Having been pitted in combat against each other at last month’s Prospect thinktank of the year awards, the inhabitants of wonk world have been putting on an impressive display of unity in recent weeks. Maybe it’s the Christmas spirit. Seven thinktanks, many of whom would not usually agree on just about anything, published a joint pamphlet on how to reform parliament in the wake of the expenses scandal.
Led by the ippr, A Future for Politics – Ways to reform our Political System – featuring contributions from Centre Forum, Demos, the Fabian Society, Policy Exchange, Progress and Reform – came out the same week that the Kelly committee published its recommendations on how to clean up parliament.
‘Although the thinktanks which have contributed to this book have different views on many issues, for all of us, politics matter,’ said ippr co-director Carey Oppenheim. ‘There is an impressive level of agreement among us as to the importance of real political reform and as to the shape it should take. Cleaning up expenses and clearing out errant MPs is not nearly enough to address the crisis that has engulfed politics in the UK.’
Centre Forum’s Julian Astle and Alisdair Murray adopted a measured tone, arguing that ‘…it is important to remember that the majority of MPs embroiled in the expenses scandal did not actually break the rules,’ but instead colluded in a ‘system so lax and so opaque that, more often than not, the rules did not need to be broken’. Reforming politics, therefore, requires focusing on changing the system, rather than the people working within it.
‘The most pertinent question to ask in the wake of the expenses scandal is not “how can we restore trust in parliament and our representatives?” but “how can we give citizens more control and oversight over parliament and their representatives?”‘, wrote Demos’s Dan Leighton, who claimed the real issue at stake was ‘how we decentralise power or increase participation in decisionmaking, so that citizens can hold their representatives to account for decisions they have already made, rather than those they promise to undertake’.
Fabian general secretary Sunder Katwala, in somewhat despondent mood, observed that ‘the spirit of democratic renewal has been somewhat doused by what has turned into a Whitehall tidying up exercise, with little to excite the most engaged reform anorak, still less to send great swathes of the disengaged rushing back to a ballot box near you’.
Policy Exchange’s Neil O’Brien, meanwhile, laid much of the blame squarely at the feet of a political class that the public feels ‘speaks its own language, does not tell the truth, does not understand their problems, looks after its own and (in recent years) has become rather too free and easy about spending the public’s money’. The root causes of the voters’ disdain, O’Brien argued, was the weakening of the party system and ‘the fact that power is increasingly not in the hands of local people who the public can influence, but instead invested in international bodies, the courts and remote quangos’.
Jessica Asato, of this parish, argued that it was time the political class stopped dragging its feet over reform. ‘What is required in the next six months is for politics to be turned on its head and for politicians to accept that only radical changes will help to restore some of the lost trust, not just from the expenses crisis, but from the last few decades’.