Hansard Society Speech, by Robin Cook Wednesday 22 May 2002

Tonight I want to talk about the health of our democracy. As Leader of the House, you would expect me to begin such a subject with a medical bulletin on the health of Parliament. But I want to go wider in looking at the changing pressures on our democracy and the changing character of political debate.

You find me in an optimistic mood about the regeneration of Parliament. The past month has seen a series of decisions that together reinforce the status of Parliament.

The largest of these was the announcement last week that the Government will put Parliament in the driving seat on the road to reform of the House of Lords, through a free vote in both Houses. I was encouraged that Charter88 welcomed the announcement as “a victory for those campaigning for a democratic UK”. It is indeed possible that it will result in a more democratic second chamber, as the Public Administration Select Committee identified a “mainly elected” second chamber as the preference with the largest support among MPs.

It is right that the starting point of this parliamentary process should be a Joint Committee of backbenchers from both Houses. It will not be easy to build a consensus, but we are more likely to establish where the centre of gravity for reform lies among a committee representative of Parliament than through a decision imposed by Government. The first phase of the Committee’s work will be to define the range of options on composition, which will be put to both free votes. After both free votes, the Joint Committee must return to consideration of the detailed implementation of reform. This need not take a long time - it is not a new or untrodden path they are being asked to explore.

As far back as 1911, Lloyd George brought in the Parliament Act to curb powers for the House of Lords. Its preamble asserted:

“It is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as presently constituted, a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of a hereditary basis, but such a substitution cannot immediately be brought into operation”

Lloyd George was most certainly proved right in the last assertion. Ninety years and twenty General Elections later we have still not achieved it. But at least we have rehearsed all the arguments for reform. Although we all try very hard to come up with it, the truth is there is nothing new to be said on Lords reform. But, with good will and sober application, I see no reason why the work of the Joint Committee should not be concluded by the end of this year.

The second step that strengthens the status of Parliament is the decision by Tony Blair to give evidence twice a year to the Liaison Committee, which brings together the chairs of all Select Committees. This is an historic increase in accountability to Parliament. No Prime Minister has ever before agreed to be questioned by Parliament’s committees of scrutiny.

I am warned that it is not strictly accurate to say that no Prime Minister has ever appeared before a Select Committee. I am advised that, in the era of Ramsay Macdonald, Prime Ministers doubled-up as Leaders of the House and, as such, would appear before the Procedure Committee. However, that does not remove the central point that no previous Prime Minister has ever volunteered to answer questions from any of our investigative Select Committees.

This step by the Prime Minister neatly complements the third major move forward - the reforms that we have made to the system of departmental select committees. The changes that were agreed last week provide the Select Committees with specialist staff, administrative help, and the lead role in scrutinising draft legislation in advance of it being laid before the Commons. This package of measures will significantly strengthen their ability to hold ministers to account and adds up to the most important set of changes to the Select Committee system since departmental committees were introduced twenty years ago.

The fourth item of evidence, which I produce of progress in the health of Parliament, is the recent announcement to make the Parliamentary Lobby more transparent and open not only to journalists with membership of the exclusive club. It’s a bold task to take on the parliamentary Lobby.

But I found the following reaction of one of the doyens of the Lobby rather extravagant, when he wrote last Friday:

“The Lobby is doomed. Alistair has sentenced us to a slow death by openness and transparency.”

As openness and transparency is what the media are forever urging on everyone else, especially on Government, I am perplexed that members of the Lobby should feel so threatened when this is demanded of themselves. It must be right in a modern democracy for the public to be able to see on the record the morning briefing by the Government and not have it mediated through a small privileged group who have the select credentials. It cannot be right that specialist journalists who are experts in the story of the day are prevented from attending or putting their questions.

Fifthly, and lastly, I can confirm that we are making good progress in the Modernisation Committee on the agenda for modernisation which I published in December and which set out my programme for reform. I would like, if I may, to dwell on my ambitions for that.

I want to see more Government Bills published first in draft. The truth is that by the time both parties have wheeled their heavy artillery up to the despatch box for the set piece exchanges at Second Reading, the battle lines have been drawn too firmly to allow much rethinking. If we want Parliament really to shape the character of legislation, it must get in on the act much earlier at the time of a draft Bill.

I want a mechanism to permit the carry-over of a Bill from one parliamentary year to the next, to allow a longer time for Parliament to carry out scrutiny. The present situation prescribes that every Bill must finish in November or perish with the winter frost. Leaders of the House will always be forced to rush legislation through Parliament. If we want longer to consider legislation, we have to allow Parliament to carry Bills from one session to the next.

I want an earlier start to the Parliamentary day, so that we rescue the key events in Parliament, such as ministerial statements or opening speeches in the main debate, from their relative obscurity in the late afternoon slot, and rescue the key votes in Parliament from the late evening, when it is too late for even the last bulletins.

I want more flexible procedures so that exchanges in the Chamber can be more topical. If we had wanted to prevent the Commons from being topical, we could not have come up with a more clever barrier than requiring a fortnight’s notice of any oral Question. For instance, during the recent fighting in Jenin it was not in order for MPs to raise that crisis at Foreign Office Questions, because the Israeli incursion had taken place after the close of tabling of oral Questions two weeks before.

And I want to see a Parliament also that is more accessible to the public and more welcoming to the British visitor or, as we call them rather quaintly “strangers”. At last we are making some progress. A feasibility study has been commissioned into an interpretative Visitor Centre. We have just agreed on professional training for House of Commons guides with a view to ensuring that the visitor does not just get an appreciation of the history and architecture of Westminster, but gets also some sense of Parliament as a working institution at the heart of our democracy. I would tribute to the Hansard Society, in particular yourself Richard (Holme), for their persistent badgering to get Parliament to take full advantage of the immense asset that our building represents and the great opportunity that a visit to it provides for education in citizenship.

Of course, change is not always easy; change will always have its opponents. Any campaign of advance must expect the occasional rearguard action. And we encountered one last week when the House resolved not to put nominations to the Select Committees on a basis more independent of party control. I am encouraged that there was a majority for the reform among the Labour MPs who voted. The status quo was protected by a large majority of Conservative MPs.

A number of commentators have since expressed themselves baffled that when offered the chance to vote for greater parliamentary independence, the Commons voted against. There has been particular perplexity that Conservative MPs voted en masse to preserve the power of the Government Whips.

The explanation of that phenomenon lies in the duality of the MP’s role. We are all parliamentarians, but we are also all party politicians. We are deeply ambivalent as to whether we want Parliament reaching independent decisions, or whether we want our Party securing its own agenda.

I will be perfectly frank; I am as deeply torn by this duality as the next man is. As an Opposition spokesman I took no prisoners. I have been a loyal member of my Party since I was a teenager and I will go to my grave clutching my Party membership card as previous generations went to their grave clutching their sword as their most precious possession. So, I fully understand the pull of tribal instincts because I also am a member of the tribe.

However, as Leader of the House, I have come to recognise that the tribal character of party politics may now be a trap for Parliament. The world outside Parliament has changed. When I first canvassed for the Party at 19, when you discovered a Labour voter, you knew the probability was that everyone in the household was Labour. Even more comfortingly, when you went back 4 years later on, you knew they would all still be Labour.

Today you never know how they will be voting at the next General Election. Moreover, many of those who commit themselves to one or other major party are not necessarily buying in to all the Party’s portmanteau of policies.

This is entirely healthy. It is good for democracy that electors reserve the right to change their minds from one election to the next, and reserve the right to think for themselves, whatever their party is telling them.

The challenge to the Commons is whether we can adjust to the less tribal society, which we are supposed to represent. And it is a real challenge. We may know that the public outside want to see a Commons that is more concerned with the public interest than with scoring party political advantage. But we also know that what we will get reported in the media is not the serious, and mildly boring, business of scrutinising social policy. What we will get reported in the media is a good bout of party political mud wrestling. We are stuck with the conundrum that we cannot restore respect for Parliament without airtime, but we cannot get the airtime without displays of the partisan aggression that in the long-term lowers respect for the Parliament.

When I first came to Parliament in 1974 there was only one BBC microphone within half a mile of the Chamber. It was literally in a garden shed attached to Abbey Gardens. The place is now awash with microphones and cameras. There are now thirty accredited BBC journalists. I am sure they all work jolly hard and many of them are extremely likeable people. Nevertheless, Parliament was more often in the bulletins thirty years ago, when we had one BBC microphone, than it is today when we have thirty BBC reporters.

I don’t wish to single out the BBC for the present ambiguous relationship between Parliament and the media. The print media must also accept their responsibility, especially the allegedly serious print media. Every nation has its version of the tabloid press. What makes Britain unique is that our broadsheet press now faithfully tracks the agenda of the tabloid press. Politics is reported as a soap opera of personality conflict, which puts the spotlight on the process of decision-making by these personalities rather than the outcome of policies for the nation. This makes it difficult for the press to cover serious social issues.

There have been major breakthroughs in the past five years on matters that worry real people. For instance, the virtual abolition of long-term youth unemployment is one of the largest dividing lines between the history of the eighties and the record of this Government. It is also the largest single explanation of the 20 per cent reduction in overall crime. Yet, it has gone virtually unremarked in the media. Both press and Parliament now are handicapped by a culture of political reporting that is too introverted and too little about what is going on in the lives of readers and electors.

One of new Labour’s great achievements is that it has put the patient and the pupil first and freed public services from capture by producer interests. But this lesson has yet to be learnt at Westminster, where reporting is still dominated by producer capture.

Political reporting reinforces the public impression of a self-preoccupied “Westminster village”. It is dominated by the issues about which Lobby journalists and MPs like to gossip to the exclusion of the issues, which are pressing upon the lives of the public beyond Parliament Square. Jonathan Freedland pointed out recently that, if newspapers were edited by plumbers, they would give prominence to disasters about blocked drains and street floods. As they are edited by journalists, they give prominence to stories about spin-doctors and press officers.

That is why the media lovingly detailed every twist, every email, and every phone call about which day and at what hour Martin Sixsmith resigned. It is strange that a media, which keeps offering itself as an example of a highly competitive industry, is so blind to the real interests of the market. On the night in February when the media was preoccupied with Stephen Byers’ statement on Martin Sixsmith’s resignation, BBC bulletins beyond London and the South East had their lowest ratings for a year.

The viewers are literally switching off media stories of the Westminster village. The risk is that the public then also start to switch off from democracy.

Philip Gould observed last week that the ratio of negative to positive media stories has increased from 3:1 in 1974 to 18:1 in 2001. Is it any wonder that we have difficulty in restoring faith in democracy as a successful process, if the outcome of the process is only reported in terms of failure?

But the need to repair popular faith in democracy is underlined by the gathering strength on the continent of Far Right extremist parties, which are intolerant, authoritarian and fundamentally anti-democratic. Let’s keep the problem in proportion. Everywhere they remain a minority of less than one-fifth of the total vote. It is not a common European movement; it is different in every nation. But the emergence of the Far Right from the further lunatic extremes poses sharp questions to democratic politicians everywhere and challenges our conventional way of doing politics.

For example, our concept of political dynamics is rooted in a century of struggle between Left and Right, and that concept remains a valid short hand for the choice between the major parties in most European countries. But increasingly the choice, which the electorate is making, is between establishment and populism. Parties of the far Right are currently thriving by picking up the growing “none of the above” vote. The challenge for responsible democratic government is to be in power, but not to become trapped in the establishment.

Since Maynard Keynes convinced the opinion formers of his time that government was responsible for the state of the economy, political parties have put economic management at the top of their sales pitch. Only a decade ago Clinton built its entire campaign on the maxim “it’s the economy, stupid”. Yet the challenge we have seen recently from the Far Right is not based on discontent with the economy. A government of the Centre Left in the Netherlands has just been put out of office by a dramatic rise in the vote for the Far Right, despite a prosperous economy, in which GDP has grown by 25 per cent within a decade. Mainstream politicians need to find progressive and inclusive solutions to the new politics of which the Far Right feed – the politics of insecurity and belonging which authoritarian parties now exploit as fear of crime and hostility to different people.

There is another lesson to be absorbed and reflected upon. In the past generation we have become accustomed to the electoral battleground being waged for the centre, where live Mondeo Man, Worcester Woman, and all the rest of the pebbledash People. This fixation has been particularly acute in Britain because our idiosyncratic electoral system ensures that these crucial swing electors are the only ones whose votes really count. Yet the message from the Continent is that the struggle for the centre voter is no longer the only contest in town. Continental parties of the left have seen their core voters go straight to the Far Right without stopping off in the centre. We need to adjust to a different electoral environment, possibly more healthy electoral environment, in which those competitions are for the vote of every community not just the centrist voters.

We also need to recognise the impact on domestic politics of globalised economics. Globalisation has been great for those with internationally marketable skills. They have seen the price of their labour bid up in the much wider market place. It has not been so great for unskilled workers who have found themselves in direct competition with cheaper labour anywhere on the face of the globe.

Perhaps one of the reasons why we have been more successful in Britain in keeping the Far Right in check, has been the vigorous programme we have pursued to widen access to education and skills and to promote social justice. Despite these pressures of globalisation, we have ensured over the past five years that the bottom decile of income earners has received the same percentage increase as the top decile, contrasting vividly with the outcome of the Thatcher years when they got a beggarly one-thirtieth of the top decile.

The most profound challenge of all is how do we bridge the gap between politicians and people, and build a shared reality understood by both.

The most brilliant and at the same time the most depressing political tract which I have read in the past year is the monograph by Colin Crouch on Coping with Post Democracy. His central thesis is that mass democracy reached its zenith in the mid-twentieth century, and has been on a descending parabola ever since. Politics is now seen to be the property of a political class. It is not seen as the product of a mass movement or under ownership of the people.

The bigger the gulf between electors and elected, the greater my problem - everybody else’s problem - in maintaining consensus around Parliamentary democracy as the remedy. The problem is particularly acute among younger voters. Although they are better educated, better informed, and on the whole have a better financial stake in society than previous generations, younger voters had an even worse turnout at the General Election than the rest of the population. The recent BBC research into public disillusionment came to the depressing conclusion that there was a collective sense of pride among the third of the population that did not vote. We are in danger of it being seen as not cool to vote in parliamentary elections.

Those of you who will recall that I began by saying that I am in an optimistic mood must now be asking how then do we get back to the optimism with which I started?

We can begin to recover that optimism by recognising that democratic ballots are still enthusiastically embraced when people believe that their opinions make a difference on issues, which directly affect them. There have now been a string of ballots with a high turnout as a result of our initiatives on New Deal Communities. From Sheffield to Bristol, the turnout has exceeded 50 per cent, and the turnout in Sheffield was exactly double the previous local government turnout. These are turnouts in ballots in deprived communities, which normally have the worst turnouts.

Over the past year there have been 26 ballots on the transfer of municipal housing. The average turnout is a staggering 69 per cent, which would be a highly respectable figure for any General Election. Both in Birmingham and Glasgow there was a 65 per cent turnout. This contrasts with a lower turnout in those cities for General Elections, local elections and, in the case of Glasgow, for the first election to the Scottish Parliament.

There is hope here. People will vote if they believe that the ballot is part of an empowering process. There is no single, simple stroke by which Parliament can make elections to it appear equally relevant. But there are three steps, which I want to leave with you, which must be part of anyone’s package.

Firstly, MPs must be given space to respond to events as human beings rather than as programmed politicians. We need to try to be less tribal and more individualist in our approach to political debate. Pager politics belongs to the era of collectivism and the command economy of half a century ago. In the consumerist and lifestyle age, in which younger voters inhabit respect goes to personalised responses, rather than to party mantras.

Secondly, if we are to do that, the media need to resist pouncing on the least spark of originality from an MP as a gaffe, or running off to find another MP of the same party to denounce it. No MP will show a spark of originality if we are left living in terror that it will be turned into a conflagration of headlines on party splits. Mature and honest debate requires a media that is equally mature and balanced.

Thirdly, the Commons, if it wants to be seen as relevant, must be seen to belong to the modern age. It has been unkindly described by one commentator as “Hogwarts-on-Thames”. I could not possibly comment. But I do know that our language often appears jargon and our customs Victorian. We need a bonfire of those little pink ribbons, which each of us are given on election, and on which to hang our swords, and a determined attempt to look and sound as if we belong to the same century as our electors.

Policy: 020 8880 6088 policy@charter88.org.uk