In the days after the murder of Jo Cox, members of parliament became human again. Suddenly our parliamentarians were capable of compassion, of caring deeply about their local community. Suddenly they were frail and vulnerable like the rest of us. But this became forgotten as the tragic news of Jo Cox’s death faded from the headlines and MPs went back to being seen by many people as a homogenous, self-interested elite. Over the years, MPs have helped contribute to this impression, notably over the expenses scandal. However enduring and wholesale contempt for parliament has worrying consequences. There is an enormous danger that the disengagement between voters and parliamentary democracy, leaves a vacuum for populists from both the left and right to fill.
The expenses scandal which first broke in 2009, channelled a rising tide of general anti-establishment sentiment into a concentrated outpouring of contempt towards MPs in particular. But seven years later, there does not seem any way to get past this. The work of many dedicated and honest MPs – including Jo Cox – has done nothing to ameliorate the widespread impression that they are all essentially liars and cheats.
This matters because representative democracy cannot function without trust. The parliamentary system deliberately places responsibility for decision making in the hands of an individual MP without necessarily obliging them to follow a party line or the majority view of their constituents. When party, constituency and individual conscience speak with different voices then the electorate needs to believe that the decision to choose one over the other is being made in good faith.
But rebuilding trust requires engagement from both sides. My sense is that a substantial part of the electorate are not interested in forgiving or forgetting, because they are simply not that interested full stop. In the context of a fragmented, internet-dominated world where “top-down” structures are becoming less relevant, there is something anachronistic about handing over all our decision making powers to a tiny group of people who sit around in a neo-Gothic palace, braying at each other. Yet the irony is that MPs are now more accessible than they have ever been. You can get in contact with them whilst sitting on the top deck of a bus, virtually all MPs email newsletters to constituents, the vast majority have Twitter accounts; it is easy to find out what your representative is up to and to ask them why they make the decisions they make. Parliament should not be ‘top down’ because ultimately MPs work for us, but unless we choose to have a relationship with them, we cannot trust this is true.
On top of all this there is a belief, apparently shared by some parliamentarians, that even honest MPs cannot achieve very much. Clive Lewis wrote recently that ‘[parliamentary democracy] worked when MPs and the central state could make the political weather. Increasingly, we cannot. Increasingly, power is both global and local, with corporations and citizens – not with MPs.’ It is true that supra-national entities are wielding more and more power, but it does not follow that national governments are therefore impotent. Changes in healthcare, education, the level of taxation, the level of benefits, the response to security threats, the protection of the environment – all of which are in the hands of national government, quite obviously have an enormous impact. Meanwhile if local issues are more important to some people, then involvement in any campaign which seeks a substantive outcome, will almost inevitably mean engaging with elected representatives whether at council or parliamentary level in order to actually effect change.
The nihilistic idea that ordinary people are powerless because MPs are self-interested and in any case cannot really change things, is one that populists of both left and right seek to encourage and exploit. In place of parliamentary democracy, populism relies on the simple message that all problems will be solved by defeating a particular enemy. A selection of currently available ‘enemies’ include bankers, immigrants, Blairites, benefit claimants and European Union bureaucrats. Populism is dangerous, firstly because it is so divisive. It treats opponents as if they are a kind of cancerous tumour that needs to be excised, rather than real, complex people whose opinions and actions may very well be wrong, but who often have genuine reasons for doing what they do. The second danger comes from raising expectations that cannot be fulfilled; the simplistic answers that populism provides are never the panacea that they are sold as. Whipping up resentment and then disappointing the people you have encouraged to be angry seems like an obviously bad idea.
Parliament exists to give representation to all parts of the country and all parts of society. Clearly it often fails in this and the current system may well be in need of reform, but it is still surely better to have this as an ambition rather than to have division and conflict as your goal. That messy, unsatisfying compromises often come out of this process is a reflection of the fact that governing a country of 65 million people, all of whom have different opinions, ideas and outlooks on life is difficult. Right now we need to decide whether we want to go on trying to be a ‘United Kingdom’, by supporting a political system which has the potential to engage everyone in the country whether we agree with them or not. Or whether we want to believe in the easy, but divisive promises of the populists.
———————————
Christabel Cooper writes a regular column on the Progress website
———————————