While I agree with Jonathan Freedland in yesterday’sGuardian that a series of reforms are needed at Parliament and that the time is now, I fear he identified the wrong cause and proposes the wrong solution. He says we need a revolution; I say that would be a foolish thing indeed.

The cause

The cause of dissatisfaction is not MPs’ expenses. Yes, it’s bad, and it adds (in this instance correctly) to the belief that MPs are a bunch of money-grubbing so-and-sos. However, even if the only mis-claimed expense had been a single teapot, people would still have believed that MPs are a bunch of money-grubbing so-and-sos. Freedland partly acknowledges this in a report of an unfortunate remark from Gerald Kaufman that suggests MPs have a ‘sense of entitlement’.

The question not asked is how this develops. I suggest that it is not because everyone involved in politics is TEH EVILZ but because they are human. If you started a new job, chances are you’d turn up early (not too early – don’t want to make yourself look too keen) to begin with. As time went on, you’d aim to turn up on time, occasionally being a bit late if the lights are against you. Over time, it becomes nine-thirty. Take away the time sheet or the punch clock and I should think there’d be a few duvet days as well. Over time, people can slacken. This isn’t because they’re evil, or lazy, or bad but because they’re human and tend to reference things against short-term indexes. Equally, if you turn up at an office and everyone rocks up at nine-thirty, it’s unlikely most people are going to turn up at seven.

Similarly with MPs; one of the reasons we need transparency is to make sure there are lots of eyes on the cookie jars.

The solution

Next, sovereignty. Freedland says

It is the shift from our current system – which rests on the belief that the crown-in-parliament is sovereign – to the simpler notion that it is the people who are sovereign in their own land.

Sovereignty is a contested term. Oppenheim has it right:

There exists perhaps no conception the meaning of which is more controversial than that of sovereignty. It is an indisputable fact that this conception, from the moment when it was introduced into political science until the present day, has never had a meaning which was universally agreed upon.

Without explaining which particular version of sovereignty he means (which is not just where it is located), the phrase simply has no ontological meaning. Even if we abolished the monarchy, threw out all the MPs and wrote ourselves a brand new constitution that declared the sovereignty of the people, not a jot would change. Sovereignty would like as not continue to reside with a political, social, cultural and economic elite. While Freedland might claim popular sovereignty – that the state is an emanation of the people and its nature an emanation of the grundnorm – the state exists by virtue of historical accident and there is no basic norm of society.

Herein lies the problem; all this talk of sovereignty and constitutions is meaningless because, at the end of the day, we are talking about political structures that tend to degrade over time. We might well remove the monarchy and declare the people sovereign only to find that we end up with a very similar system to our current one with the exception of a new set of words on the inside of the passport.

We would also run the risk of thinking this sovereignty is whatever solves our existing, systemic problems rather than establishing something that can deal with the unforeseen. Here, we could learn from remarks John McCain habitually made at the time of the McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Bill: that people were looking for ways to do what they wanted within the letter of the law and that people were inventive; that lobbyists and campaign financiers would be looking for ways to circumvent the law, and that a new CFR bill would be needed sooner rather than later.

Revolutionary dangers

I have tried to show that MPs are humans and must be expected to behave as such; and that institutions are also human, and develop over time. The danger I see in Freedland’s revolutionary talk is, to an extent, similar to the ‘New Tory’ problem. The Tories were sleazy, and New Labour promised to be clean. Then it turned out New Labour could be a bit sleazy too, and now no-one believes anyone in politics when they say they’re not sleazy.

If we have this revolution in parliamentary affairs – and I agree with many of the ideas suggested by Freedland, and would add some more – we will raise a great deal of expectation and I confidently predict that it will be dashed when it turns out that MPs are still human. To offer a revolution will only solve our current ills. It does nothing longer-lasting. In time, more changes would be needed even though we thought we had dealt with the problem.

We need watchfulness and political education, not a claim that a few tweaks here and there will do it. It is not o tempora, o mores, but that

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in our selves

.

xD.

Posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 10:09 pm
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In response to Jonathan Freedland: revolution is not the answer