This week’s launch of Ken Clarke’s Democracy Task Force paper on parliamentary reform will go some way to dispelling the myth that Cameron’s Conservatives are policy-lite. As the rest of the policy groups prepare to announce their conclusions over the next seven weeks they will give the Party a much needed fillip after the dark days of ‘grammargeddon’.
David Cameron has returned from his week long sojourn in Crete and hit the ground running. At the Democracy task Force launch he looked genuinely excited by the policy proposals Clarke has produced. Indeed, he seemed far more enthused than Ken Clarke himself.
The policy ideas they were announcing were a genuine attempt to find ways of modernising the way parliament operates and to re-engage people with the political process. Good luck to them. This is a well trodden path where success has so far eluded those who have tried to reform the system.
The headline proposal is to take the Downing Street e-petitions one stage further and experiment with what has come to be known as ‘direct democracy’. The current petitions are meaningless as they have no conclusion. Not even the Prime Minister is told which of them have attracted the most support each week.
The Tory suggestion is that if an e-petition gets a certain number of signatures it would then be debated in Parliament and voted on. In itself this doesn’t seem a very radical idea but to the adherents of the Burkian theory of representative democracy it is a red rag to a bull.
Members of Parliament jealously guard their representative rights. The basic tenets of representative democracy still hold true today, but in an age when technology enables the people to have a direct say, surely we should all be looking at different ways to engage people in the political process, rather than just allowing them a vote once every five years. That’s the message David Cameron will be projecting. He sees this as the most important part of the Clarke Task Force and wants to see the idea fleshed out over the next few months.
There are, of course, obvious dangers in such petitions. They can be hijacked by vested interests or the mad, the bad or the sad, so some sort of policing filter will have to be imposed. But petitions date back to the days of the slave trade and it is somehow fitting that in the year of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of that vile trade, the tradition of petitioning Parliament is being revived.
Another idea, not discussed by Ken Clarke, which could also enhance the role of backbench MPs and parliamentary debate, is to allow the Early Day Motions with the most signatures in any given each week to have an hour long debate in Westminster Hall. Early Day Motions are commonly described as graffiti on the walls of Parliament. If people really thought they could lead to a meaningful debate they might then lobby their MPs to ensure that a particular EDM is debated.
There is a misconception that MPs in all parties behave like sheep and do the whips’ bidding. Philip Cowley’s research on the www.revolts.co.uk website shows that the 2001-2005 parliament was the most rebellious in post-war history – and this one is currently on course to beat it. Contrary to what people think, the power and influence of the whips is on the wane. There is little doubt that the Clarke proposals will hasten this trend, particularly in the area of Select Committees.
Ken Clarke proposes that whips should lose their powers of patronage over Select Committees and that Select Committee chairmen should be elected by MPs. This will give them greater legitimacy and independence and provide an alternative career path for those MPs not suited to being Ministers.
The most important of the Clarke proposals is to weaken the power of the Executive over the Legislature, but they could go further. While the proposal for the Prime Minister to appear twice as often before the Liaison Committee is a good one, a more symbolic proposal would have been to restore Prime Minister’s Question Time to a twice weekly format. It’s something everyone would understand, yet I understand from a source close to David Cameron that such a move has been ruled out. This is a pity.
In the coming weeks three more policy commissions will be releasing their findings. Some commentators are already saying that it’s dangerous to do this as it will provide Gordon Brown with an opportunity to cherry pick and to deploy the ‘Great Clunking Fist’. This is a misjudgement and political commentators cannot have it both ways. They cannot complain at the lack of policy and then advise Cameron to wait a little longer before coming out with policy proposals for fear of what Brown might do.
We are about to move into a new political era in which the Conservatives will be having a conversation with the nation while Gordon Brown retreats to the only thing he knows – adversarial politics. We’ll see who is most in tune with the electorate.
