Not democracy, but plutocracy
(From Tribune.)
When Sir Hayden Phillips was appointed in the wake of the cash for honours episode, a lot more was at stake than simply new arrangements for party funding. In the background was a long-laid plan for the Americanisation of British politics
Sir Hayden’s key recommendation – a £50,000 cap on donations, with some restrictions on national or local spending – would, if accepted, lead inexorably towards ever greater dependence of all the political parties on rich donors, whether companies or individuals, as in the US. Apart from reproducing in Britain the cancer at the heart of the American plutocracy, it would emasculate even further the sense of shared involvement which has always been at the heart of British political democracy.
The essence of the US political model is that parties exist for fund-raising and vote-getting purposes at elections, not for political education or for participation in the political process through lobbying of leaders or ministers. Political leaders, who are dependent for their election on a war-chest drawn from rich donors, overwhelmingly big business, owe no allegiance to operating political parties or to any particularly distinctive political or class ideology. American politics is thus driven by this alliance of convenience between a narrowly drawn political elite and the business plutocracy that sustains it on condition of rewards and kickbacks from whichever party wins.
British politics is still a long way from reaching this point. But the signs of seismic change in this direction in the last days of the Blair era are all too apparent. A donation cap of £50,000 would virtually cripple the mass financing of the Labour Party via the trade unions whilst still allowing the Conservative Party to draw in full on its traditional source of funding from wealthy corporate and individual donors, only spread more widely than before. Though some of the finance gap, probably only a small part because of public distaste, may be met by State funding, the dependence of British politics on rich donors would be remorselessly increased.
There are several ironies in this situation. A scandal that arose from the demand to clean up British politics from the alleged corruption of selling peerages in exchange for huge cash contributions has now been turned on its head by efforts to suppress the one element in the current system that is genuinely democratic – the contribution by millions of union members to a political fund legitimised by a regular vote. By contrast, large-scale contributions by companies are not subject to any vote of either shareholders or employees.
Another irony is that the Hayden Phillips proposals seem to be targeted at reducing or eliminating trade union influence when the real corrosive power behind the scenes is wielded by business funding. The Phillips review proposes “individualisation” whereby each union member opts in or out each year of contributing to political parties. Collective trade union funding would largely come to an end. Yet all the evidence suggests that union monies have had no influence whatever in subverting the political process over the last two decades, while corporate monies exert very considerable power in overriding democratic channels and due legal process. The Ecclestone affair, the kow-towing to Murdoch, Blair’s over-close relationship with BP and BAE Systems (and those are just the ones we know about), the alleged cash for peerages episode itself, together with the policy of keeping employee workplace rights firmly under the thumb of the employers, all point in this direction.
But radically increasing dependence on business and other wealthy donors is only part of the present landscape that is moving. Several other proposals currently floated are coming together like pieces in a broader jigsaw. There is already talk of introducing primaries for the election of party leaders. No.10 has been strongly pressing for a loose “supporters’ network” as an addition to, and perhaps eventual substitute for, party membership. The advantage for the proponents of this political model is that ‘supporters’ could be readily targeted by email while bothersome members continually demanding a participatory role in policy-making could be dispensed with. Already Labour Party Annual Conference has been reduced to a grandstanding for the Leader’s speech, and now the idea of it being held less frequently, say biennially, is being talked about. Party subscriptions have been raised to £36 a year – a further discouragement to low-paid members when ‘supporters’ are not charged anything at all.
Again there is a bitter irony here. All of these measures will conspire to increase power in the hands of the political leadership. Yet the single biggest failure of the British political system today is the over-centralisation of power within a narrow, unelected clique around the Prime Minister which excludes the Cabinet and the elected Parliament, together with the almost total breakdown in the democratic checks and balances for holding the Executive and particularly the Prime Minister to account.
Britain now has in effect a President without the counter-balances of the Presidential system in the US where a separately elected Congress can act as an effective check against arbitrary Presidential rule. In Britain, by contrast, the unitary hierarchy of power from Prime Minister downwards undermines the constitutional necessity of a separation of powers, as the current questions over the independence of the Attorney-General’s advice about the legal case for the Iraq War and the closing down of the SFO investigation into suspected corruption in the Al Yamamah arms deal with Saudi Arabia make only too clear. There is no case whatever for changing party funding arrangements in a manner which will consolidate yet further Prime Ministerial power linked to private deals with big business – quite the reverse.
For several decades, the power of the Prime Minister has grown. It is still growing, and now needs to be cut back as a matter of urgency. The current proposals however for restructuring party funding do not represent the modernisation of politics in Britain. They reflect rather the emasculation of the existing balance of power which will lead inexorably towards the Americanised system where corporate coffers buy political parties. That’s not democracy, but plutocracy.