Politicians need to change their ways rather more than they need to change the voting system, argues Jon Craig
The new politics? Don’t make me laugh. The politicians who aspire to lead their parties into the next general are all proposing constitutional reform and changes to the voting system.
Constitutional renewal: that was what Gordon Brown promised just a few days after Labour’s electoral humiliation. He’s trying to fix the election rules before the next election, claimed David Cameron.
The Tory leader also said the election of two BNP MEPs was a very strong argument against proportional representation. I’d certainly agree with that. First past the post may not be flawless, but at least it prevents BNP MPs being elected to Westminster.
But the claims by the party leaders to be serious about change, a new politics or reform of the political system are bogus. They are nothing more than an attempt to create a diversion from Westminster’s expenses scandal.
I almost choked on my cornflakes when I heard Gordon Brown say a few weeks ago on the Andrew Marr Show: “What I have seen offends my Presbyterian conscience.” This is a man who paid his brother £6,000 for “cleaning services”, put a London flat in his wife’s name and switched his house in Scotland to his second home when he became Prime Minister.
And yet when I asked him in a Sky News interview to explain the cleaning arrangement, he accused me of challenging his integrity. I wasn’t, actually, Gordon. I was just asking you to explain the deal.
The Prime Minister has now told MPs that we are to have a “constitutional reform bill”, which will include a statutory code of conduct for MPs. He has also set up a “national democratic council”, which in reality is just a group of ministers meeting inside Number 10.
I’m not normally a big fan of the Electoral Reform Society, but I did chuckle when I read that its chief executive, Ken Ritchie, dismissed this new body as a “Soviet talking shop”. I’m not sure about “Soviet”, but he’s right about this quango being just another talking shop.
Meanwhile, Alan Johnson, the cheeky chappie with the wit and laid-back demeanour that terrifies the Tories, wants a national referendum on electoral reform. I can just see that enthralling the nation in the way television viewers were gripped by Britain’s Got Talent.
Johnson wrote in The Times that “a root-and-branch examination” of the political system was needed to regain trust. “We need to overhaul the engine, not just clean the upholstery.” He favours alternative vote-plus, the system proposed by an independent commission on electoral reform appointed by Tony Blair and led by Roy Jenkins in 1998. Please try to stay awake. Under AV-plus, voters get two ballot papers: one for an MP representing their constituency and a second for their favoured political party. Please stop yawning. Johnson also wants to look at fixed-term parliaments, reform of the House of Lords and more power for Parliament over the executive. It’s all very worthy. But is that the basis for Labour MPs dumping Gordon and installing Al as leader?
Which brings us to the other alternative Prime Minister, David Cameron. He agrees with Johnson about fixed-term parliaments. (So do I, as it happens.) But writing in The Guardian’s “New Politics” series, Cameron dismissed Johnson’s call for electoral reform.
“Proportional representation takes power away from the man and woman in the street and hands it to the political elite. Instead of voters choosing their government on the basis of the manifestos put before them in an election, party managers would choose a government on the basis of secret backroom deals.”
I’m with Cameron on that argument. Where his pretence to be a champion of “new politics” collapses, however, is his appalling shunning of mainstream European conservatives such as Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy and getting into bed with a bunch of anti-gay climate change deniers on the far-right fringe of European Union politics.
Here’s a prediction: Cameron will live to rue the day he bought the votes of the right-wing Cornerstone Group of Conservative MPs in the 2005 Tory leadership election with a cynical pledge for short-term gain by ditching two decades of co-operation with the centre-right European People’s Party.
New politics? New, certainly. But very bad politics. Even Margaret Thatcher never made such a barmy, isolationist move.
And Nick Clegg’s recipe for new politics? At least he seems to understand that sorting out the Westminster expenses scandal is the most urgent priority, even though I’m not sure I go along with his “100-day action plan”.
In The Guardian’s “New Politics” series, Clegg wrote: “Let us bar the gates of Westminster and stop MPs leaving for their summer holidays until this crisis has been sorted out”. He advocated “making it possible for MPs to be sacked by their constituents, abolishing the House of Lords, getting corrupt money out of politics and changing the electoral system to give a voice to everyone”.
Although I’d like a summer holiday, Clegg’s first three proposals are fine. But the fourth? Why do so many political leaders think that changing the voting system from first past the post to proportional representation will clean up the system?
Forget it, guys. Changing the voting system won’t clean up Parliament or bring about a new politics. Just get your MPs to stop “flipping”, dodging capital gains tax and claiming taxpayers’ money for phantom mortgages, swimming pools and so on, and generally milking the expenses system. Then we might start to believe you about a new politics.
Jon Craig is chief political correspondent of Sky News.
