In whose name? A comment on democratic will and other such stuff.

"Not in my name is the cry". Petitions are posted, letters are written, placards are badly spelled, frantic facebook rants are posted. "Not in my name".

Well, yes, absolutely. It's not in your name. Never has been in your name. Never will be in your name. That's whole point really. About this representative democracy lark, I mean. It's not done on the basis of individual approval but of collective approval. So long as fifty per cent plus one of the good folk we choose to represent us in parliament say we do it, we do it. What you and I think doesn't matter. We get to keep our powder dry until the next time we get to choose someone to represent us.

You don't think MPs are any good? Fine - that's your absolute right. But they're all we've got - the inadequate, incompetent, venal and self-serving bastion protecting us from rule by faceless bureaucrats, arrogant technocrats and anonymous securicrats. Depressing I know but that's it really which is why we should pay attention to the voting stuff and take it seriously. It's also why those people who say "we don't need any more politicians" are wrong - we need as many politicians as we can get if we want to hold the government to account - from parish councillors to peers of the realm.

Yesterday - and this is what has prompted all the 'not in my name' stuff - MPs voted to approve airstrikes against targets inside Syria. This followed a week or so of frenetic pseudo-debate and a full day of parliamentary debate culminating in that vote. And it's true that MPs, in arriving at a decision, did so with a variety of motives and reasons. Some will have supported (or opposed) airstrikes simply from loyalty to party - my party leader says one thing or the other, therefore I back that position. And this isn't a bad thing - we decry loyalty and trust too readily resulting in a world where such behaviour is assumed to be self-serving, shallow and essentially corrupt. But, for a complicated issue such as whether to take military action, it isn't copping out to take the view that, all things being equal, you'll go along with the foreign minister and defence minister appointed by your Party's government.

Others - and we saw a bit of this yesterday - will have made their decision on the basis of a moral stance ('I'm a pacifist' or 'ISIS is evil and must be stopped') without consideration of tactics. Again we see this described as sophistry or as disingenuous - as if politicians can never support something on grounds of simple conscience. Worse still, people (as they shout 'not in my name' again and again) make a moral judgement about the reasons for people making the choice - if that choice supports our view its noble and brave, if not its because of bullying, political calculation or stupidity (sometimes all three).

I'm not persuaded by the argument for bombing. Not because of any objection to war or crocodile tears over the civilian deaths that will happen whether or not we bomb. No, my concern is that there seems to be no idea as to what the end of all this looks like. I didn't listen to every word yesterday but I didn't hear an argument setting out a strategy aimed at creating a place to which several million refugees can return and live a fulfilling life in peace and happiness. And I didn't see how bombing Raqqa stops terrorists already in the UK, USA or France from machine-gunning or bombing innocents just to wave their murderous islamo-fascist ideology in our liberal democratic faces.

But my argument lost. Maybe for honourable reasons, perhaps because there's internal turmoil in the Labour Party, perhaps because too many MPs, ministers and media folk didn't understand the issues. But mostly because there was a feeling - one echoed outside the febrile world of Westminster - that, following Paris, something had to be done. And targeted bombing is something.

That bombing isn't being done in your name. It's being done by the UK government on the authorisation of parliament. If you didn't like how your MP voted on this then come the next election you get the chance to vote for someone else - it's how our imperfect system works. If you can stomach party politics, you can join one of the parties and make your case from inside. But shouting 'not in my name' is fatuous and serves no purpose except to make you feel a little bit better about the fact that parliament decided to do something you don't like.

....

Taxation without representation - haven't we been here before? Labour and saving the high street

****

The Labour Party wants to extend the scope of things called 'business improvement districts' (BIDs) - organisations of local businesses that are (subject to a poll of local businesses) able to levy a charge on all businesses in an area for the purposes of improving that area. These BIDS are popular with high street regeneration folk and are usually managed by a private business organisation.

It seems that, flush with the success of these organisations, Labour's resident 'experts' on saving the high street have come up with a wheeze to make BIDs even grander:

An advisory group created by Labour to consider the future of the high street has recommended that it looks at introducing a new levy on residents to fund a major expansion of Business Improvement Districts, which manage local areas.

In its report, which has been seen by The Telegraph, the High Street Advisory Group recommends “diversifying the application of BIDs, including the ability to assess property owners and residents” and says that “new tools will need to be explored which diversify income streams”.

Now there are two things that are utterly wrong with this proposal - even if you set aside the nonsense that yet another tax is the solution to anything. Firstly, taxation is bad enough when government is doing the levying but surely allowing a private organisation to levy the tax runs totally against the principle of good governance? And secondly, don't we have at least a tenuous attachment to the idea that taxation goes hand in hand with representation?

We could talk at length about high streets but these proposals represent a step beyond local businesses agreeing to a local levy (and for the record, I find the idea behind BIDs coercive and hard to defend) - every tax should be levy by a body over which those being taxed have some control. This is a fundamental tenet of democracy and if you ignore it the result is the dumping of tea in the harbour.

However, and in the interests of bipartisan policy-development, I have a wonderful solution to the dilemma. It doesn't require any new legislation or any new organisations. This solution has been tried and tested over many decades. It has its limits and its problems but most of the time it works. It also meets those tests - representation, democracy and public accountability - that we should apply to bodies that levy taxes. These are hundreds of these bodies across England ranging in size from a few folk meeting once a year to large organisations employing full time staff.

The bodies are called 'parish councils' (although you can choose to call them town, community, village or local councils too).

...

Representation...

****

You hear the cries about politicians:

"We elect them to do what we say!"

And a host of variations on this theme.

These cries are wrong. And it is important that we understand why they are wrong - it's not because we aren't democratic or that it's anything to do with the modern idea of the political party. No, it's because we choose a representative - someone to go down to Westminster (or in my case Bradford City Hall) and make decisions on our behalves.

We don't instruct such a person (although he would be wise to listen and on occasion consult) nor is he a delegate, sent there with a limited mandate. What we have done is entrust the politician with our votes - the votes we would have had in some sort of 21st century agora. And we cannot know at the point of choosing our representative quite what all those votes will be, we are unable to predict every bill, every amendment and every committee debate or discussion. We have to trust that the person we choose will act in our interests - or in what he honourably sees as our interest.

None of this is about spending time in the constituency (although time spent there when parliament is in session is time the MP spends not doing his job), nor is it about the whip or the manifesto. It is quite simply that no system could be created that allowed all of us to "have our say" on every little item before MPs or to vote in every division. Even in these days of whizzing technology, of the Internet and the smart phone, the idea that all the thousands of votes - let alone the work on committees - could somehow involve us all is a nonsense.

In describing this situation - one that has been the case since Simon de Montford's first parliament - I have been careful to avoid the word democracy. Indeed, in the strictest of senses our system is not democratic, other than at the moment when we chose the men and women who will represent us. People try to pretend that democracy is about more than debating and deciding together - it is not, that is absolutely the whole point of democracy.

I am a representative. I vote firstly according to my conscience, then on what I understand to be the interests of those who chose me and lastly in consideration of the advice given me by my Party. And, when the day of democracy comes, those I represent have the chance to chose someone else should that be their wish.

In the meantime I will say what I think right and vote accordingly.

....

What are politicians for...?

I appreciate that this sort of question raises an endless torrent of sarcasm, cynicism and vulgar repartee but it’s an important question. And one we don’t often ask, preferring instead to wander along in a safe assumption that somehow we need politicians. Which I think rather lets us off the hook and allows us to ramble on about “leadership” even, horror of horrors, “community leadership”.

Frankly I think leadership is a vastly over-rated element of politics. I’m not elected to “lead” but to represent, yet the debate is always about political “leadership” rather than political “representation”. This isn’t to say that politicians shouldn’t lead but it is to observe that leadership is not the purpose of politics or politicians. Yet it remains the obsession of observers – who seem to want a kind of magical spirit of leadership to emanate from politicians:

Yet I couldn’t help think that there was something missing in all the talk of leadership. There were numerous real life and theoretical examples of people ‘doing’ leadership or asking others to show leadership, but I couldn’t help but feel that I was no nearer understanding what Cameron’s definition of leadership is, how it manifests/shows itself and why he thinks the examples that he used demonstrate leadership (as well as what politicians can learn). One of the problems with our body politic at present is that all of those references to leadership could have been sprinkled into the speeches of Ed Miliband or Nick Clegg and none of us would have noticed any different.

What we have here isn’t leadership (and Puffles is right to make that observation), it is representation – people want leadership so our representatives present themselves as leaders. And what we mostly want is one of two things – and often both:

1. The leaders to take away the problems of our life – be it work, health or relationships. We want it to be “someone else’s problem”; we want the magic government fairy to sort it out. This applies whether you’re a billionaire banker or a poor pensioner
2. The leaders to fix things for our benefit, to make rules that favour what we do or that stop those things of which we disapprove. Sometimes this is about economic protection, sometimes it is the projection of a moral position but it is always about fixing things so we benefit.

When politicians don’t do this – or do it for someone else and not us – we accuse them of being weak leaders. Yet the irony of such accusations is that the very opposite is true – it takes a real strength (and a willingness to risk electoral defeat) to tell people they can’t have what they are demanding.

None of this is to argue that politicians shouldn’t lead but it is to say that we don’t have politics and politicians for the purpose of leadership – we have politics and (under our system of representative democracy) politicians to resolve dispute. To make the choice between competing policy options, to decide what course of action to take. And the representation bit is important – my member of parliament has the job of representing me (and the sixty-odd thousand other Shipley electors) in that process of choice.

This is representation and, if we opt instead to devolve responsibility for our economic, social and personal well-being to these people, we are making a colossal mistake – we stop being free men and women and become mere supplicants. Wide-eyed beggar brats gazing into the shiny political salon hoping they’ll notice and “do something”. Because of this, politicians have become a peculiar species of social worker – mollycoddling their electors rather than doing the primary job of representing those electors in the making of choices, in the job of politics.

Puffles suggests that the system for choosing politicians (the selection process rather than the election process) is at fault:

One of the paradoxes I find is that some of our political institutions and the practices of political parties end up suppressing leadership rather than encouraging and nurturing it.

I remain unconvinced - so long as we shuffle about like well-fed sheep waiting for the man with the crook or the dog to herd us in their chosen direction, so long as we see the problem as one of leadership, so long as politicians are expected to wet nurse the voter we will have this crisis of leadership.

I look to a world where, to borrow a Marxist turn of phrase, the need for politicians withers away. Some call this a process of apathy, the rebirth of idiots, but I welcome private strength, individual choices and people who want to be free from the “leadership” that politicians are urged to provide.

As I wrote a couple of years ago:

...the core consideration is the extent to which we are able to live as Greek idiots. Quietly, privately, without bothering our neighbours with our problems – and when such people want change they will get up from their armchairs, walk away from the telly and vote. The idea that not being bothered with voting most of the time makes them bad people is a misplaced idea – they are the good folk.

Above all we should listen quietly to what this “apathy” calls for – it is less bothersome, less interfering, less hectoring and more effective government. Such people want government to be conducted at their level not to be the province of pompous politicians with overblown and lying rhetoric. And they want the language of common sense, freedom, liberty and choice to push away the elitist exclusivity of modern bureaucratic government.

 ....