Power2010: Time for a New Politics

Guest post by Guy Aitchison

It is time for those who want a new politics to work together for change

With the party conferences over and MPs returning to Westminster today following their 82-day break, now seems like a good moment to reflect on the crisis that engulfed the political class during the early summer months and how they have responded.

At the height of the Great Expenses Scandal party leaders made a great show of telling us how they knew exactly what was wrong with our political system and how to fix it, competing to outdo each other with ever-more radical constitutional solutions to voters’ loss of trust in the system.

Gordon Brown promised far-reaching democratic reform, informing us that he was a long-time fan of constitutional campaign group Charter 88 and making noises about a “a written constitution”. David Cameron called for giving “power to the powerless” and talked of fixed term parliaments and new powers for constituents to recall MPs. Nick Clegg, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, pointed out that he had long distinguished himself with calls for reform of a “rotten” Westminster system and demanded that an urgent list of constitutional changes be made in “100 days”.

At the time, some in the commentariat were asking what on earth constitutional reform has to do with abuse of expenses. But the impulse to respond to public anger with proposals to re-distribute power was the correct one. It involved the recognition that anger over expenses was about more than simply duck houses, moats, dry rot, and other abuses, however petty or extravagant: it was symptomatic of a much deeper disconnect between the public and politicians that has been building for years.

For a long time, people in the UK have been switching off from formal politics. Voter turnout at the last two general elections in 2001 and 2005 was at a historic low of around 60%. This disengagement doesn’t arise from apathy or satisfaction with the status quo, as the Power Inquiry, which carried out the largest ever investigation into people’s attitudes to British democracy several years ago, concluded. It arises from feelings of powerlessness and a sense that parties and politicians are all the same.

Public outrage reflects a much deeper sense that our political system is dysfunctional and in crisis and that our insular and self-serving political class just don’t give a damn. How else to explain disastrous decisions like the Iraq war executed with total contempt for popular opinion, the vicious attacks on our civil liberties, the pathetic surrender to the banking system, and the total failure to face up to the challenge of catastrophic climate change? The disjuncture between what needs to happen on the big challenges we face and what our closed political system will permit is massive.

What is to be done?

Several months on from this crisis, as we enter a new parliamentary term with a general election in sight, any small hope there briefly was that the managers of our stale two-party system would bring about change has been disappointed. The political class are once again hoping that voters’ anger and disgust will give way to disillusionment and resignation allowing them to keep the whole sorry show on the road a while longer.

I was at the Labour and Tory party conferences, in the main hall and at the party fringes, and you could almost hear the sound of brush strokes sweeping the crisis and the earlier promises of change under the carpet.

Brown’s speech to the Labour conference offered a cowardly mixture of fudges and half-measures that will please no one. The Prime Minister promised a referendum on electoral reform – but not until after the next election and even then only on the Alternative Vote system which wouldn’t move Parliament any closer to being proportional. He talked of a new right for constituents to recall errant MPs – but only when voters are given permission from their political masters on high. And one hundred years after Parliament decided to reform the Lords, Brown committed to “remove the hereditary principle” from the second chamber, re-stating Labour’s position in their manifesto of twelve years ago.

David Cameron’s speech to the Tory party conference was a master class of rhetoric promising a lot but offering little of substance. He clearly wants people to think that he “gets it” when he says that the expenses crisis “reflected something deeper…the sense that people have been left powerless by big government”. Spot on! But apart from some vague references to “decentralisation”, “transparency”, and “accountability” there was nothing on how he plans to reform a political system which, by his own admission, is “broken”.

These paltry offers to the electorate confirm that we simply can’t trust politicians to deliver the reform that’s needed. With less than a year until the next election, all of us who want a new politics should focus our efforts on ensuring that the next Parliament is a reforming one.

This will not be easy. It’s almost a law of nature that once politicians take power they are reluctant to give it away.

We need an intelligent and demanding citizens’ movement organising outside the parties and the formal structures of political power, calling for change and holding politicians to their promises.

It is with this goal in mind that the Rowntree Trusts have launched Power2010, a unique campaign that will give everyone a chance to have a say in how this country should be run.

In the first phase of the campaign, Power2010 is asking the public for their ideas for how we change politics. Everyone is encouraged to get involved and contribute their own ideas by going to the website at www.power2010.org.uk.

All the ideas submitted will then be considered by a panel of randomly selected citizens drawn from across the UK who will decide a list of options to be put to the public vote.

The five ideas that receive the most votes will become the Power2010 Pledge, which candidates of all parties will be asked to commit to at the next election – in public meetings, on the door step, by email and letter; as often as possible by as many people as possible.

It is time for those who want a new politics, one that is open, honest, and responsive to the needs and interests of the public, to work together for change. If we join forces and act now we could get a reforming parliament and a new politics out of the next election.

Guy Aitchison works for the Power2010 campaign. Before that he was deputy director of the Convention on Modern Liberty. He blogs at openDemocracy’s UK blog, OurKingdom.