Received wisdom says the five years I spent as a lobby correspondent, from 1999 to 2004, were a barren period for parliament. Labour had such a big majority, so the argument goes, that the Commons became an irrelevance. There may have been a grain of truth in it. I didn’t witness the chaos of John Major’s final years. I never saw a government properly defeated in the Commons. But I did see three Tory leaders, three wars, and the government majority cut to five over tuition fees. And more than any of that, I saw Robin Cook’s resignation speech.
As I watched from my seat in the press gallery, I felt a poignancy I had never experienced before. The timing on the eve of the war in Iraq, and the significance of a man prepared to give up so much on a point of principle, played their part in making it such an electrifying spectacle.
Most of all, I thought the speech encapsulated the case against the war with such clarity, force and passion that I could not understand how anyone could listen to it and still support the conflict.
Of course, by the time Cook quit the cabinet he had already been demoted to commons leader. In his final job he made changes to improve the democracy and openness of parliament but he didn’t quite manage to create an elected second chamber. And MPs later partially reversed his modernisation of working hours. But I expect that in decades to come, his view on both matters will prevail.
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Charter 88 has produced some fascinating facts and figures regarding another of Cook’s causes, proportional representation. The lobby group’s number-crunchers have scored every MP for what share of the local electorate turned out to vote for them.
The results are not a pretty picture. No MP scored higher than 50 per cent at this year’s election. Ironically, the MP who fares worst is a Lib Dem: Lorely Burt, who captured marginal Solihull with only 16 per cent support. Among the Labour ranks, two MPs score under 20 per cent – Ann McKechin in Glasgow Maryhill and Roger Godsiff in Birmingham Sparkbrook and Small Heath. Only one weighs in above 40 per cent – Chris Bryant in Rhondda.
But what does any of this mean? Charter 88 says the fact that it took 27,000 voters to elect a Labour MP but 44,000 to elect a Tory proves that ‘some voters are more equal than others’. In fact, it proves that in Labour’s innercity and industrial heartland, many voters feel too dispossessed or downtrodden to have much faith in any political party. Yet the MP elected in such an area must represent all local voters, of all political opinions and none – and with more casework than their counterpart in a Tory shire.
Switching to a system that lumps innercities in with shires, and that awards seats in proportion to votes cast, would effectively give the well-to-do areas greater weighting in parliament, disenfranchising the most vulnerable. Some variants of PR have this weakness, some don’t. If we do ever adopt PR, we must avoid the pitfall that Charter 88 has fallen into.
According to polls, two-thirds of voters believe the Iraq war was a key cause of the London bombings, even if Tony Blair doesn’t agree. I put it to a cabinet minister that surely, if some young British Muslims feel angry enough to attack their own country, Iraq must be at the top of their minds? The minister said, well, al-Qaeda was active before Iraq. September 11 happened before Iraq. And anyway, nothing can justify terrorism.
No one is saying terrorism is justified. The two-thirds of the public who blame Iraq aren’t saying they wanted an atrocity in London. They are just saying that the war made one more likely.