Conventional politicians love referring to unconventional ones as "swivel-eyed". They mean anyone who breaks ranks or appears to take a stand on a point of principle. The adjective is particularly applied to any MP who takes a persistent interest in a single subject – Europe, say, or tax reform or the poverty trap. Such interest, after all, gets in the way of self-advancement.
Douglas Carswell, the Conservative Member for Harwich, is a classic example of the genre. Although his eyes do not, in fact, swivel, he does look slightly odd. He is tall and thin and gangly, with a very powerful jaw. He is uncomfortable and serious, rather like the sort of crank who stalks the streets carrying plastic bags bursting with documents which prove that UFOs are beaming radiation into the water supply. His weird idea is that voters should be able to make MPs genuinely answerable to them. For this reason, many of his colleagues regard him as a lunatic.
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But these are strange times. In the expenses scandal, conventional politicians are made to look fools or knaves. Jacqui Smith, the former Home Secretary, is a purely conventional politician, of the Blair Babe variety. This week, she made a half-apology to the House of Commons for having designated what was clearly her second home (a lodging with her sister in south London) as her first – in unparliamentary English, she cheated. She is finished, although the conventions established by the conventional politicians will ensure her an undeservedly long political afterlife.
Mr Carswell, on the other hand, is just getting started. It was he, to much tut-tutting from his seniors, who put down the motion of no-confidence in Mr Speaker Martin this summer. He set something in train. Eventually, Mr Martin had to go.
This week, on the same day, by piquant chance, that one Baron Martin of Springburn was being elevated to the Lords, Mr Carswell rose in the Commons to introduce his Ten-Minute Rule Bill. He began by asking MPs to remember when they were first elected, the moment "…when we heard the returning officer read out our names". "Most Hon. Members felt in their bones," he went on, "that entering the House was one of the greatest and most exalted moments in their lives, yet today we find ourselves scorned". The loss of public respect is so great that "In a reversal of 300 years of democratic development, the very fact of being elected to public office is sometimes… regarded as a disqualification".
The Carswell solution is not to submit MPs to ever greater tortures at the hands of unelected people like Sir Thomas Legg, but to send them back to face the electors. He wants candidates to be chosen by open primaries of all constituents, rather than by party caucuses. MPs found guilty of serious wrongdoing would be subject to "recall" (in effect, a by-election) by their constituents if a decent percentage of them petitioned for it. Under our current system, Mr Carswell points out, roughly 70 per cent of seats are safe for the party holding them, so the Member, once elected, can relax. Under the Carswell rules, there will be no such a thing as a safe seat.
If this is "swivel-eyed", it is preferable to the conventional blindness. Mr Carswell sees clearly a point which is missed both by most of those who excoriate our MPs and most of those struggling to defend them. Attempts to regulate MPs by an external authority will prove an utter disaster, because they set that authority above the people we ourselves choose to make our laws. It therefore replaces parliamentary democracy by the rule of minister, judge or bureaucrat.
Every recent scheme – state funding for political parties, control of "second jobs" for MPs, Gordon Brown's invention of an Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, even the establishment of a Supreme Court separate from the House of Lords – is guilty of the same error. We entrench more and more "scrutiny", but what we are creating is a quango state.
On the other hand, no voter, at present, will listen to another word from MPs about their right to supply their own pay and rations, because they have collectively, blatantly abused that right. The only items that we, the public, are now prepared to permit under the Additional Costs Allowance are sackcloth and ashes. So something like what Mr Carswell wants is the only way forward.
I keep asking myself how all this has come about. How is it that a Parliamentary system which really was the envy of the world even only a generation ago is now the butt of its jokes? I think I have a possible explanation.
For a hundred years, the great issue which Parliament debated most often was the franchise. Who should be allowed to elect MPs? From the Great Reform Bill of 1832 until the final admission of all women as voters in 1928, this argument raged. It made MPs super-conscious of the people who put them into Parliament, since they kept on debating who those people should be. And it made the public feel that the right to vote really mattered.
With these battles won, people felt satisfied, for the time being. But after the Second World War, politicians began to take advantage. With their legitimacy uncontested, they made things more comfortable for themselves. MPs forgot that their House was esteemed because it genuinely made the laws for the people it represented, and so they transferred much of that right to Europe.
Having handed over their birthright, MPs then focused on their mess of pottage. Individual offices, more paid advisers, bigger pensions, shorter hours, second homes, free ginger-crinkle biscuits! It is not a coincidence that Tony Blair, the first prime minister in our history ever to show consistent contempt for the House of Commons, was also the first to make the hand-outs really gargantuan.
In the party conference season which has just finished, little bits of this subject came up. David Cameron, in particular, was specific about one or two tough things which he wanted to apply in the next Parliament, such as an end to the MPs' pension scandal. But the mood in all the leaderships was that they wanted to "move on". They are avoiding plans for real reform. They should be reverting to Prime Minister's Questions twice a week, relinquishing government control of parliamentary business, providing for referendums. But of course they do not want to strengthen Parliament against the executive which they themselves hope to lead.
All the parties are fighting the next election on the old assumption that whoever wins will have the necessary mandate to govern from the British people. It is true that a fresh Parliament will automatically be less shameful than this one. But will that be enough? Isn't public disillusionment more radical? Conventional politics has been failing for 40 years: time for something more swivel-eyed.
The state of parliamentary democracy in the UK.
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Originally Posted by rory_20_uk
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