Should some matters be taken out of the political arena?
The departure, enforced or not, of Sarah Champion from the Labour front bench for an injudicious article in the Sun, got me thinking again about an aspect of politics that seems to me to be in need of revision.
Whether the hapless Ms Champion should have written the article or not, as the relevant party spokesman she was in an impossible position. Either she took the stated view (We have a problem with British-Asian men raping white girls) or she could take the opposite position (There is not a racial problem, it is a few bad apples); most of us would probably subscribe to the view that there is a problem with some British-Asian men with regard to white girls in some places, but this sounds too milquetoast when a blanket statement seems to be required. My point is that I don’t see why every case requires a policy statement. For instance, why should Jeremy Corbyn have to condemn Pres. Maduro if he doesn’t feel like it?
I was taken back to the 70s and 80s and the bipartisan policy that existed with regard to the Irish question (OK, Jeremy didn’t subscribe to it but most MPs did); whether it made the situation less dire I don’t know, but it was felt that the IRA (and others, but less so) was so dangerous that the whole political establishment had to be in agreement. It seems to me that in matters of public safety this is perfectly reasonable, and, further, that party politics is redundant anyway where practical matters of policing and defence are concerned. Which made me wonder where else this might apply.
The obvious other example of where ideology is deeply unhelpful would, I suggest, be immigration. It’s easy to see where partisan positions don’t work by looking at the way in which oppositions approach government policy, and, over immigration, oppositions will pick on irrelevancies such as numbers or profit and loss calculations rather than concluding that this is not a political issue, but a functional one. I’m not saying it’s easy to solve, but bogus party arguments hinder the creation of a set of principles or methods for addressing the issue.
So my suggestion would be to take immigration, defence, policing and any other issues relating to public safety or social disorder out of the Westminster arena – it would mean a more mature debate on the way forward and less blurring of other issues (obviously Brexit for one). It would still leave a lot of room for ideological differences over how to govern, economically, socially and administratively, but could defuse some of the more toxic questions, not least because it would remove the more implausible claims made by either side.
If this argument has any merit, it would be interesting to see if it could be taken further. Your move.
This might be a case for a People’s Assembly run on deliberative democratic lines. I think Trevor suggested such an assembly taking over the House of Lords but it could operate in other ways. Graham Smith suggested some ideas at our launch and he has published quite a lot on his website at https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/directory/smith-graham He was also director of a large scale deliberative experiment in Southampton in 2015 called Assembly South and there is a piece about that on our website.
However, I’m not quite as pessimistic about party politics as you. Realpolitik is a messy business and I think will always be so in a democracy, but I do think that a healthy injection of deliberative democracy would help ease some of its worst aspects. On the other hand I think there is sometimes a danger of conflating ‘politics’ and its practice so that it simply becomes partisanship. For me everything starts with a fairly stable philosophical theory, which moves into a somewhat less stable political position and finally the messy world of practical politics, which itself can descend into dogma, partisanship and tribalism. I hate to think that the word ‘politics’ is only associated with the last stage.
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For my part, I think the NHS and education should not be led by politicians. Every new secretary/party seems to have to leave their mark. Changes would be best led by the true experts who lie at the heart of these sectors rather than politicians in Westminster.
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OK, but it was politicians that brought the NHS into being in the first place. And if we place the NHS and education into the hands of true experts are we beginning to undermine democratic accountability?
I should add to my earlier posting that it is also interesting to know how our emotions, environment and genes shape who we are and, therefore, what we believe and how that feeds into our fundamental philosophy. Some people argue that we are not as free as we think we are and that we have no control at all over our characters which are formed long before we have a chance to think about them. So, do we just have pre-formed emotional response to issues and then try to rationalize them? Even if that is true, of course, it doesn’t follow that our rationalization is necessarily wrong. And is it true to say that the more we know about the limitations to our freedom, the more able we are to exercise whatever freedom that remains? Of course, that question in itself is a loaded one because it assumes that we have any freedom at all.
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I cannot agree with the general thrust of this article at all. To say that any issue should be taken out of the political arena seems to me to be a cop-out and a recipe for reinforcing the status quo. There should be room for debate on all issues, and even where there is an overwhelming consensus there needs to be space for contrary minority views to be heard.
As a life-long campaigner against nuclear weapons, and against the various interventionist wars in which we have become embroiled in recent years, I could certainly never agree that defence issues could or should be taken out of politics. Similarly policing, whether that of the miners’ strike in 1984-5, or the use of under cover police against environmental and peace campaigners from the 1960s to the present day, or the use of armed police, or the existence of institutional racism, cannot be exempted from political discussion, criticism, and democratic accountability.
As for immigration, as soon as any opposition party (and even a minor opposition party like UKIP) took a contrary position to the government, it became inescapably a political issue. An uncomfortable, divisive and toxic issue certainly, but the genie cannot be put back in the bottle.
And the Northern Ireland peace process only happened because politicians were brave enough to move away from the previous bi-partisan position of the 1970s and ’80s.
I do have some sympathy however with contributor “S” in regard to education and health. The problem, it seems to me, lies in our “greasey pole” political system, under which ambitious ministers regard those ministries as merely stepping stones to higher office. Hence they feel the need to make a mark within two years, before the next reshuffle, and undertake another unnecessary reorganisation. However, whilst it would clearly be better if ministers did not meddle so much in the day-to-day management, and some decisions (such as which drugs should be available on the NHS) are best left to technical experts, that does not mean that either health or education can or should be taken out of politics. In both cases the issue of funding is clearly political, as are many issues of principle such as the creeping privatisation of the NHS, PFI deals and the role of private medicine in health, and in education the push from the right for new grammar schools and academisation, and from the left for ending the charitable status of public schools.
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Yes, I think we are in danger of tarring all politicians with the same brush – that they are all equally bad. As in any other walk of life some are good and some are bad and, probably, most are a mixture of the two. Undoubtedly, as Brig implies, it is intensely irritating when career politicians come along, screw-up an institution (as Lansley did with the NHS) and then breezily move on to pastures new – at least in Lansley’s case he seems to have been put out to pasture! But I don’t think this means that we should necessarily remove issues from Parliamentary politics. I also think that some kind of party politics, or at least grouping, is here to stay because humans need to work together on common causes. However, I also think that non-party political organizations and movements like Compass, The Resolution Foundation, Occupy, the Progressive Alliance and the People’s Assembly also have an important role to play because they can operate outside the normal messiness and pressures of Realpolitiks but still influence it. One of the reasons I decided to join the Labour Party was that it has always been part of a wider movement as well as a party seeking power in Parliament and, despite attempts to break that link, it still is. I think Compass realises this with its 45-degree campaign that seeks to link the horizontal campaign groups like the ones just mentioned with the vertical road to power. In some sense, the problem with Labour at the moment is the conflict between its wider, horizontal movement and the vertical Parliamentary party following a shift from the latter to the former.
I also think, as I said previously, that an element of deliberative democracy, possibly in the form of a People’s Assembly, could be beneficial, perhaps as a link between the horizontal and the vertical and particularly when tackling issues like education, health, immigration and defence.
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… Lansley is now something to do with an American health provider Bain & Co, so very profitable ‘pasture’!
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Yes, I suppose I should have known better than to think that he was languishing somewhere in disgrace!
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