in 2010. Let’s consider that we’ve had fixed-term parliaments for the last thirty years and what the possible outcomes of elections might have been. 

Would the Conservatives have won the election in 1980?  Probably yes, Callaghan’s government would have found it difficult to come back from the ‘winter of discontent’ and the widespread belief that ‘Labour isn’t working’.  Given the rifts within Labour and the outcome of the Falklands War, a Conservative victory in 1985 was likely but, given the increasing debacle over the community charge and the increasing unpopularity of Margaret Thatcher, the Conservatives lost in 1990.  With Labour under Neil Kinnock in power, the Conservatives elect Michael Heseltine as leader and he wins the 1995 election after a lack-lustre Labour government floundered.  With the economy improving in the late 1990s, the Conservatives win again in 2000.  Given that the modernisation of the Labour Party had begun while it was in office between 1990 and 1995, it is questionable whether Tony Blair would have risen to prominence in the party.  Either way, Labour wins the 2005 election but falls victim to the global financial crisis in 2010. 

If we had four-year parliaments then the electoral history could have been very different.  The Conservatives again win in 1980 and 1984 and, as the community charge issue had yet to achieving toxic intensity, in 1988 as well.  With John Major as prime minister from 1990, he surprisingly wins in 1992.  With Tony Blair as Labour leader after 1994, Labour wins in 1996, 2000 and 2004.  Gordon Brown takes over as Prime Minister in 2007 and wins the election in 2008.  With his strong global leadership over the financial crisis, Gordon Brown gains in national influence and, though he does not win the 2012 election, Labour is the largest party and, with the support of the Liberal party, forms a coalition government.  David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives since 2006, falls on his sword and Boris Johnson takes over as Conservative leader. 

Although these scenarios are speculative, they do suggest that there is a considerable difference between the possible outcomes of having either four of five year fixed parliaments.  The reason why, I assume, the decision was made to go for five year parliaments was because that was what already existed and had done since 1911.  In reality, five year parliaments and there have only been four since 1945—1945-50, 1959-1964, 1987-1992, 2005-2010—are far from the norm in British politics, four year parliaments are.  Whether, as some have suggested, it means that the final year of a five-year government is a zombie parliament is questionable but it is clear that in the final year of the government, the prospect of an extended general election campaign is almost self-evident.  This might be less the case with four-year parliaments when the incumbent government will presumably still have aspects of its programme to complete.

Chickens coming home to roost…I think not!

I have read with interest the speech Ed Miliband made today as part of what he sees as ‘the most important election for a generation’…presumably he means since 1997.  Lets deal with the ‘let those who are without sin…’ points first.  He says he is serious about dealing with environmental issues and that climate change would be at the centre of his agenda…well he couldn’t really say I don’t give a damn about climate change could he?  Of course it’s going to be at a heart of his agenda though what that actually means in practice is unclear.  He also said that vocational and academic qualifications would be valued ‘equally’ by his party.  I’ve been hearing this for thirty years by a succession of party leaders, ministers and MPs and the reality for most people is that academic qualifications are still regarded as superior to vocational ones.  I’d like to know how he intended to achieve this. 

Let’s move on to more substantive issues.  The minimum wage would rise to more than £8 an hour under Labour.  It’s currently £6.50 and will rise before the election.  In effect, what he is saying is that by 2020, it will go up by less than £1.50…that’s 30p a year…so much for a ‘living wage’!  As far as immigration is concerned—you know the subject Labour candidates have been advised not to talk about on the doorstep—there’s really little to distinguish Labour from the other parties, UKIP apart.  Immigration, he says, makes the UK ‘stronger, richer and more powerful’ but those who enter the country should ‘play by the rules ‘and ‘contribute before they claim’.  Talk about vacuous generalisation!  He also believes that the A & E crisis would be solved by improving community health services.  So having introduced the GP contract that effectively made it a five day, 9-6 service, Labour is going to do what?  Given that two GPs failed to recognise that my wife had pneumonia—hardly a difficult illness to identify--something A & E picked up immediately, can we really have confidence that GPs can fulfil the same or similar functions as A & E?  Yes too many people go to A & E for trivial reasons or are there because of their own, often drunken, stupidity, but are Labour planning to introduce a 24/7 National Health Service rather than what is in effect a Monday to Friday service?

As for people ‘chocking on their cornflakes’ after David Cameron urged firms to use windfalls from cheaper fuel to fund pay rises, that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable position to take.  Yes, wage increases have either been non-existent or extremely low over the past five years and I’m afraid I don’t think that this was any more than a practical position for those in both public and private sectors to take—though poorly managed when executives were getting high levels of remuneration giving a lie to George Osborne’s ‘we’re all in this together’.  In a recession everyone suffers or should suffer and people are worse off today than they were in 2010 but was there an alternative?  The Ed Balls’ solution would simply have increased borrowing and would have done little for the private sector that would have effectively cut wages to survive.  With their argument about a cost of living crisis shot, Labour now appears to be saying the economic success and a concomitant improvement in wages is an attempt to ‘wipe away five years of failure’.  Well it’s coming up to an election, what else did he expect! 

I’m hardly a supporter of the Conservatives, but is this really the best that Ed can do?

Chickens, dead parrots and political debate

It was hardly a surprise that Prime Minister’s Questions today saw David Cameron and Ed Miliband trading blows over the proposed TV leaders’ debates in April.  Both accused each other of being ‘frit’ with Cameron saying that he would not debate if the Greens are not included while Miliband using the well-worn chicken analogy to explain his resistance to the debates.   Let’s be clear the decision of who should or should not be involved in the debates was not made by politicians.  The result was that UKIP was in, but the Greens were not.  The SMP, Plaid Cymru and the Northern Ireland parties were not included since they are seen a national not UK parties.

Why the broadcasters made its decision is really one of logistics.  Imagine a debate between the leaders of all the political parties in the UK…it wouldn’t be a debate, more a series of statements…so you can understand why they took the decision.  The debates are, or at least should be, a combination of spectacle as well as reasoned debate and simply a series of statements would not be that.  The solution seems to me to be relatively simple.  

• There should be a series of national debates including all of the UK political parties who have members of Parliament.  This would include the Greens and end Cameron’s reluctance to debate.
• There should also be a national debates in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland involving the leaders of the political parties in each respective country who have members of Parliament.

If you already have a member of Parliament not a political party, then you should be involved in the debates. 

Accident & Emergency: a political imponderable

In the past two weeks I have had direct experience of Accident & Emergency…not personally but a member of the family has had a serious bout of pneumonia though she’s now on the mend.  Did the four hour target for getting her on to a ward matter?  Well no.  She needed to be treated in Accident & Emergency before being moved after about five hours to ICU and then to the Coronary Care Unit. The doctors and nurses were brilliant and got her through the initial crisis.  So why is there, in fact is there, a crisis in A & E?

The problem with targets is that that when they are not met, it is seen as a failure with all the concomitant political flak.  The reality is that when there is increased demand for A & E services, it is almost inevitable that targets will not be met.  The NHS is an organisation that is extensively managed but A & E ultimately cannot be managed…it is a service that reacts to immediate demands.  You also have the day-to-day work that hospitals do…appointments, doing operations, providing support etc.….that are planned.  So you have two elements in many hospitals—the ‘normal’ planned operation of the hospital caring for people and A & E where planning is based on ‘predicted’ demand and predictions are always tentative.  Take an emergency patient who needs to be admitted but the only way this can be achieved is that another non-emergency patient is told ‘your operation has been postponed’ or ‘we need your bed, we’re sending you home’.  It’s a matter of priorities…the emergency patient may died if not admitted but the patient whose operation is postponed may be living with some non-life threatening pain.

Does this mean that we need to expand A & E services?  Well we could but whether this would be a good use of constrained resources is questionable.  It isn’t a case of there being insufficient A & E services, it’s the reasons why people use them today.  Until relatively recently, A & E was the last recourse for people…it was an emergency option often accessed through calling 999.  That is no longer the case.  Today people who, in the past, would have gone to their GP turn up at A & E because they can’t get an immediate doctor’s appointment.  Many A & E departments deal with this by having a minor injuries section dealing with triage leaving emergency staff to deal with real emergencies.  The problem is that we no longer have a 24/7 GP service…yes I know we have an emergency call out system operating outside GP working hours but how effective this is in practice is open to question. 

A further and an increasingly important issue is the aging population.  With people living longer because of improvements in medical technology, it is inevitable that the number of older people going to A & E is going to increase.  I was recently in a respiratory unit of 24 beds in which 17 of the patients were over 65 of whom half had been there for over a week.  Care in the community does not provide a solution for these patients…they are seriously ill and need to be in hospital.  This does, however, put pressure on the limited resources hospitals have and puts pressure on A & E, the route most of these patients took to get into hospital in the first place. 

So have we, what many of today’s newspapers call ‘a meltdown’ in A & E?  If the four hour target is taken as the criterion for measuring this, probably yes.  But then that target is an aspiration, not a true reflection of the realities in A & E.  Our obsession—or should I say politicians’ obsession with targets—gets in the way of the superb work done in A & E across the country in often difficult circumstances.  We don’t plan to be an emergency patient but if we are what concerns us is the expertise of those treating us, not whether they hit a spurious target.

Regionalism and political power: an unresolvable conundrum

One of the casualties of the reorganisation of local government in the early 1970s was the Isle of Ely absorbed within a much extended Cambridgeshire.  While there may have been a logical and administrative case for this, it still rankles with many older residents in the now expunged shire.  Yet even in the Isle there were differences largely between those who regarded themselves as Fen people and those who did not, a distinction based on whether you were a Fen person born and those regarded as ‘foreigners’ (and that included those born in the old shire of Cambridge).  The Fens was not an administrative unit but covered parts of the Isle, Norfolk, smidgeons of Suffolk and Lincolnshire.  The trick is to find a structure that marries individual identity with historical traditions (and myth) and administrative necessities.

This is indicative of the problems involved in creating a regional structure in England—or in fact in Scotland or Wales.  People, even in these days of global social networking and global awareness, still have an intense attachment to ‘their’ localities.  In part this is a consequence of how the English state developed before 1945.  Although that state was already centralised with most political power and decision-making (at least at the level of policy) made in Westminster, how people experienced those policies was mediated through local institutions—face-to-face contact with ‘government’ was through the vestry, parish council, the shire structures rather than with Westminster and declining involvement is politics can be explained by the breakdown in this personal contact with those institutions.  If all key decisions are made in London, why should people really bother about what’s going on in their own localities?  This is reflected in the paltry number of voters in local elections—why bother to vote for something that really has little control over your destinies—and this has had a debilitating effect on national elections with a progressive decline in turnout.  Today, no political party in local or national government has a majority mandate for its actions.  What we are witnessing is the de-democratisation of politics and the creation of technocratic conceptions of government in which elections do not really change anything but essentially tweak policies.

The question is whether an English parliament—for which there is a strong case within a federal structure—or establishing self-governing regions will put the ‘demos’ back into democracy.  If not, then all we will have is another administrative reorganisation that will bring about ‘cosmetic change’—it will seem to address the constitutional concerns of the people (well at least that will be what politicians in Westminster say: ‘we’re listening’!) but all it will do is create another tier of ambitious, self-important and self-obsessed, if well-meaning politicians who lack any real popular legitimacy.  The truth is that we cannot go back to the regionalism of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy or the early-modern notion of the ‘commonweal’—England is no longer a rural, democratic idyll, something that has long been discarded in the dustbin of history.  Yet, for some people at least, nostalgia for a ‘lost past’—that is reality did not exist—lies behind their support for regionalism.  Yes there are differences between the different parts of England—a diversity that should be celebrated—but whether regional constitutional structures resolve those differences rather than magnifying them is a moot point.

Little Englands or the dangers of fragmentation

Watching Newsnight yesterday evening, I was struck by a discussion of whether or not London could seeks independence from the United Kingdom.  It could, one of the participants suggested, become a city state like those of the Hanseatic League, the medieval commercial powerhouse of northern Europe.  I was surprised that he did not mention the Athenian polis as well.  The argument was essentially that London is different from the rest of the UK…it is wealthier (anger at the mansion tax proposals from Labour as it will particularly hit Londoners), more diverse ethnically and culturally and less concerned by immigration and more pro-Europe than the rest of the country.  Well, yes.  Could London survive as a separate ‘state’, probably yes.  Is it an appealing idea for Londoners, almost certainly yes.  Should the proposition be seriously considered, definitely no.  That the idea of London as a city state is being touted as a constitutional solution is indicative of the mess we have got ourselves into since the Scottish referendum. 

For good or ill, one of the strengths of the British constitutional system has been its centralised nature.  I remember being told by a medieval historian several decades ago that one of the reasons why centralised constitutional solutions worked in Britain but not in other countries was that Britain was just the right size.  This combined with responsive local government meant that the writ of central government ran effectively across the country.  Before the twentieth century and the emergence of the massively centralised welfare state, Parliament reflected this bifurcation of power in spending much of the time discussing local legislation rather than, as it does today, pondering national policies.  While it is certainly the case that constitutional change is now unavoidable, there seems to be no consensus on what that change should be and the mechanisms through which change should be accomplished.  The danger we have now is that different political groupings for different and often contradictory reasons seem intent on fragmenting this constitutional settlement. 

There are three issues that need to be resolved.  First, what should the relationship be between the four parts of the United Kingdom?  For this we need to look to a federal solution…what may be called home rule for the nations.  This means that everything that is not a union issue, such as defence, should be devolved to the four nations.  We already have this in several areas: in education, for instance, policies in Scotland and Wales already diverge from those that apply in England.  Each nation would have its own parliament or assembly to deal with these issues…it would be simply wrong not to have an unicameral English parliament to deal with English laws.   Secondly, within the nations there are also calls for greater regional autonomy.  Though the debate has focussed on England, the same pressures are evident in Wales and Scotland…the Shetland Islands, for instance, are as far from Edinburgh and Edinburgh is from London.  Finally, there is the question of Europe.  I agree with David Milliband’s statement today:

I have this residual faith in the common sense of the British people that generally they don't do stupid things. And it would be unbelievably stupid to walk out of the European Union.

By focussing attention of the question of the free movement of labour within the EU…something that concerns other EU members as well as the UK…there is a danger that we will forget the benefits of membership.   Much better p…..g out of the tent than p….g in! 

The problem with my neat solution to the constitutional mess we’ve got ourselves into is that it requires the different political parties to agree even if they are disadvantaged by the solution.  So Labour has to accept that the West Lothian question has to be resolved and that, in future, Scottish MPs should not vote on English issues.  Similarly, the Conservatives need to accept that an element of proportional representation is necessary in electing members to the four national parliaments even if first past the post remains the norm for elections to the UK Parliament.  Above all we need to have a constitutional settlement that all political parties can buy into whether they like all its elements or not.  Only by doing this can a constitutional referendum be won…in reality you probably wouldn’t need a referendum simply a General Election with all parties committed to the settlement meaning that whoever won, it would be implemented. 

Not doing this leaves the danger of further fragmentation as a potent threat and a further weakening of Britain’s global position.  Little Englands is not a viable option in the twenty-first century.

Evidence, research and professionalism

Both Conservatives and Labour have now made raising the professional standing of teachers a priority in the lead-up to the General Election next May.  For Tristram Hunt, this is linked to a teachers’ ‘Hippocratic oath’ while the Conservatives now propose to establish a College of Teaching to protect standards and to raise the status of the teaching profession. Education Secretary Nicky Morgan says she wants teaching to be seen as having a similar status as professions such as medicine and law and will ‘allow teachers, like other professions, to set their own high standards for their members; to take a lead in improving the profession's skills and abilities; and to champion higher standards for children.’

The government says that it will set up a fund to provide ‘evidence-based professional development, led by a network of more than 600 outstanding teaching schools’.  For those of us who were involved in this sort of research when we were teaching, this is a welcomed move.  But, evidence-based research is neither easy to do nor something that can be directly linked to improvements in standards even if that was its intention.  Having spent two years doing an Advanced Diploma in Education with John Elliott at UEA and a M.Phil at Cambridge, I found that effective evidence-based research is something that takes time and does not lead to immediate solutions…it is a process that creates a way of thinking about teaching and learning rather than simply an administrative tool to achieve change.  Unless this distinction is recognised and the problematic nature of the notion of ‘evidence’ in evidence-based research is recognised then is is probable that it will lead to ‘cosmetic’  results or action without change…change in slow motion. 

It has been my experience that teachers fall into three broad categories: those who embrace change, those who resist change and the majority who fall between the two and hope to continue what they’re doing and for whom change is less a challenge more an obstacle to get over.  When my much-maligned generation went into the profession many of us did so because we saw teaching as a life-long vocation…we were never going to get rich teaching as many of our colleagues did who entered the legal or medical professions.  Few teachers did any research and those who did were regarded as somewhat exotic beings…I remember being told by a prominent head teacher in the late 1980s that doing research into teaching would get me nowhere and that it was of little value.  In fact, for most teachers it was what has been called a ‘quiet billet’ involving little planning…many teachers wrote their lesson plans once and then used them for the remainder of their careers…with an liberal use of coercion to enforce authority.  The assumption was, something I was told in my first professional development session as a teacher…and this statement was the whole of the session…if you assume that you have a class of disruptive idiots in front of you, you’ll never be disappointed.

We have come a long way from that antediluvian view and it is to be hoped that a College of Teaching will further develop the excellent classroom-based research that has been a feature of good professional development since the 1990s but, despite all the attempts to establish a well-paid cadre of excellent teachers, we still do not have an administrative cadre in the profession.  The inevitable route for the excellent teacher and middle-manager is out of the classroom and into educational administration and there is a considerable attitudinal and intellectual difference between being an excellent teacher and being an excellent manager…managing finances is very different from managing children.   

Are we a nation of amnesiacs?

How much do we know or want to know about our pasts?  For the past half century, there has been a widespread discourse about western societies ignoring their collective pasts and their citizens not knowing their national history.  This view is often legitimised in surveys showing that people fail to identify famous events and politicians and is also linked with concerns about the perils facing the nation and questions of citizenship. What is seen as woeful ignorance is used to justify educational reforms in which the state imposes its view of the past through a national curriculum that has less to do with the past than with current political concerns. 

Who is this?

However, there are other ways to look at peoples’ perception of the past particularly discourse on historical ignorance can, itself, be considered a site of memory. The site is an intangible monument carefully constructed, erected for political purposes, widely visited, and dedicated to a particular relationship between peoples and their national pasts. In the ignorance of history discourse, ignorance generally means one thing: the incapacity to answer correctly factual questions about history. In Canada, for instance, The Dominion Institute was created in 1997 to improve Canadians’ knowledge of their national history. In 1997, the Institute published its first annual history survey, which tested general knowledge. The discovery that only 54 per cent of Canadians polled could name Sir John A. Macdonald as Canada’s first Prime Minister and only 36 per cent knew that Confederation took place in 1867. Since then, the Institute’s polls have filtered into the national discourse, quoted in more than 2,000 media stories and routinely incorporated into political speeches.  By the late 1990s it had become conventional wisdom that Canadians did not know their history, in large part because their schools did not teach it or did not teach it properly.  Similar conclusions were reached at the turn of the millennium in Australia—leading in part to the ‘History Wars’ and in the United Kingdom, though here the debate went back to the 1960s.  Ignorance, it seems, was a combination of poor teaching, an un-prescribed curriculum and the triumph of skills over knowledge and by erecting what is in essence a false dichotomy provided justification for intervention by the state not simply in what was taught but its pedagogical character.

What battle is this?

Discourse on ignorance of history is easily digestible because it is built on common sense evidence showing a lack of historical facts that ‘everyone should know’. Implicitly in those facts, there is a normative framework oriented toward a specific and increasingly politicised definition of a nation’s history which, to different degrees in different countries changes when governments change.  Ignorance of history discourse has become bureaucratised and self-fulfilling.   Since 1997, The Dominion Institute repeated its 1997 survey in 2001 and 2009 and found that Canadians have a persistent difficulty with identifying Sir John A. Macdonald. In Quebec, La Coalition pour l’histoire commissioned a similar survey in 2012 to support changes in the history curriculum. In that poll, it was found that 94 per cent of those surveyed were unable to identify Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau, the first Prime Minister of Quebec.  In 2002, historian Desmond Morton declared, ‘Canadian ignorance of our history is commonplace, and not just among professors. Politicians and business leaders repeat the mantra’ .

What is most problematic about the evidence is that it documents only ignorance and excludes investigation of what people actually know about the past. Many researchers have contested the validity of the discourse on historical ignorance arguing for surveys that include no factual questions, but open ones, such as: ‘How important is the past of Britain to you?’  Results of these more nuanced surveys add much greater complexity and diversity to the notion of historical amnesia.  The problem is that little attention has been given by the media or politicians to surveys like this largely perhaps because they call into  question their vested interest in government spending and educational reforms.  What history is, how it is defined, how it is taught and how it is received by its different audiences must be set against the widespread popularity of history as a leisure activity—whether as family history or in the audiences for the History Channel.  Historical amnesia, it appears, is a matter of elite rather than populist perceptions.   

Devolution, fragmentation and the end of the United Kingdom!

‘We’re all in this together’, the mantra expounded by George Osborne relentlessly over the past five years…though aimed at justifying the reduction of the deficit and the government’s austerity measures, it can also be seen as the Westminster view of the United Kingdom.  The reality, however, is far more complex than this simplistic view.  The development of the United Kingdom took centuries—the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the tenth century, the conquest of Wales in the thirteenth century, the Act of Union of 1707 and finally Act of Union  that finally brought Ireland under the centralised control of Westminster.  Yet it has taken less than two decades—since 1998 in reality—to unravel this constitutional settlement.  By giving devolution to Wales and Scotland and then to Northern Ireland (the rump of the 1801 legislation), the government created a constitutional momentum that led to the narrowly lost Scottish referendum in September and the precipitous statement by David Cameron about resolving the ‘English question’ in tandem with further devolution for Scotland.  This, combined with Britain’s increasingly fractious and tenuous membership of the EU, reinforces the concerns of many that we are going back to a ‘little England’ scenario, a fragmentation of the United Kingdom which though constitutionally still ‘together’ is increasingly splitting apart and that the usual approach of muddling through or tinkering with things won’t do.

Yet that, it appears is precisely what Westminster intends to do.  Scotland will get more devolved powers—too little I suspect for those calling for independence and too much for many in England who argue that they do not have the same freedoms.  There will be a movement of power from Westminster to the English ‘regions’, something already presaged in proposals to give the bigger cities their own mayors.  The West Lothian question will be ducked yet again as the Labour Party has a vested interest and future governmental necessity of keeping Scottish MPs voting rights.  The House of Lords will not be abolished.  The question of the EU will be fudged with the Prime Minister, if he wins the 2015 election (something many people think unlikely), like Chamberlain bringing back a ‘piece of paper’ from Brussels offering repatriation of powers but no solution to the unfettered immigration from the EU.  If he loses then Labour are not offering a referendum anyway.  This might have worked a decade ago…even five years ago…but it won’t now. Tinkering is no longer something that the public will countenance.  There is a constitutional momentum building across the United Kingdom that favours something more radical, more fundamental.

Do nothing and things will simply implode.  Scotland will gain its independence in a decade after a second successful referendum.  Northern Ireland and Wales will in effect be given Home Rule.  England will become even more fragmented as Westminster fails to curb regional aspirations in, for instance, the North and Cornwall, while its regional policies devolve more and more power to the new mayoral regions.  UKIP will gain in power and MPs and the government will be compelled to give the in-out referendum people want and it will lose.  What we will have is a fragmented, disunited kingdom; in effect a failing state of no global influence or significance especially when we lose our permanent place on the UN Security Council.  Preventing this, as I see this now inevitable process, requires rapid constitutional change and a written British Constitution.  It means the creation of a federal structure with a unicameral English Parliament in Birmingham, something that will inevitably lead to a diminution in the powers of the Westminster Parliament so we can get rid of the House of Lords, elected on the same terms as those in Scotland and Wales combining first-past-the-post and proportional representation.  We are better together than apart but cosmetic change to maintain the status quo no longer cuts it.

Yes it’s the Oliver syndrome…more!

The UK has been told it must pay an extra £1.7bn (2.1bn euros) towards the European Union's budget because the economy has performed better than expected in recent years. The additional payment was requested after the European Commission's statistics agency, Eurostat, reviewed the economic performances of member states since 1995, and readjusted the contributions made by each state over the last four years - based on their pace of growth.   Patrizio Fiorilli, a European Commission spokesman, said the additional request for funds ‘reflects an increase in wealth…Just as in Britain you pay more to the Inland Revenue if your earnings go up’.  It is hardly surprising that a government source said the budget demand was ‘not acceptable’.

Whether the request for additional funds is within EU rules or not, it is a politically inept decision by the Commission.  With the growing intensity of the debate in Britain over whether it should remain in the EU, the resurgence of support for UKIP and the forthcoming Rochester by-election, the timing of this announcement could not be worse.  It gives the impression that the EU bureaucracy has no sense of what is politically expedient  and inexpedient but is only concerned with following the rules come what may.  It has its agenda and seems unwilling or unable to step outside its own tunnel vision to appreciate that this vision is not acceptable to many people…it’s a closer union at all costs.  Now some may see this as politically and ideologically inspired…a vision of a more prosperous and politically united European state rather than the fragmented and aggressive nationalism that existed prior to 1945…others take a different view..the EU as a top-down, bureaucratically-centred, undemocratic, technocracy trying to imposed a uniformity on the diverse and ‘un-uniform’ nations of Europe.

The problem with the rule-oriented, treaty-based conception of the EU is that rules and treaties are difficult to change quickly…this requires, as it should, the agreement of all the member states.  So what happens when some aspect of these rules and treaties is not working for member states?  Well often little in the short-term as making changes to rules and treaties is a long, frequently drawn-out process.  Once something has been enshrined in rules or treaties—whether good or bad—the EU constitutional structures make it very difficult to reverse them even if they are clearly not in the interests of member states.  The EU has become a leviathan, if not quite yet in the Hobbesian mode.  Its unidirectional approach to development seems premised on the notion of more not less interference in the affairs of nation states coupled with an unwillingness to recognise that alternative ways of developing Europe have any real validity at all.      

If a week is a long time in politics…..

If a week in politics is a long time, then the last week must have seemed like an eternity in Westminster.  The referendum was won but then confused by the Prime Minister’s attempt to link further Scottish devolution with ‘English votes for English laws’.  Then Ed Miliband ‘forgot’ to mention the deficit in his speech on Tuesday, something that did little to suggest a Prime Minister in the making, and his attempt to resolve the problem of England by focusing on regionalism—he needs Scottish MPs to be able to vote in Westminster.  Then, on Friday, the House of Commons voted in favour of the use of British planes in Iraq against IS..a third Iraq war…Britain’s involvement in the Middle East is increasingly resembling the Hundred Years War.  Finally, a second Conservative MP defected to UKIP and a junior minister resigned after what appears was a newspaper ‘sting’—you would really think that they would have learned from past experience about these and yet politicians appear to fall for it every time--not an ideal beginning to the Conservative Party conference.

Looking at all these mistakes, errors of judgement, what many call betrayal, is it too much to suggest that the political system is in ‘crisis’?  I know that politicians have bad weeks but I find it difficult to remember when they actually had a good one.  It appears that they have come under the Voltairean delusion that ‘everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’ or ‘things can only get better’!  Well, they’re not.  There is a profound and continuing disillusionment with the political system, politicians and everything emanating from Westminster.  It’s not simply that politicians get things wrong—we all do that—or that they appear out of touch with the lives of ordinary people—it has ever been thus—it’s a sense that something is fundamentally wrong with the body politic—something rotten in the state of Denmark.  It raises questions about what is the point of the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century?

One of the things that History teaches us is that societies in which there is a disconnect between the aspirations of its peoples and the credibility and legitimacy of its political elites is that it leads to growing economic, social , cultural and political pressures and that if these pressures are not reduced then those societies often fragment.  In the past, people have assumed that their political leaders have solutions to their everyday problems and, although there may have been different emphases among different politicians, to some extent they did.  The primary aim for politicians at least since 1945 was to make sure that people had work, were educated, had proper health provision and a good standard of living—they ensured that people’s aspirations were as least partially met.  There were always some who fell through the social net and welfare provision provided support for their needs.  At a time of growing globalisation and global tensions, British society—or more accurately English society—is turning in on itself, becoming less tolerant, more xenophobic, more clearly divided between the rich and the rest and unhappy with itself.  This, in part, explains why UKIP is gaining  increasing support across the political spectrum—you make a grave error if you think its appeal is simply to those with right-wing views,its jingoistic rhetoric appeals equally to white working-class voters on the left.  The mainstream political parties may ridicule UKIP—and much of what it says is easy to ridicule—but what it does and does very effectively is to speak for those who feel increasingly dispossessed in their own country for whom unfettered immigration and membership of the European Union are the fundamental causes of Britain’s woes.  The unwillingness of both Labour and the Conservatives to call a referendum on membership of the EU—despite saying they would—is a longstanding reflection of this disillusion that predates the formation of UKIP and is something Gordon Brown should have done over the Lisbon Treaty almost a decade ago.  We simply do not trust politicians to do what they say they’re going to do—something people are finding increasingly irksome. 

What does democracy mean in Britain?

Britain undergoes periods of democratic introspection about once every decade but what is often a frenzy of calls for constitutional change quickly subsides and the country returns to its normal state of constitutional lassitude.  Britain is not unique in doing this—crises in the body politic globally tends to lead to existing governmental structures baring the brunt of public opprobrium with the emergence of new political parties saying that they have the solution of the nation’s woes.  So what does democracy actually mean in Britain and why is our attitude to it so ambivalent?

For many in Britain, democracy relates to the right to express their opinion through the ballot box, a right that evolved between the Reform Act in 1832 and the Representation of the People Act in 1928—a process that took almost a century.  The extension of the vote to include those between 18 and 21 in 1969 marked an end to the democratisation of the electorate and the only way this could be altered is to extend the vote down to 16 and 17 year olds—something achieved with some success in the Scottish referendum.  Parallel to the extension of the vote has been the emergence of pressure group politics where interest groups seek to exert influence on government through parliamentary and extra-parliamentary pressure and party politics through which different sections is society seek to achieve electoral dominance.  So democracy in Britain can be expressed individually through participation in local, national, Union and European elections, through seeking to influence government policy through legitimate pressure and lobbying and from within political parties, processes made both more complex and more immediate by the twenty-four hour nature of the media and the emergence of social networking.  Politicians are now expected to be able to react immediately and often instinctively to emerging stories in the media with an appropriate and often inappropriate sound bites almost before events occur.  Today democracy is played out on the television screen, the tablet or smartphone—everyone it seems has an opinion—and there has been a ‘technologing’ of politics as never before.

The problem is that our constitutional and political structures have not been keeping pace with the changes in how people experience democracy.  In one sense that may not be a bad thing since constitutional change needs to be a considered process—rapid constitutional change is often poor constitutional change.  But the lag between people’s perceptions of how democracy works for them and a responding repackaging of constitutional structures to reflect those perceptions has resulted in a growing dissatisfaction with Westminster politics and its seeming inability to do more than adopting the classic ‘we know what’s best’ approach to challenges to its legitimacy.  This is reflected in the falling numbers of people who votes in elections, further reducing their legitimacy and the legitimacy of those elected to public office—why should we bother to vote when it doesn’t change anything?  Our democratic system is linked almost exclusively to the question of voting rather than taking a broader view of democracy as a participatory process—the campaigns in Scotland clearly show what the impact of active participation are and their effect on voter turnout.  Our representative system based on the notion that ‘if you don’t like what we’re doing you can vote us out at the next election’ is today insufficiently responsive to people’s democratic aspirations.  Whether an English Parliament is the solution to this is unlikely—it simply adds another tier of already discredited politicians.