Bereft of ideas, the party leaders are ransacking the storehouse of history. Yet, in their very desperation, they are sowing the seeds of destruction of our political system
The row over MPs’ expenses has exposed a deep national sense of alienation from our politicians. But this is nothing new. Historically, our parliament has seldom served to represent the people and our MPs have rarely been in touch with the lives of ordinary folk. Westminster has been forced to become more responsive by aggressive, even violent, popular action. The main party leaders, more out of fear for their
political survival than a principled commitment to reform, are once again having to listen to popular demands for change. The reforms advocated by Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg – fixed-term parliaments, revived local democracy and greater transparency – in fact represent the resurrection of demands made hundreds of years ago by radical groups such as the Levellers and Chartists. Rather than breathing life into these ideas, our present politicians are actually trying to strip them of their revolutionary consequences. But, having promised “big change”, however insincerely, the party leaders may have set in motion a juggernaut they are powerless to stop.
If the parliamentarians of today appear to be making a tenuous claim when they say they represent our interests, the assertion was practically insupportable in the long period before Britain became a mass democracy. For much of our history, it was patently obvious that parliament did not represent the people. In 1714, at the end of Queen Anne’s reign – a period characterised by intense party conflict within parliament and heavily contested elections in the counties and boroughs – a mere 5.2 per cent of the adult male population could vote. Formal politics was the preserve of a tiny minority of the population, and Westminster was, in every sense, a gentleman’s club. The Great Reform Act 1832 did nothing to alter this; the electorate created by the new law in fact represented a smaller proportion of the male population (4.7 per cent) than had had the right to vote over a century earlier.
Although the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 enfranchised large sections of the working class, the “mother of all parliaments”, by the end of the Victorian era, was lagging behind even her own colonies in the political rights she accorded to female citizens. (Australian women received the vote 17 years before their British counterparts.) Even the eventual equalisation of suffrage in 1928 did not mean that parliament became truly representative. The initial electoral struggles of the Labour Party offer clear evidence of the difficulty of getting working-class MPs into parliament. Salaries for MPs – a long-standing radical demand – were only introduced in 1911. Prior to that, Labour members such as Keir Hardie lived on a meagre stipend provided by the party, in Hardie’s case a mere £150 a year. Few of the multi-home-owning, chandelier-loving MPs of today would put up with Hardie’s humble digs, a bedsit with one solitary gas ring, on which he prepared his main forms of sustenance: black tea and drop scones.
Working-class representation improved dramatically in the wake of Labour’s 1945 election landslide, but in recent decades the process has been reversed. The number of female and ethnic-minority MPs has certainly increased, but there has also been a very marked decline in the number of MPs from working-class backgrounds. Of the parliament produced by the 2005 election, a mere 6.2 per cent had previously been manual workers. In their place came rising numbers of professionals, especially barristers. From being a gentleman’s club in the 18th and 19th centuries, 21st-century Westminster turned into a white-collar wonderland.
This middle-class-dominated parliament now represents a nation in which the median household income is roughly £25,000 a year, not that much more than Sir John Butterfill claimed in expenses to build his servants’ quarters. Even those who have remained squeaky clean on expenses scarcely present the image of being in touch with the lives of everyday people. While households across the country struggle to make ends meet, the leader of the opposition struggles to remember how many houses he owns.
Even the incremental change that has taken place in British politics has had to be vigorously fought for. Peaceful protest alone has, more often than not, ended in failure, even in tragedy. The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 brought about the deaths of up to 18 peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators and the severe injury of hundreds more, but the immediate consequence of the atrocity was a crackdown on radical activity. Peterloo reminds us that, although popular radicalism favoured peaceful petitioning and protest as the means to achieve its ends, these methods were often ineffective. It took more vigorous action to alter the attitudes of our legislators.
In 1831-32, as riots engulfed Nottingham, Derby and Bristol, the threat of revolution helped focus MPs’ minds on the need for reform. Similar comparisons can be made between the relative success of Chartism and the suffragettes. The radical Chartist movement of the Victorian era, though occasionally sanctioning physical violence, largely confined itself to mass demonstrations and mass petitioning to get its message across. If Chartism’s message of political reform appealed to the millions who signed up to its
national petitions, its demands were ignored in parliament; Disraeli spent most of the “debate” on the 1839 petition leisurely eating oranges. Likewise, the peaceful, constitutionalist “suffragist” campaign for women’s votes made little headway. As Lady Frances Balfour complained, before the emergence of the Pankhursts the issue of votes for women was “always shoved on to a siding to let express trains go by, and even the slowest train was an express to those who wished the matter shelved”.
Once again it was direct, even violent, action that transformed a moribund cause. Suffragette militancy placed votes for women back on the political agenda, not just through the hardline actions of the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union – from window-breaking, to arson and bombing, to hunger-striking – but also via the more playful and dramatic activities of members of the Women’s Freedom League such as Muriel Matters, who showered London with pro-suffrage leaflets from a hot-air balloon.
The opening up of the political process to mass participation was the result of centuries of often tumultuous agitation. Similarly, while unjustified personal attacks on MPs in the present expenses furore are regrettable, it has been this controversy, and more importantly the public anger it has aroused, that have pushed political reform back on to the agenda. As a result, the leaders of the three main parties are engaged in a frantic bidding war as each vies to be the man to clean the Augean stables of Westminster and restore trust in British politics. Cameron in particular has attempted to coat his reform package with a sprinkling of cutting-edge, Web 2.0-style innovation, by suggesting putting parliamentary debates on YouTube, offering SMS text alerts of the outcome of votes, and providing online accounts of public expenditure.
In reality, however, the proposals advanced by Brown, Cameron and Clegg are centuries old. And the reforming potential of important measures – fixed-term parliaments, a revival of local democracy and greater transparency – is being blunted for short-term political gain.
Take Cameron’s and Clegg’s support for fixed-term parliaments. This notion originated in the 17th century as first the Scottish parliament and then the English tried to prevent Charles I from ruling alone, by establishing legal mechanisms that would ensure the issuing of writs for new elections every three years, with or without royal consent. By the mid-17th century, fixed-term parliaments had become a demand of radical movements, most notably the Levellers. This continued to be a central demand of the Chartists in the 19th century.
For Clegg and Cameron, the attraction of fixed-term parliaments is that they will prevent the majority party from managing the election cycle to its own political advantage. A reasonable argument, but one strangely disconnected from the debate on MPs’ expenses – essentially an issue of political corruption focusing on the behaviour of individual members, not parties.
Yet radical groups originally sought fixed-term parliaments precisely because they saw these as a check on parliamentary malfeasance. The Chartists viewed annual parliaments as crucial to political reform because, as the 1838 People’s Charter declared, they were “the most effectual check to bribery and intimidation, since though a constituency might be bought once in seven years (even with the ballot), no purse could buy
a constituency (under a system of universal suffrage) in each ensuing twelvemonth; and since members, when elected for a year only, would not be able to defy and betray their constituents as now”.
The People’s Charter raised another important attribute of fixed-term parliaments – that they would help to hold members to account for their behaviour, a model followed by the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor when he was elected as the MP for Nottingham in 1847. O’Connor held an annual “election” into his conduct as MP in which electors and non-electors alike were allowed to participate, with the promise to resign should a majority ever disapprove of his behaviour.
More than this, fixed-term parliaments – and fixed terms for political officeholders, another leading demand of British radicals – were designed to prevent the rule of an ossified political elite. In recent years, the threat of government by a clique of professional politicos has returned. Seventeen per cent of Labour MPs elected in 2005 were designated as having been employed at some point as a political organiser or adviser. The danger that this new breed of MP poses to parliamentary independence is clear: it is not only the actions of the whips that have created a pliant Commons, but the growth in the number of members who owe their livelihood and loyalty solely to a party machine.
David Cameron has spoken recently of the need not only to reform Westminster, but also for a “radical redistribution of power” from the state to citizens. Equally, for many British reformist movements of the past, it was the local community, and not central government, that was the best guardian of liberty. In actual policy, however, this present-day “radical redistribution” looks distinctly lacking in ambition. The Conservative leader’s vision for rejuvenating local democracy extends little beyond creating elected mayoralties across England.
Cameron’s caution is not surprising. Local government has served as a training ground for generations of rebels. The leaders of medieval uprisings, from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 to Kett’s Rebellion of 1549, were often local officeholders, men of substance in their communities, not the illiterate peasants of popular myth. British agitators from the Digger leader Gerrard Winstanley to the 18th-century republican Thomas Paine were radicalised in the seemingly humdrum world of parish politics. In the 19th century, first the Chartists, most notably in Sheffield, and then the suffragettes, in Manchester, secured local representation where national representation was barred to them by either class or sex. Ultimately it was the radicalisation of local government in the 1980s, in London with Ken Livingstone’s GLC, and in Liverpool with the Militant-dominated city council, that led the Thatcher government to clamp down on local democracy and begin the process of quangoisation against which Cameron now rails.
Rebellion, revolt and reform: a timeline of radical action
1381 Peasants’ Revolt Wat Tyler and his followers briefly seize control of the capital and demand freedom from feudal service. The boy king Richard II makes generous concessions but swiftly reneges on them. Tyler is killed and other rebels brutally punished.
1549 Kett’s Rebellion, also known as the “commotion time”. Robert Kett and his men urge that “all bondmen be made free”. The uprising is suppressed, but serfdom in England soon disappears.
1649 Charles I is executed, the culmination of two bloody civil wars, leading to an upsurge in popular agitation. But Leveller-inspired army mutinies and communitarian “Digger” settlements alike are crushed.
1819 “Peterloo”, St Peter’s Fields, Manchester Pro-reform demonstrators heed the advice of their leader Henry Hunt, and attend a mass meeting unarmed. They are stampeded, sabred and bayoneted by cavalry and the local militia.
1831 Riots in Bristol as the House of Lords rejects the second Reform Bill. The orgy of destruction continues for three days.
1848 The last great Chartist mass meeting on Kennington Common. One hundred and fifty thousand gather to support the six points of the People’s Charter. Only 15 MPs vote in favour of accepting the petition, signed by roughly two million people.
1866 Hyde Park riots Supporters of parliamentary reform tear down the railings to the park. A further demonstration in 1867 in the face of a government ban establishes the park’s reputation as a site for unrestrained political speech-making, institutionalised in Speakers’ Corner.
1905 The first act of suffragette militancy Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst interrupt a Liberal meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and assault policemen.
1909 The first suffragette hunger-striker Marion Wallace Dunlop refuses food after being jailed for stencilling graffiti on the walls of St Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster.
1936 The Battle of Cable Street East End Jews, communists and trade union activists send Oswald Mosley’s parading fascists packing with a show of force.
1990 Poll tax riots Disturbances across British cities, especially London, sound the death knell for both the Community Charge and Margaret Thatcher’s premiership.
The final misplaced claim to innovation in the parliamentary reform arms race is the harnessing of technology to increase transparency. More often than not, it has been radicals outside, not the politicians within parliament, who have most successfully used technology to speed up and improve political communication. This trend goes back way beyond the G20 protesters with their Twitter, Facebook and text-organised demonstrations.
British radicals have always been at the cutting edge of technology. From the Levellers, who first harnessed the power of the printing press to deliver a political message, to the Chartists, who realised the power of a party newspaper to enter into the cultural as well as political lives of the masses, radical movements have in effect been cleverly exploiting technological change to outwit their opponents.
There is nothing wrong with harnessing the power of the Information Revolution to make parliament more accountable. Once again, however, the political parties of today refuse to take these ideas to their radical conclusion, instead proposing largely cosmetic changes to improve delivery of information to the general public. Let’s call their bluff. The development of high-speed broadband makes a very good case for MPs not having to come to Westminster at all. Why not save all the money spent on non-existent mortgages, by having MPs participate in virtual debates and votes from the comfort of their own constituency office/home? (If the expenses row proves anything, however, it is that many MPs would rather live anywhere than in the provincial towns and cities that elect them.)
The current debate on parliamentary reform reveals little more than a political class desperate to save its own skin. Bereft of genuinely innovative ideas, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg are ransacking the ideological storehouse of British history. Yet, in doing so, they are advancing arguments which – however old – could, if carried to their natural conclusion, sow the seeds of the current system’s destruction.
In hoping to diffuse our anger with hurried proposals for political reform, the main parties are stoking up the public’s expectation of change. It is not an unthinking, angry mob that threatens our political leaders, but a British public finally awaking, to quote Shelley’s “Masque of Anarchy”, “like lions after slumber”.
Ted Vallance is lecturer in early modern British history at the University of Liverpool. His book “A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries – the Men and Women Who Fought for Our Freedoms” is newly published by Little, Brown (£25)
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