A New Politics

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The Guardian | Thursday 21 May 2009

Towards a blueprint for reforming government

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hese are exceptional times. You have to go back to the days before the 1832 reform act, to the “old corruption” with its vote-buying, electoral intimidation and rotten boroughs, to find an era in which the British way of politics was as widely discredited and in need of reform as it is today. Two centuries ago, the answer to the scandals seemed plain – systemic reform and, though it was 100 years coming, votes for all. Today, faced with an alarmingly comparable collapse of esteem for politics under the democratic system, the answer to the new corruption is the same as it was to the old: systemic political reform and a modern, reinvigorated, devolved democracy. Amid the continuing torrent of jaw-dropping expenses revelations, it is hard to comprehend how so many apparently decent MPs could each have set aside their capacity for moral judgment about their own actions. Even so, the expenses crisis is not simply a set of personal failings and transgressions, occasionally exaggerated. That is why it is not enough to call for heads to roll. The deeper problem is systemic. It is rooted in the whole way we do our politics. A general election is certainly not irrelevant to addressing that problem; but it is not a fundamental solution either. In the end, we need a new politics more than we need a new government. The mood of anger is understandable. Moods of anger often are. But they are rarely good guides to wise action. That is why it is far more important to focus on what should be built rather than on what should be destroyed. The White House chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, observed last

TYPOGRAPHY: KITCHING/STOTHARD THE TYPOGRAPHY WORKSHOP 2009

year that one should “never want a serious crisis to go to waste”. A crisis is not just an occasion for blame and punishment. It is also, as Mr Emmanuel added, “an opportunity to do things you could not do before”. That insight has been powerfully borne out by the expenses crisis. Agendas that for years had seemed trapped on the political margins have suddenly been swept into the mainstream and have captured the public mood. Radical pruning of MPs’ allowances. An end to parliamentary selfregulation. All-party agreement in advance to accept Sir Christopher Kelly’s report. A Speaker driven from office for the first time since the 17th century. Party leaders calling on local par-

ties to purge errant MPs. Approving references to Oliver Cromwell. Genuine all-party agreement on reform. None of these things happened before the publication of MPs’ expenses. All of them have happened since. The reform agenda can go much further. It must now do so. Fixing the expenses system is not enough. The reformers who urged the case for radical reform of MPs’ finances have also earned the right to have the rest of their menu of political reform taken more seriously and urgently. The reactionaries who opposed change, often on the grounds that these are not “real” issues of interest to “real” people should have learned that reality bites hard and that reform is not a side issue. Nick Clegg yesterday called this a once-ina-generation moment to change politics for good. He was spot on.

Today, Guardian and Observer writers map out some of the possible moves. They range from the composition of select committees through reform of the House of Lords to the role of the press. Online debate on the ideas is already vigorous. Some proposals are systemic; others are more focused. Some, such as Lords reform, would take some time to implement; others, such as reform of the role of the attorney general, could be made today. Most require all-party agreement, while some could properly be initiated by the government alone. All of them are urgent.

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ublic life matters. It should be a high calling, not a base one. Gordon Brown often speaks for the better angels of politics, but he presides over an unprecedented pandemonium of its fallen ones. His handling of the expenses crisis has often been clumsy. This week, however, largely because he listened to others and learned from his mistakes, he finds himself in the right place on these issues at last. He must now go much further on the equally imperative reform agenda. He has the means, motive and opportunity to help shape the new politics that modern Britain, so different a country from the Britain that spawned our broken parties and our discredited institutions, craves. It took the founding fathers of the United States four months to agree their constitution. Mr Brown has longer than that. He has a year in which to cement his place in history as a great political reformer or as a great political failure. These are exceptional times. And this is an exceptional opportunity.

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The Guardian | Thursday 21 May 2009

Here, Guardian and Observer writers launch a major debate on renewing British politics. With your help, we hope to build a blueprint for reform. Join the discussion on each of these topics at guardian.co.uk/anewpolitics – and tell us what we’ve missed. We’ll keep you informed of progress

using the same principle under which we organise the refereeing of football? Who would have Black Rod, with his tights and mace? Would anyone bother with that blather about “honourable” and “right honourable gentlemen”? If it didn’t seem ridiculous before, it certainly does now. Why go on with those interminable maiden speeches? The pat questions to ministers planted by the whips? The ritual investigation of the prime minister on his engagements? This is a body barely recognisable to most people: Planet Westminster. There is a modernisation of the house select committee system under way – proof that the wheels turn slowly. Our courts can hardly be held up as an example but they have recognised that arcane practices and language can cut ordinary people off. Have our courts been rendered less effective by the shift away from wigs and gowns, or by allowing solicitors directly to represent clients? People will leave court unhappy, but few complain they didn’t understand it. Let the honourable member for Blackburn become plain Mr Straw, let the Speaker be independent of the parties and let’s have members of both houses discussing the issues inside parliament in the terms they might use outside it. As for Black Rod and those tights – what a gift to cabaret.

Written constitution

The great goal Timothy Garton Ash h We need a written constitution. That is the largest conclusion we should draw from a crisis that is also an opportunity. Our legislature has compromised itself. Our executive has long been over-mighty. Our judiciary remains largely credible, but its independence needs to be reinforced. In 10 years’ time, I wish to walk round Westminster and show a visitor three great buildings housing three separate powers of a renewed democracy. Every schoolchild should know what each does, by what explicit rules, and how they relate to each other. And how our individual rights and liberties are secured within this constitution. Nothing less will do. This need not be a revolution. Most elements of a constitution are there already. Unlike many countries after wars or dictatorships, we won’t have to rebuild from rubble. Many British institutions function well, and even many aspects of our parliament. We should beware the hyperbole of crisis. But we do need to put together these elements as we never have before, add a few, reform some, and make the whole thing explicit, clear and transparent. The question is how we go about this. We will need a government ready to propose to parliament a new great reform bill. We must build a constitution by constitutional means. But before we reach that point, we need a great debate. That can start right now, and right here.

The monarchy

A corrosive symbol Gary Younge Thanks to hanging chads and the supreme court, the left could poke fun at the credibility of George Bush’s first term. But when it comes to Britain, there can really be no debate about the democratic credentials of our head of state. She has none. For all the fetishisation of modernity, there is one glaring omission – the abolition of the monarchy. Power has been devolved to Scotland and Wales; there will soon be a supreme court. But when it comes to the little things like declaring war, dissolving parliament and ratifying treaties, all power lies with the monarch. Those who insist the role is merely symbolic miss the point. It symbolises something extremely corrosive in our history and culture: that your life chances are determined not by what you can do, but to whom you were born. Moreover, it enshrines the notion that power can be unaccountable. The tendency to point out the personal deficiencies of the nation’s first family is understandable, but flawed. “Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793,” wrote Albert Camus, referring to Louis XVI’s execution. “But regicides of earlier times … were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king.” The issue is not the individuals but the institution, not personalities but politics. A call to remove the Queen’s constitutional powers may well attract broad support, leaving the ceremonial and symbolic and little else. That would be a start.

House of Lords

We must be able to choose our rulers Jonathan Freedland

Electoral reform

Our system is bust John Harris Above all others, there is one institutional wrong that sits underneath the sickness of our politics. It enables governments to claim thumping mandates while they attract the support of a small minority, thereby facilitating rule-by-clique. It results in focusing on marginal seats and scything out whole swaths of voters, from residents of the old Labour heartlands to suburban middle-class liberals – and, truth be told, rightwing Tories. It has led to too many “safe” seats, creating the climate in which MPs stretched or broke the rules, with little thought of their constituencies. Self-evidently, our first-past-the-post model is as busted as the allowances system, and now is the time for a new electoral settlement. I’d settle for a version of alternative vote plus ( but with the proportional “top-up” share of MPs bigger) or the additional member system of the Scottish parliament, and the assemblies in London and Wales, but the practice of closed party lists should be binned. Although David Cameron has made most of the recent running on political reform and a quick general election, the Tories’ likely success would be based on the usual grim mathematics – a big Commons majority on a minority of the vote, and all the dysfunction that implies – but given that change would tear up so many of their standard calculations, will either of the main parties listen?

Parliamentary protocol

Earth calling Planet Westminster Hugh Muir Who, designing a representative body for the 21st century, would start from here? Who would allow the House of Commons to be run by the Speaker as we know the role, the candidate of least resistance,

You would think it was a sine qua non of a democracy that those who write the laws of the land would be chosen by its people . Imagine if MPs were not elected but emerged through some other cloudy process – because they were one of 92 people with aristocratic blood, one of 26 bishops affiliated with the state-approved version of Christianity, or picked by the prime minister. If anyone suggested that be the process by which we pick members of the British legislature there would be howls of laughter and outrage. It would be an affront to democracy. Yet, that is how one half of our legislature is chosen. The House of Lords is often presented as some ceremonial body of sleeping old gents who add to the dignity of national life. But the upper house shares in the writing of our laws. The principle – that, in a democracy, the people elect those who govern them – should trump all others. Electing members of the second chamber creates complications in our constitutional set-up (wouldn’t an elected “Lords” threaten the primacy of the Commons?) have held back reform for at least a century. It is not impossible to devise an election method that would preserve what people admire, ensuring the new second chamber does not comprise party hacks, and still has access to the wisdom of elders. But what comes first in a democracy is the right to elect – and remove – those who govern us. It is long past time that we demanded it.

Democracy

Reorchestrating the second chamber Will Hutton Democracy is a process and an attitude of mind. It understands that the to-and-fro of argument is the best way communities feel their way to good decisions and good law. It holds executive power to account day by day for its actions, and periodically through elections. It protects liberty. British democracy falls short of these aspirations in many ways. It is a two-chamber system that may genuflect to the role of deliberation and argument, but the House of Commons is ruthlessly controlled by the executive while the Lords is a useful revis-

ing chamber, but essentially a democratic cipher. That must change. The British will always site the government of the day in the Commons. As a result, its capacity to revise, deliberate and argue will always be weak. The role must fall to the House of Lords. Its standing must be raised to become the co-determiner of British law. The Commons must lose its power always to trump the Lords. That will require that the Lords is composed through democratic mandate. But to avoid relative party strengths predetermining outcomes so that it becomes a mere simulacrum of the Commons, there need to be substantive innovations. The first is that a critical mass of Lords – say, a third – must be elected as independent crossbenchers so that the government must win assent for its legislation through force of argument and not political arm-twisting. The second is that each nation and region of the UK must be represented, so larger interests are considered. The third is that its select and working committees should be able to co-opt external experts as members. Britain would then have a 21stcentury democratic chamber of which it could be proud.

Local government

Restore power and accountability Simon Jenkins At the root of this scandal has been a transformation in the role of a member of parliament: MPs have become the leading citizens of their municipalities. They are the first port of call for citizen complaints. Their surgeries deal almost entirely with local matters requiring complex negotiation with councils and agencies. They have become what in any other European democracy would be the local mayor, the best-known elected person in town. The result has been a steadily more shrill demand for them to “live in the constituency”, unheard of 50 years ago. The erosion of localism has sucked MPs into the vacuum, and they are now paying the price. An MP’s job is hopelessly confused, as a party hack in London and as a prominent civic leader back home. The consequence is two homes, two lives, two expenses rackets and misery. This will only stop when locally elected officials – I am convinced this means mayors as in most other countries – are introduced to relieve MPs of their local duties and thus of some of their pre-eminence. Their present agony is entirely the result of their resistance to local democracy. Political Britain needs a whole new cast list of local mayors, governors, parochial and municipal leaders to return status and political accountability to the local level.

The Speaker

Redefine every part of the role Jackie Ashley If MPs, the press and the public are agreed on one thing, it’s that the new Speaker should be a reformer. That means a change in each and every aspect of the Speaker’s role. It’s already clear that the new Speaker will not be in charge of MPs’ pay and expenses. Within hours of Michael Martin announcing his decision to quit, the prime minister made it clear that an independent commission will take over the day to day administration of the Commons. The Speaker’s main role will continue to be chairing debates and keeping order. But he must do much more that: dragging parliament into the 21st century, he should ensure that procedures and debates are comprehensible to all, inside and outside the chamber. No more “remaining orders” that no one understands. He would do well to put a total stop to all that yah-booing, too. For years it has put the public off Westminster – not surprisingly. The new Speaker can also take a leaf from the Lord Speaker’s book. Since 2006, Lady Hayman, as Speaker of the Lords, has made it clear that her job is to act as an ambassador for the Lords, with a full programme of speeches, conferences, outreach events, charity work, engagement with young people and foreign visitors. Now, more than ever, the House of Commons needs an ambassador.

MP numbers

Slash the headcount to 400 Polly Toynbee In the sea of faces on the green benches, how many of those 647 MPs can you recognise? Most will never be ministers. We have so many, they say, because of the sacred link between MP and constituency, one to roughly every 60,000 voters. But that mystical bond is mostly the wishful

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The Guardian | Thursday 21 May 2009

Comment is free The debate continues Put your mark on the blueprint guardian.co.uk/anewpolitics

thinking of self-deluding MPs. Both the good and the useless are swept in and out of office on their party’s coat-tails. We need fewer, representing larger areas, to make them more powerful national figures. If there were, say, 400, most would have a valuable role to play in party and parliament. Their business should be governing the country: too much time is spent now as advocates for individual local cases on housing, benefits and vast numbers of immigration pleas, often queue-jumping existing appeals and complaints procedures, to the aggravation of officials. Some casework should go to councillors, if more power is to be devolved. Good MPs say they need some casework, to see at first hand where government departments are failing, but the balance is out of kilter. A proportional representation system, such as the Jenkins plan, means grouping MPs together in clumps of six, in larger constituencies, so that voters are represented by someone they voted for. No system is perfect, but fewer MPs grouped in larger constituencies would better represent more people.

the average wage and increase their salary in line with average earnings. That would remind politicians that their job is to represent their constituents – and give them an interest in improving the lot of voters.

MPs’ pay

Boost salaries and abolish allowances Jenni Russell

Representation

The House should reflect those it serves Madeleine Bunting We need a House of Commons that reflects the people it is designated to represent and serve. Voters need to see in this institution a closer reflection of themselves, instead of the anachronisms of a macho, predominantly white culture that still owes many of its characteristics to the English traditions of public school and Oxbridge. We need many more women in the place and a much wider variety of backgrounds. It’s not that they will be made of better moral fibre, but that such an influx will disrupt the cosy, self-referentialism that has done so much damage. All parties should sign up to a quota for female candidates – it could be for a limited period of, say, 10 years. Over the past 25 years, Norway, Sweden and Denmark have all achieved high representation of women through quotas of 40% on candidate lists. The UK parliament is currently 58th out of 187 democratic countries in the world for its meagre 18% female representation in the Commons. Only quotas will bring the big breakthrough. Alongside more women, concerted action is needed to improve the paltry 2.1% of MPs from ethnic minorities – just 15. All-black shortlists in key areas is the kind of measure that could crack this long-running issue.

Direct democracy

Use the jury system as a model Julian Glover Bill Clinton put it most snappily: “If you want to change the world,” he said, “join a focus group.” He had something in common with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who commented: “The people of England think they are free. They are gravely mistaken. They are free only during the election of members of parliament.” Both were getting at the same thing: the people are asked to pick other people to take decisions for them. While their choice – Britain’s parliament – implodes under the strain of the expenses scandal, the public can only watch and howl. Constitutionalists propose all sorts of fixes: proportional representation; devolved assemblies; an elected Lords; a smaller parliament or a bigger one. But in every case they still ask voters to choose someone else to do the governing. Think of that revered constitutional linchpin, the jury system. We are happy for randomly picked, untrained members of the public to weigh the evidence and the

argument, and imprison someone for life. It works. Why not for goverment, too? Gordon Brown did once talk of what he called citizen’s juries, but they turned out to be nothing more than state-funded party political focus groups. A bad start, though, should not ruin a good idea. We could give such juries real power – if not to swing decisions, at least to contribute to them. In a democracy, ruling and being ruled should be part of the same thing.

MPs’ pay

Link to average earnings Aditya Chakrabortty Easily the most galling aspect of the expenses debacle is the way MPs defend their abuse. Our politicians really mean it when they say these outlandish claims were only to top up inadequate wages. Hang on, MPs not paid properly? The £64,766 salary puts them comfortably into the top 5% of all single earners. The median salary in the UK is £25,100; take into account pensioners and others living off benefits, and the average person lives on less than £16,000. As for parliamentary pay lagging behind other industries, that is a canard. MPs’ pay rises between 1990 and the end of 2006 far outstripped increases in inflation, average earnings and public-sector pay. If parliamentarians want to claim, as the late Tony Banks did, that they are “a sort of highpowered social worker”, they should note that a social worker’s position in Camden (a borough that neighbours Westminster) is advertised on the Guardian’s jobs website for between £30,045 and £39,228. If MPs complain about constituency work, they should be given more caseworkers. If the Westminster working day is antisocial), then it should be changed, by shortening recesses. True, the life of an elected representative is an uncertain one, but that is compensated for by one of those increasingly rare creatures, a generous final-salary pension scheme. A pay regime for parliamentarians should reflect the work carried out, and be democratically justifiable. The solution is to link MPs’ wages to average earnings. Put backbenchers on, say, two times

It’s not a popular moment to suggest such a thing, but MPs’ headline salary should be raised and allowances cut. There’s nothing honest about the current system, in which most MPs treat second home allowances as an integral part of salary, in effect raising their income to £104,000 before tax. The danger is that representing people in parliament will now look so tarnished that talented potential candidates will be put off – being an MP should attract people of the same calibre as those who work at high levels in public service: senior civil servants, judges, headteachers of large schools. Consider this: the civil servant who ran the fees office was earning £125,000 a year, nearly twice as much as the MPs whose expenses he oversaw. The heads of large London schools get £107,000. Judges and senior doctors get more than £100,000 a year. If we pretend that pay shouldn’t matter to MPs, we’ll end up with a high proportion of low-calibre candidates, or those who have sufficient private incomes not to care. Don’t forget that Lloyd George introduced payments for MPs in 1911 precisely so that the pool of politicians could extend beyond the privileged class. Let us be brave now. Remove the second home allowance, and make office travel as transparent as it is in any company. Link MPs’ pay to those of civil servants’ grades, or those of judges, and fix them somewhere in the region of £85,000-95,000 a year. Take that issue out of the political realm – and free us from the demeaning spectacle of MPs arguing that bathplugs, antique rugs and £8,000 TV sets are a necessary requirement for doing their jobs.

MPs’ hours

Shorten the holidays Anne Perkins One of the better parliamentary reforms of the past 10 years has been changing the hours to reflect a normal working week, rather than the traditional arrangement of the day around 18th-century gentlemen’s clubs and society hostesses’ drawing rooms, slightly modified in the 20th century to allow lawyers to get in a day’s work before turning up in the late afternoon. The reforms (take a bow, Harriet Harman) removed a hurdle for people with young families taking part in Westminster politics, either as MPs or as officials, or even journalists. Along with other reforms, of which easily the most important has been the dramatic – if still insufficient – increase in the number of women, this change has slowly softened the culture of the place. But it came at a high cost. The change to the working day removed probably the most powerful weapon an ordinary backbencher had – the power to delay, sometimes to derail, the government’s business. The balance is now heavily weighted against the ordinary backbencher and in favour of the executive. No longer could a Michael Foot talk for hours in order to preventa half-baked plan for reform of the Lords going through. In fact, half-baked plans speed through nowadays, with ministers often redrafting important bits of legislation in the final stages. So much for better scrutiny. Don’t make MPs’ days longer. Cut the holidays, change procedure and give MPs back the chance to get right up the executive’s nose.

The executive

Party whips

Let MPs reclaim control in the house

A devilish discipline

Martin Kettle Parliament exists to sustain a government by passing its bills and approving its actions. But it also exists to hold a government and its ministers to account. Modern parliaments have been infinitely better at the former than the latter – think of Iraq, think of some anti-terror laws, and think, in particular, about the needless proliferation of laws and regulations. MPs need to stop being sheep and start being watchdogs. The rest of us, the media in particular, need to assist them. Parliament should draw up its own bill of parliamentary rights to control the executive. It should limit the power of the prime minister to alter Whitehall. It could restrict the number of ministers. Select committees could sit many more days and ministers could be required to account them more regularly. MPs should reclaim control of parliamentary business, giving the Speaker more routine power to set the Commons agenda. MPs should remove the government’s patronage over who sits on and chairs committees. In the end, we should go the whole hog and move towards a more complete separation, along US lines, in which MPs are no longer ministers. That would remove a lot of the current conflicts. A change of political culture is needed, too. Everybody knows ministers and MPs have differing views on most issues. So be more grown-up about allowing those views to be heard in public. Why not modify the doctrine of collective responsibility so that ministers and MPs can speak their minds more freely without losing their posts? The current system stifles debate and public engagement. A new system would throw the windows open.

David Hencke The whips are essential to the running of an efficient political process in the sense that elected governments need to push policies through parliament. However, they have too much power and too much say over what happens to MPs. Whips have myriad ways of taking revenge on or rewarding people. An accommodation whip, for example, can decide which MP gets what room – a suite for the helpfully toadying member or a hole-in-thecorner office for a troublemaker. Though not the root of the current malaise, the power of the whip – unrecognised as a parliamentary post – rules supreme, inhibits democracy and encourages a herd instinct and mindlessly partisan behaviour. A major reform is essential to bring back meaningful debate to parliament. At present, both government and opposition chief whips – who, incidentally, receive additional salaries from the taxpayer – are creatures of the political party. They have a stranglehold over the committee system in the House of Commons – influencing who sits on committees and having some say over who becomes chairman. They are also good at arm-twisting MPs to follow the party leader on motions, which means debates in the Commons – as opposed to the Lords, where there are more crossbenchers – are often stilted events, where real issues are ignored. Those perks that presently lie within the gift of the whips’ office – rooms, travel, committee places – should be apportioned by an independent parliamentary body, not by party apparatchiks. Party discipline should be enforced by appeal and persuasion, rather than by patronage and the granting or withholding of favours.

Select committees

Backbenchers need to wrest control Michael White Congressional committees in Washington have sweeping powers to tackle the executive. But the US constitution rests on a separate executive, judiciary and legislature, whereas Britain’s remains integrated, a medieval legacy the Americans rejected in 1787. MPs are paid, of course, to represent their constituents, to vet the government’s legislation and hold the government of the day to account. If necessary, they do that by turning off the tax revenues. Charles I eventually discovered that hard fact when he tried to manage without them. The basics of politics never change. But it needs a John Pym or an Oliver Cromwell once in a while to give the system a well-aimed kick. All models have problems, but parliament’s select committees could benefit from the conviction among backbenchers that being a committee chairman is at least as useful a public career as being a junior minister in charge of paperclips. “Ministerialitis” is a curse. MPs have the power to summon witnesses – as they demonstrated with the errant bankers – and issue severe reports. But committee membership is still controlled on all but rare occasions by the party whips. Labour’s chief whip, Nick Brown, explicitly argues that serial rebels should be denied a committee place. Tory governments have removed troublemakers such as Nicholas Winterton. Reform will require backbenchers to take control of committee membership and the appointment of chairmen away from the party whips and hand it to their own committee of selection. It’s small constitutional beer compared with sweeping proposals such as demands for proportional representation voting at Westminster, but modest changes often matter more than dramatic ones. That coupled with changing attitudes.

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The Guardian | Thursday 21 May 2009

Secondary legislation

have a cosy relationship with sources, but that’s inevitable anywhere where reporters are “embedded” with their contacts. The solution is more transparency: Access Parliament should let virtually any journalists in. If there aren’t enough desks, there should be a press centre for bloggers – even Guido Fawkes. Lobby Ditto lobby briefings. Officials worry about single-issue obsessives, but everyone would soon get used to them. TV The rules on the use of footage from the chamber should be abolished. Have I Got News for You should be able to use the pictures and it should be easy for MPs to put footage on YouTube. The Tory MEP Daniel Hannan could offer some advice. Announcements Statements should be published well before a minister speaks at the dispatch box, so that MPs have time to think up good questions. Cameras and laptops MPs should be allowed to send pictures from the green benches. And journalists should be allowed to blog from the press gallery overlooking the chamber. I’d love to be the first.

Cancel ministers’ blank cheques es Henry Porter Any reform of parliament should urgently include means to restrict the use of secondary legislation – usually statutory instruments (SIs) – and provide better ways of scrutinising what are essentially ministerial edicts. Most bills contain clauses that allow for secondary legislation to be drafted in certain vaguely specified areas at a later stage – a blank cheque, if you like. Eventually these refined measures are presented to parliament and made law with almost no debate. Research shows that in the last two decades SIs have doubled, with a noticeable spike at the beginning of the Blair era. In 2005, there were an incredible 14,580 pages of legislation, of which nearly 12,000 were SIs. Much of this amounts to harmless regulation but increasingly we are seeing criminal offences created by unscrutinised measures that ride into the law on the back of primary legislation. The general point about SIs is that they greatly increase the power of the executive and allow ministers to avoid unfavourable publicity and critical examination. A statutory instrument should be published in draft form giving MPs the chance to look at the measure on its merits and describe in simple terms what it means. A sifting committee should apply a systematic scrutiny and decide whether the measure should be debated. To restore power and respect to MPs, SIs should be amendable by either house and both houses should have the power to refer back to the ministry concerned with precise suggestions. Once the measure becomes law there should be opportunities for post legislative scrutiny to see how it is working in practice.

Political parties

Reach out afresh to the public Andrew Rawnsley A parliament of independents: what an attractive idea. The Right Hon Martin Bell. Hooray! The Right Hon Esther Rantzen. Er, well, maybe. The Right Hon Russell Brand. Hmm. Perhaps this idea needs a rethink. Political parties are here to stay. An assembly of independents may be an Athenian ideal, but even in ancient Greece it wasn’t much put into practice. It isn’t going to work in a complex modern democracy. We need parties to guide, lead and clarify debate. When the talking stops, someone has to take a decision whether to sign that treaty, change that tax level, increase that budget and decrease that one. The trick is to reduce what’s bad about them and accentuate what’s good. All the parties desperately need to modernise their relationship with the public, not least because boosting membership is one way to reduce dependency on funding by vested interests. Parties need empowering so that it is worth being a member again. We need parties to supply MPs who can provide a pool of talent to become ministers and supply the Commons with quality invigilators of a powerful executive. The people the parties send to parliament need to be both more representative of the country and of a higher calibre. That means no more of MPs taking money in chandeliers, plasma screens, massage chairs and all the scandalous rest of it. It also means paying them a good salary. Would we like to see a Commons with fewer party hacks and more people with experiences, skills and perspectives developed in other walks of life? Would we, say, like to make it more attractive for the accomplished head of a comprehensive to make the career switch into politics? Then we should pay MPs that sort of salary.

Lobbying

Full disclosure and scrutiny Party funding

Beware shovelling state money Seumas Milne Before it was cash for MPs’ moats and flatscreen TVs, there was cash for questions and cash for honours. The growing conviction that influence can be bought by handouts from billionaires and corporate donors has been at the heart of the collapse in confidence in mainstream politics. Any reform has to include action to bring party funding and spending under control. That means tighter caps on national and local expenditure. The arms race between parties is the main factor feeding demand for dodgy donations. Closing it down would also make it easier to limit funding: you can’t buy much influence if personal donations are capped at, say, £1,000. Larger-scale funding should depend on transparency and accountability: shareholder endorsement, at least, in the corporate world; democratic backing in the voluntary sector. Which is already what happens in the trade unions. The demand to clamp down on union funding – the only clean money left in politics – would be to miss the point of the political crisis. Union funding is already open, regulated and accountable. It’s also one of the few factors kicking against the monopolisation of parliament by the professional middle class. Extending the model could help to open up Westminster’s magic circle. Far better than extending the dead hand of state funding, which tends to lock out new entrants, freeze the existing setup and make it less dependent on public participation. Quite apart from that, shovelling more money into the parties after the events of the past fortnight is surely a non-starter.

Communications

More transparency, new technology ogy y Andrew Sparrow Democracy only works if voters can access information that allows them to exercise choice. The problem is that parliament is institutionally hostile to scrutiny by the media. In recent years, parliament has become more open and the old lobby system, involving collective, unattributable briefings on a daily basis, has been scrapped. Political correspondents can still

Peter Preston There are constant themes to any Westminster reform: transparency, rigour, outside independent monitoring and enforcement. And that, in turn, means members’ interests and lobbying rules require few key changes. Much of the work was done 14 years ago by the committee on standards in public life (set up after the Guardian’s cashfor-questions revelations in 1994). Still, some holes need filling: post interests on the net within a week, not a month; declare gifts under 1% of a parliamentary salary (you can buy lots of bath plugs and toilet seats for £640); inspect lobbying firms prior to access to the Commons – and withdraw access if they transgress; make it impossible to pay lobbyists and also contribute to political party funds. But then – most crucial of all – comes the need for independent outside control. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards is just another “servant of the House” chosen by the House itself. But blow away their rotten expenses system and, in grim logic, members’ interests have to be policed by outsiders as well. So, bring in servants of the public and publish every ruling they give. Give commissioners job security: no more ditching Elizabeth Filkin if she makes too many waves, no more neutering of high-profile heads of the committee on standards (such as Sir Alistair Graham). Oh, and no more politicians on the standards committee either. They’re our watchdogs now. Not poodles playing on College Green.

MPs’ staff

Don’t hire relatives Catherine Bennett Each day, as more names are added to the villainy index, the reputations of the MPs who disdained to join in the great fiddle rise in public esteem. The Telegraph calls them “the saints”. But is it possible to be both virtuous and a specialist in nepotism? Hilary Benn, for instance, is one of many MPs who couldn’t think of a better parliamentary assistant than the person he had married. Not that one can deny the economies that must come from key staff sharing beds, free food and stimulating DVDs with their line managers. In fact, to listen to Margaret Beckett, explaining what fabulous value her husband, Leo, represents, being available to the minister at all hours, even on caravanning holidays, is to wonder why more public servants aren’t encouraged to recruit within the home. Don’t most have a spouse,

child, sibling, or even, like Peter Hain, an elderly parent, who could use the money? MPs’ patronage, under the guise of a “staffing allowance”, is up there with their expenses as an insulting, salary-boosting scam parading as baroque parliamentary tradition. They should sack any relations in their employment and replace them with properly recruited staff, to be paid directly by the House of Commons. And that includes the saints.

Attorney general

One law for all Tom Clark The outpouring of rage over MPs’ expenses reflects the sense that there is one set of rules for the people in charge, and another for everyone else. To rebuild trust, politicians must show that they understand that legal processes will always apply without fear or favour – including to themselves. The Iraq war and the pulled prosecution of BAE Systems are the two recent instances where this principle has been most egregiously breached. The attorney general was at the heart of both, and reformers would do well to start here. The attorney has three traditional tasks – to provide rigorous legal advice, to oversee prosecutions in the public interest, and to serve No 10 as a loyal minister. There is an urgent need to split these jobs up, a task Gordon Brown started but failed to finish. The criminal probe into BAE’s Saudi dealings was dropped after Tony Blair had personally written to the attorney. In the case of Iraq, the attorney was called into No 10 for talks on the eve of war, twice changing his mind on the legal position before finally giving the green light . Strengthening the rule of law must be at the heart of constitutional reform. A new respect for the courts, and perhaps new powers to strike down laws may eventually be part of the mix. But there is no better starting point than completing the halffinished reform of the attorney general.

The press

The vanishing reporter Ian Aitken A factor in the present collapse of public respect for parliament that is rarely discussed is the shrinking – almost vanishing – of the coverage of parliamentary debates in national newspapers. Defenders of the press argue this is down to MPs’ lack of interest in day-to-day business, demonstrated by the chamber’s emptiness during debates and the generally poor speeches. They are simply not worth reporting. This is partly true, but it is a two-way process. Many MPs don’t bother to participate in debates they know will not be reported. Why spend hours preparing speeches to appear only in Hansard? There is solid factual evidence for this assertion. In the 50s a strike in Fleet Street’s print shops closed down the national press for nearly three weeks. During that time there was a noticeable fall in the attendance of MPs, with an even sharper fall in questions tabled for ministers. In those days, even the popular newspapers maintained one or (in the case of the Mail and Express) two gallery correspondents. The Times and the Telegraph had teams of shorthand reporters. The Manchester Guardian had the incomparable Norman Shrapnel. Today the gallery correspondent is virtually extinct. Instead, there are sketch writers whose job is to be funny about parliament. I have no objection to sketch writers. But if a paper is going to make fun of MPs, it owes it to parliament to report what actually happens – which means rather more than recording the twice-weekly slapstick of prime minister’s questions. Most of the reforms must come from MPs. But this is one that could come from the press, and it is crucial not just to restoring the perception of parliament but also to reviving its function as the watchdog of the nation. You can’t be a successful watchdog if no one can hear you bark.

Entertainment

Settle votes with swordplay Simon Hoggart What parliament needs to reconnect with the public is more fun and more entertainment. The Commons is competing with a host of other entertainments and, of course, the internet. The public gallery usually has half a dozen people in it listening to a bill written in antique language being debated according to antique procedures. So, my suggestions are: Britain’s Got Legislators An annual TV series including tests for debating, committee work, expenses-claiming, etc. The winner spends the next year as an MP, sitting in the chamber, debating, asking questions, raising points of order and voting. Better costumes Bring back wigs – not just for the Speaker, but for everyone. It could resemble the start of the London marathon, with MPs turning up in clown costume, diving suits, baby nappies, etc. Music There should be musical interludes between debates. Swords MPs already have hooks on which to hang their swords, and the chamber famously has red lines to keep members two sword-lengths apart. Settling votes with cold steel instead of ballots would get the viewers in and, by reducing the numbers of MPs, would save money. Sponsorship This would bring in huge sums, enough for any number of chandeliers, flat-screen TVs, Christmas decorations, etc. The Sainsbury’s Sunday opening debate, for example, or the Boursin cheese appropriations bill. The new Speaker would say, “Order, order. This supply day is brought to you by Blossom Hill, the wine for when old friends get together for good times. Mr Cameron ... ”