Tag: Liberal Democrats

Lords in limbo: apply the Salisbury Convention in spirit as well as letter, please

Lords reform has been fairly heavily trailed for some time now, and we’ve had a bit more confirmation that the White Paper is on the way in the past couple of days. I’ll be glad to see the Government make headway on this: despite the outcome of the AV referendum, Lords reform has been a longstanding commitment from politicians of all parties and the evidence has always been pretty clear that a majority of the public believe our second chamber should be (at least predominantly) elected.

Personally, I think this really should be a fairly cut-and-dried issue. Members of the House of Lords are not primarily independent experts, sources of warnings or nods to tradition. These are all understandable things to want, and we ought to think much harder about how we integrate expertise into our legislative process, but they are not the primary role of the people who vote in the second chamber. They are, first and foremost, legislators – and legislators whose record of changing Bills and therefore policy is significant and growing. If we want expertise, we should make sure we have it in the right committees and the right debates for the right issues. (Could some experts even sit on Select Committees, in the Commons and in a new second chamber, as non-voting, co-opted members?)

The people who actually do make our laws should be democratically accountable. In an ideal world, therefore, we should finish up with nothing less than a 100% elected second chamber. I’m relatively relaxed about the finer points of STV versus open lists (lists where you can choose a candidate within a party list rather than just opting for a party): so long as it’s a proportional system where voters don’t just have to tick a party box, I’ll settle for it.

With regard to the likely plans to come from the Government: I’m not ecstatic about the idea of 15-year terms and I have fairly serious reservations about single terms – I think it’s an important principle that legislators should have to at least consider the possibility that they might want to face the electorate again, and if we’re serious about democracy then we have to accept that that requires accountability. Electing by thirds (or halves, or quarters) is sensible, though: our new Senate should be a more continuous body than the House of Commons, and a combination of PR and staggered elections would help to make sure it fits the bill. In terms of dealing with the current members of the Lords, I think an arrangement along the lines of the Cranborne deal might make sense – which would mean that we’d have 200 left in 2015, 100 left in 2020 and none by 2025 (when the full complement of Senators would have been elected).

But I’m enough of a pragmatist to understand that, if you want Lords reform at all, you can’t let the best be the enemy of the good. The fact that people haven’t recognised that is exactly why Lords reform hasn’t happened, even with a Labour government who said they wanted it in charge for 13 years. So if Nick Clegg can even secure an 80% elected second chamber, even with twelve voting bishops (though the latter will cause me real pain …) and even with all the other peers staying until 2025, then I’ll see that as a major step forwards and a real achievement. Of course, that depends on his Coalition partners voting it through. Whether the Conservatives will choose to live up to the spirit, as well as the letter, of the Coalition Agreement remains to be seen: if they choose not to, no doubt Liberal Democrats will feel even more betrayed than many of them do already.

The other question is how fiercely the House of Lords will resist being reformed. Everyone seems to agree that they will fight tooth and nail against reform. I do appreciate that, when people find themselves on the red benches, they have an uncanny knack of seeing the wisdom of allowing the nation to carry on benefiting from their wisdom. The Cross Benches’ reluctance is understandable, given that there would undoubtedly be pretty few (if any) of them in a 100% elected second chamber and that their role would inevitably be questioned in an 80% elected one. In any case, the difficulties the Lords could cause for reform, and for large areas of Government business, are very substantial indeed.

It’ll eventually be a question of whether the Coalition has the political will to push change through, whether peers like it or not. But one thing I really don’t understand is: on what basis do the Lords think they have any right to derail this legislation at all?  All three main party manifestos called for a wholly or mainly elected second chamber. All parties have been reasonably clear, with some wobbling from the Conservatives in the past, that the second chamber would need to be elected by some sort of proportional system. In 2005, both Conservatives and Liberal Democrats also called for a wholly or majority elected second chamber too.

It seems to me that, if a pledge won the support of both parties in the Coalition when they went to the country (as well as the Opposition and a number of the smaller parties), we have a pretty clear case of the Salisbury Convention in action. I can see why the Lords might query some Coalition compromises in that regard: no one got to vote for the Coalition Agreement. But on this one, I just can’t see where the ambiguity lies. It was proposed: it was in the manifestos: it’s now in the process of being turned into a White Paper, and hopefully a Bill. If there’s any defence, it’s surely of the most technical kind. Where exactly did the Salisbury Convention include a bit saying the Lords didn’t have to apply it to their own seats?

Immigration, political honesty and the limits of the possible

Despite being a leftist, I’m going to be fair-minded and make some kinder comments about David Cameron’s speech on immigration (initially). Firstly, he is of course entering into a legitimate debate about migration. While the question of asylum is separate, economic migration is a debatable good: it’s perfectly fair to ask how much migration is desirable and what the overall pros and cons are for Britain. Furthermore, Cameron was explicit that migrants can create jobs as well as filling them, taking on the idea that there’s some sort of lump sum of labour in an economy. And he did attempt to draw some key distinctions (e.g. about the speed of change, rather than necessarily the principle): this was not on a par with Michael Howard’s 2005 campaign.

The fact remains, though, that there are lots of straw men lurking in the speech. Anyone who’s listened to Jack Straw, David Blunkett or Phil Woolas will be a bit surprised to hear that the last Labour government gave the impression that it was racist to talk about immigration, for instance. Nor is it particularly helpful to claim that the government which brought in a points system promoted the view that any attempt to control immigration was madness. And was there really a ‘mass relativism’ about sham marriages? This isn’t on the scale of 2005, but there are still nasty undertones here – in the run-up to elections, at a time when the economy is in a grim state and voters are angry. Politicians who declaim loudly about how ‘we aren’t allowed to say anything about immigration’ are playing a dangerous game.

Cameron was also making dubious use of statistics at best. For a start, while looking at EU migration, he got his figures wrong. Long-term net EU immigration ran at 57,000 from June 2009 to June 2010, not 27,000. The choice of year was also misleading at best, at a time when there has been partial unwind of the post-2004 migration from eastern Europe. Note, I’m not complaining about that migration: but in this instance, Cameron is underplaying it in order to argue that his proposed cap will be effective when, in recent years, it would have usually had little effect. And by the way, if you’re worried about destabilisation and impacts on local services, net long-term migration is not the only possible concern: the ‘churn’ of migration, causing rapid fluctuations for councils, can also cause problems – not to mention internal migration within the UK.

The statistical details matter because the misuse of figures contributes to a wider argument: that we can meaningfully control immigration, in the sense of reliably determining a net total migration figure for the UK. For the purposes of this post, I’m going to sidestep my views on preferred migration levels (fluctuating depending on economic circumstances, but probably on the liberal end of the spectrum, if you’re interested). As a simple matter of fact, irrespective of what we’d like to do, it is not the case that we can control immigration. We can, perhaps, manage migration, in the sense of knowing (broadly) who’s coming in and making sure the system works better. But EU migration is a very large part of the whole, and we can’t restrict that (transitional controls on new members are just that – transitional). Free movement of labour is, rightly, central to the EU Single Market – and we can’t have one without the other. So economically, we haven’t got much alternative in terms of EU migration.

Furthermore, our borders are always going to be fairly porous: how could it be otherwise in a country with quite so many visa waiver agreements, for example? (And one of the biggest categories of overstayers is from those countries, by the way.) The fact that we have something like 400,000 illegal residents in the UK says something about the difficulty of enforcing border controls. I’m sure we can do a fair bit to make them more effective, but I also suspect that there is a direct relationship between how restrictive our overall policy is and how much illegal migration we end up with.

Ultimately, Britain is a small island near a bigger continent in a world of mass travel. We are lying to our voters if we pretend that immigration can be fundamentally controlled: or at least, controlled without unacceptable consequences in terms of civil liberties and day-to-day life. We can affect levels at the margins, we can monitor what’s happening, we can try and affect the drivers of demand for migration – beefing up HMRC’s minimum wage compliance would be a start. But if we’re being honest, that’s about it.

That is a very unpopular statement, but it’s also true – and an honest conversation about immigration will, at some point, have to include an admission of that basic fact. How do we go about admitting that migration is, in this sense, ‘out of control’ and unavoidably so?  And where should immigration policy go from that admission? I don’t have anything like a full answer. I suspect we probably have to talk about pull factors in the UK: has immigration been encouraged by low wages at the bottom of the labour market, making it more difficult for UK citizens to leave the benefit trap? Would a living wage mean more British citizens could fill jobs in Britain? Would greater regulation of the labour market – in at least some areas, some of the time – play a role? And should we be thinking about ways of harnessing some revenue from immigration (work permit fees, in particular) and investing it in training British citizens?  (The Liberal Democrats had a policy along these lines at one point.)

I’m sure there are other, better suggestions to be discussed: these are mainly starters for ten. But sometime, somehow, we need to have a more honest conversation about this – and stop pretending either that the establishment is conspiring to shut us all up or that we could buck the trend if we wanted to, if only we were a bit more competent. Because if we carry on arguing that migration levels can be reliably determined as a matter of political choice, and keep failing to deliver a given level of migration, more and more people will reasonably ask why we’re not delivering. And those answers could produce some ugly results.

Dear ministers: poverty generally means not having enough money

Yesterday’s furore over Nick Clegg’s former interns rather missed the bigger picture. Yes, it’s not on for MPs (Clegg is, in this respect, pretty typical) to hire de facto labour and not pay for it: equally, Jonny Medland’s tactics aren’t exactly edifying (it’s not as if he suffered from the experience). The Social Mobility Strategy seems to contain a number of reasonable-in-principle-but-less-than-earth-shattering initiatives, most of which have already been announced and some of which are new. Fair enough, to a point: all governments try to reframe a whole series of policy announcements from time to time, and goodness knows oppositions like to repackage old policies too. It’s worth pointing out that much of it rings hollow in the current climate (commitments to Sure Start would be a bit more plausible if Children’s Centres weren’t closing all over the country …), but few of us are going to argue against the general principle.

The Government’s Child Poverty Strategy was also published yesterday. Of course, it received much less attention: poor children are always of much less interest to the British press than who ends up interning for the Deputy PM. But a key strand running through it was a commitment to ‘broader’ definitions of poverty. This ‘broader’ definition seems to stretch through from access to health services to – you guessed it – social mobility and life chances. Frankly, the Government seems to be in serious danger of confusing the words ‘broader’ and ‘different’: throughout the document, we get references to opportunities, to generational cycles of poverty, to unfair educational outcomes – to anything, in fact, which avoids the question of whether poor families have enough money.

Perhaps I’m narrow-minded, but it seems to me that poverty has rather a lot to do with not having enough money. It’s all very well to say that poverty isn’t all about money or that poverty plus a pound doesn’t equal fairness (not a statement, I suspect, that anyone who finds themselves one pound above the poverty line would ever make) – but ultimately, if a family struggles to put decent meals on the table, it’s about money. If an unemployed parent can’t afford the transport to a job interview, it’s about money. Finding the money for school uniforms is a question of, well, money. Children whose parents can’t afford enough space for them to study in peace and quiet are struggling with their schoolwork because their parents don’t have enough money.

There’s a cynical conclusion to draw here, which has a large degree of truth to it. This Government needs to have targets which go broader – and longer-term – than the current set: it knows perfectly well that its chances of the current targets going in anything other than the wrong direction, fast, are vanishingly small. £18bn of welfare cuts will cut savagely into poor families’ incomes; Housing Benefit cuts will mean that many poor people will find themselves forced to give up jobs as they move out of their reach, one bus ride too many to sustain or one extra half hour too much to juggle with another job; closed Children’s Centres translate into parents who find it that much harder to stay in work. All in all, income-based targets which can be measured in 2015 are unlikely to hold much comfort for Cameron and Clegg.

But it isn’t just that. The Government doesn’t really believe that income poverty is the measure of fairness. It pays lip service to it – it’s obliged to by law, after all – but in its view, as per its Social Mobility Strategy, ‘The true test of fairness is the distribution of opportunities.’ The Child Poverty Strategy trumpets the Fairness Premium for education – and the Child Poverty Commission will now be set up as a Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission (note the order, by the way) – because the Coalition thinks that poverty and mobility can be elided. It believes that the question of whether people are poor is basically the same as the question of which people are poor in a generation’s time.

Well, it isn’t. Poverty is poverty: it is a grinding, day-to-day inability to share in the common life. As Polly Toynbee said of social exclusion, “It is a No Entry sign on every ordinary pleasure”. And if we subordinate tackling poverty to promoting mobility, not only will we fail to do either: we will condemn another generation of poor children to grow up in poor housing, without birthday presents, with the fear of falling into debt, with parents trying to make ends meet (often with several jobs at once) and often divided from each other under the strain. It’s very easy to treat the lack of money as a sideshow when you’ve always had plenty of it. Our Government ought to remember that.

Afterthought: A partial exception to this, in fairness, is a focus on getting people into work. This is something the last government worked hard on, and found dauntingly difficult, at a time of economic plenty. At a time when the best part of a million people are about to be put out of work by government policy, I find it hard to believe that the Universal Credit is going to get us very far towards raising employment in the next few years – especially when no one’s even going to start receiving it until 2013. Smoothing out some of the kinks of the current system is a good thing: but it’s a smoothing out, not a revolution, and it’s accompanied by plenty of benefit horrors – many of which, like the lowering of the maximum award for childcare from 80% to 70% of costs, will actually make it harder for people to enter or to stay in work.

Housing policy poses similar problems: the arguments around the Coalition’s plans to allow higher social rents in order to create revenue streams for building more homes are complex, but higher rents combined with Housing Benefit tapers mean that the barriers to work rise even higher. (And the need for this particular expedient might have been reduced had the Government not decided to cut the social housing budget in half.)

Coalitions, majorities and mandates

One of the most interesting questions of the next few years is whether or not we’ve embarked on an era of hung parliaments, minorities and coalitions. I’m not necessarily convinced: I certainly don’t think we’ve started a period of constant hung parliaments, and post-coalition Conservatives and a more liberal Labour might even reinvigorate the two-party system (at least for a while).

So Vernon Bogdanor’s piece in The Guardian covers important ground. Our current Coalition has caused enormous anger for many – in large part because of the sheer scale of the damage being done to public services and the welfare state, but also because people feel that ‘this isn’t what I voted for’. Liberal Democrat voters, of course, feel this way particularly strongly. Bogdanor is absolutely right that the formation of government mustn’t become insulated from the people.

I assume he isn’t being literal when he says that parties should be required to signal their intentions and likely concession in a hung parliament scenario. It’s not just impractical for parties to show their hand in advance (no party leader is going to throw away all their bargaining power before they even know how much they have); it’s actually vital, if coalitions are to reflect the election results, that concessions by coalition partners have some flex. In terms of democracy, the Lib Dems should expect to make more concessions if they win 15% of the vote than if they win 24%; and no formula can pin that down in advance. He does have an important point about preferred coalition partners: British parties have, morally if not pragmatically, something to learn here. It’s worth pointing out that Clegg, for all his faults, did stick to his pre-election commitment (‘the party with the strongest mandate – the largest number of seats and votes – has the first right to seek to govern’) on government formation: but in Germany or Sweden, for instance, parties make it quite clear who they will and won’t work with. A Swedish vote for the Moderates, Liberals, Centre or Christian Democrats will go towards a four-party, centre-right coalition; Green votes in a German federal election will help support a centre-left, Red-Green government. That makes the electoral choice clearer and it helps legitimise the coalition process.

But I would also question the implied account of what actually happened in 2010 and in previous elections: the notion that normally we elect governments directly, but that in 2010 the third party decided who governed Britain and voters were excluded. I don’t think Bogdanor thinks exactly this, incidentally, but it’s a narrative which informs the argument. It deserves some scrutiny.

At the heart of the case for coalitions is a sense that the largest minority party, which generally wins a majority under first-past-the-post (and usually would under AV too), isn’t necessarily in possession of a clear mandate to govern. I am not convinced that the Labour Party, which won 35.2% of the vote in 2005, was a ‘directly elected government’. Granted, political negotiation plays an essential role in delivering the government in hung parliaments; the government’s election is, in that sense, indirect.

But normally, the voting system just turns minorities into majorities for us instead. I don’t see that that’s a more democratic approach. I believe that when the voters don’t give any political party anywhere near a majority of the vote, a coalition government – a compromise between two positions – has a better shot at reflecting the balance of views of the public than a single-party government. Would a majority Conservative government be nearer the political centre of gravity in the UK than the Coalition, for instance?

I’m also unconvinced by the (implicit) analysis of what happened in May. The formation of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition was absolutely bound up with the electoral arithmetic and with perceptions of legitimacy. 306 Conservative, 258 Labour and 57 Liberal Democrat MPs meant that a Lib-Lab coalition deal didn’t have a majority: and crucially, it was felt that the Labour Party had lost the election. The Liberal Democrat leadership feared the consequences of a ‘coalition of losers’: a government which many might deem illegitimate. Far from representing an overriding of the election result in the name of ideological agreement – even now, we need to bear in mind that most Lib Dem members, activists and even elected representatives would have found Labour a more natural partner – the resulting government was absolutely bound up with a particular interpretation of who won, who lost and what the electorate wanted.

Part of the problem with our debate at the moment, I think, is that all parties were evasive at best about what lay ahead. All three parties failed to outline more than a minority of their plans to tackle the structural deficit: all three parties emphasised ‘waste’, fairness and protecting the vulnerable. No one said that they planned to take an £18 billion axe to welfare benefits!  Labour in government would have found themselves assailed by the same cries of ‘broken promises’.

Our present position isn’t an indictment of coalition government: it is in large measure the consequence of a belief, shared by all mainstream parties, that the people simply will not vote for frankness in a general election. I’m not convinced they’re wrong about that: but in any event, the fact that politicians are either too scared or too canny to face voters with unpalatable truths in an election campaign says very little about the merits of coalition government.