More Please!
by Dan Leighton
In his first major speech as Deputy Prime Minster, Nick Clegg promised a “power revolution” that will “unleash the biggest shakeup of British Democracy since the Great Reform Act of 1832”. Aligning himself with the great liberal reformers of the nineteenth century, he vowed to “tear up” laws that infringed civil liberties, to reduce the power of political elites in Westminster and redistribute power to localities.
Clegg confirmed that a referendum on the Alternative Vote, recall of MPs, regulation of lobbyists and the scrapping of ID cards are all on the table. As is so often the case, specific details on reform of the House of Lords and decentralisation of power to localities remained hazy. Still, the concrete measures are substantial and undeniably provide a more robust protection of civil liberties.
Yet there was a strong whiff of the nineteenth century patrician in this pitch to create a “new politics” for the 21st Century - no doubt the influence of Cleggs altogether more whiggish and pragmatic boss (See Anthony Barnett’s razor sharp take on Cameron). And like that most ungrateful of nineteenth century literary creations, I found myself uttering, “More please!” There was a frustrating lack of detail on the role of citizens in the process of reform itself. Clegg spoke eloquently on taking on vested interests but ignored the vested interest professional politicians have in democratic reform.
Prior to the manifesto mash-up that occurred in the coalition negotiations, the Lib Dem’s supported the idea of a Citizens Constitutional Convention
This recognised that citizens should play a substantial role in setting the reform agenda, especially in areas where professional politicians have a vested interest in the outcome. Yet in vital areas, most notably on electoral reform, the coalition government is denying citizens agenda setting power and tightly constraining the terms of the choices they are being called upon to make.
Given Clegg chose the 1832 Reform Act as his reference point, it’s worth recalling what a narrow advance it was. Although the act extended the franchise to one in seven men and cleaned up rotten boroughs, it was not until nearly a century later that universal suffrage was achieved in the UK. In the interim, it was left to the chartists and the suffragettes to wrestle their democratic rights from the clammy embrace of a patrician political class. Today, the rapidly growing Take Back Parliament movement is seeking ,with some success, to rekindle the flames of democratic radicalism. Clegg has extracted a real but limited reform agenda from his coalition partners. The successful realisation of his “power revolution” now depends on the energy and willingness of citizens to force this agenda open and demand more.
James Cameron
What also seems hazy is the distinction between "vested interests" and simple other types of interest. Vested interests are generally those who benefit from a system staying the same, but surely those who stand to gain from a radical redistribution of power should also be taken into account? There is nothing inherently worse about those who profit from the current system as opposed to future beneficiaries. We should approach constitutional reform with an open mind.
It will not always be immediately clear who the ultimate beneficiaries of new constitutional arrangements will be. This should not be a debate that descends into a charicature of old elites versus new power-to-the-people democrats. Clegg pledges that the committee for changes to the Lords will be " a dedicated group devoted to kick-starting real reform". It should be, but zeal for reform should not be at the expense of a critical and wide-ranging assessment of the new distribution of influence.
More generally, Clegg appears to have appropriated the moral right to tell the British people what to think on vast areas of constitutional reform. Yet his position (and many of his policies) derive from a quirk of political contingency structured by the old parliamentary system in which he lost seats but now holds the balance of power. This does not completely undermine his pretensions to leadership on this issue, but it does leave him on shakier ground than his soaring rhetoric would suggest.