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At the University of Sheffield’s Festival of Social Science last week, Liberal Democrat Leader Nick Clegg called for radical change to fix Britain’s ‘broken politics’.
He challenged the two establishment parties to abandon their vested interests to allow reforms of our political system to regain the trust of the British people.
Calling for a Constitutional Convention, led by a ‘citizens’ jury’ of 100 people, to build a new constitution for Britain, Nick Clegg also set out steps that can be taken now including:
· Adopting the Power Commission proposal of allowing every voter to donate £3 to a party of their choice via the ballot paper in a General Election
· Funding to support political parties to come from cutting the cost of politics in other ways, for example reducing the number of MPs by 150 and cutting the Government’s advertising budget
· Banning political donations over £25,000 and limiting political parties to spending less than £10m every year, not just election years
In his speech, Nick Clegg said:
“People care, they just don’t care about politicians. And that should give us hope.
“If we build a new kind of politics, that engages with people in a different way, we can harness the side of people that cares, that is interested, that is engaged with society around them.
“My party, the Liberal Democrats, is in a unique position. We’re on the outside of the system. So we’re the ones who can prise it open and drive the change we need. That’s why I’m in politics.”
1 comment:
The speech in full:
Thank you for inviting me to speak and thank you to Colin for that fascinating presentation.
After all that Colin has said, I feel almost daunted to admit that I am, in fact, a politician.
There are, I think, very few other professions in which a person would be invited to account for why people who do his job are so widely hated.
But then, no profession is quite as hated as mine. So here I am.
And, as Colin’s said - the evidence is pretty compelling.
Colin’s figures on public trust of the different profession went up to 2006. But things have, I can reveal, changed since then.
In 2007, “politicians in general” finally beat journalists to the bottom spot.
76% of people say they think politicians don’t tell the truth.
Actually, it depends how you ask the question: in some surveys it’s up to 85%.
I guess I should count myself lucky you haven’t strapped me into a lie-detector machine to give this talk.
One more statistic: according to Mori polling, 89% of the British people think politicians put themselves or their party ahead of constituents and the national interest.
But I’m not here with a counsel of despair.
I’m here because I believe things can be different.
What would you do if you discovered that 9 out of 10 of your fellow
citizens thought you were a schmuck?
As anyone but the most insufferable narcissist knows, there is only one rational response.
Change.
My view is that for too long, most politicians have chosen a different course.
The elitist, establishment view is this: the people (bless their cotton socks) are misguided, and should be ignored.
So much of the debate in Westminster is complacent - based on an underlying belief that people aren’t voting because they’re comfortable with the status quo, turnouts will rise again at some point - and if they don’t, well, it doesn’t really matter.
So instead of changing politics, the two establishment parties have pulled up the drawbridge and fallen back into the comfortable arms of their own vested interests.
That strategy is arrogant, it’s wrong, and it’s doomed to failure.
People are already voting with their feet. At the last general election a third of voters chose a party other than the Big Two - and still more people chose not to vote at all.
In fact, in 2001, for the first time in our democratic history, more people didn’t vote, than voted for the winning party.
It happened again in 2005.
As we’ve heard this evening, there are complex forces at play making this happen.
But though the causes are complex, the response is simple.
This is the end of the line for the old kind of politics. It is time to build something new.
I don’t mean tinkering.
Our entire political system needs to be reconstructed from the bottom to the top.
We need a new voting system, of course, that gives voice to every voter instead of just a lucky few thousand in the key marginal seats. The estimates vary but the consensus is that perhaps 8,000 voters in a maximum of 80 marginal constituencies decide which party wins most seats in the House of Commons and forms a Government. That is about 1.8% of the registered electorate, or 3% of those who vote. By any reckoning, that is a grotesquely lop-sided and unrepresentative way of running elections.
But electoral reform isn’t enough.
I’m leading calls for a Constitutional Convention to build a new constitution for Britain.
And I want it led by a citizens’ jury of 100 people, instead of by the usual great and good.
The future of Britain shouldn’t be hammered out in secret, smoke-filled rooms, by the powers that be.
It should be created by the people, for the people.
And provide the protections all citizens need from the excessive intrusion of the state.
Our privacy has never been under more threat, as the government ploughs more and more money into technologies to monitor us.
We need a new charter of privacy for the modern age, to shield our private information like bank details, medical records and DNA from the public gaze.
A full review of the way Britain is governed must also deliver massive devolution of power to reverse the centralising excesses of Thatcher, Blair and Brown.
Britain is now the most centralised country in Europe.
Except Malta - which has a population only slightly larger than Bristol.
Labour and Conservatives alike see local government as a Whitehall delivery agency.
Almost every big policy being delivered at present in our town halls has a “Made in Whitehall” stamp on its base.
And this is just daft.
You can’t run thousands of schools from an office in Whitehall, and you can’t innovate effectively on a national scale.
If we restructure governance so it’s local, and community based, we can give people a real say over far more aspects of their daily lives.
Or, as Colin might put it, boost the supply-side provision of democracy.
More chances for democratic engagement will, I believe, boost people’s interest in that democratic engagement.
But only if - and it’s a big if - we clean up politics.
I want wholesale reform of pay and expenses.
Nothing damages democracy more than the belief that every politician has his snout in the trough.
Most of them don’t.
Scandals like that of Derek Conway cause such a stir because they’re
unusual.
But we need to make sure there’s no scope for, or suspicion of misdeeds, so people can have faith in our politics again.
Westminster needs to be reformed, so it’s a place of genuine debate and analysis, not just a cheap shouting shop where opposing parties hurl abuse at one another.
There are so many things about Westminster that are ridiculous.
And not just the tights and the wigs.
Take the Budget yesterday.
This is one of the most important government documents there is.
It spells out the state of the country’s finances.
It allocates cash for our schools, our hospitals, our pensioners.
It’s well over 600 pages long, full of tables and graphs and appendices.
And do you know when the Leaders of the Opposition Parties get a copy, to help them prepare an in-depth analysis in response?
We get it when the Chancellor sits down.
Sure, this creates moments of high political drama, with researchers dashing about waving copies of the Budget, and men in tailcoats passing urgent messages to MPs.
But it’s the most ludicrous basis for an informed debate I can possibly imagine.
Except perhaps Prime Minister’s Questions.
I don’t want to bore you with the details, but there truly is nothing quite like trying to speak over the wall of noise created by 600 grown men and women shouting directly at you.
Scrutiny is crucial. It’s the job of an opposition party. But under the current system, it just doesn’t happen.
Constitutional reform. Privacy protection. Devolution. Political reform.
These are the principles on which I want a new political system built.
The wishlist is long - and getting longer by the day as politics drifts further and further away from ordinary people.
I’m going to bring together people from my party and society at large over the coming months to hammer out some new ideas on all of them.
Before the summer I hope to have set out a new, liberal agenda, for constitutional changes to Britain from top to bottom.
Empowering people, patients, pupils, and parents, to take control of the way Britain is run.
With human sized-services designed for real families, not based on what suits the Whitehall system.
I’m devoting my party’s time and energy to this debate because I believe this sort of overhaul is necessary, urgent, and above all, achievable.
It won’t be easy.
Over-turning the vested interests that protect the status quo is hard in every circumstance.
But I am certain that once it begins, and people see that change really is achievable, the tide will be unstoppable.
So how can we create the momentum to begin this sort of fundamental change?
We’ve got to start with money.
The relationship between money and politics is rotten, and it is hollowing out our whole political system.
Both of the Big Two parties are in hock to millionaire businessmen, trade unions or both, and that’s bad news for us all.
When cash determines the rules, they will always be weighted in favour of people with the largest wallets.
That’s what happened in the US, where the humble voter has long played the poor cousin to the big money donors.
Well over $500m has already been spent in the US election and the polls don’t open for another eight months.
This will be the first billion dollar Presidential election.
Just think how many children you can send to school, how many patients you can treat, how many crimes you can solve with a billion dollars.
If Britain is to avoid this fate, we need to get money out of politics - now.
Again, tinkering is not enough, though we may need to take small steps initially.
We need a universal system where no donation over £25,000 is allowed.
It still seems a lot to most people, I know.
Most people can’t even dream of circumstances in which they’d have £25,000 spare to give to a political party.
But it would be a huge shift in our politics, which remains bought and sold by million-pound donations from the unions and tycoons.
By cutting out the big money donors, we can shift influence back where it belongs: to the people.
All parties have vested interests to defend.
And all parties must surrender them.
Unions, on top of their £25,000 limit, should be able to channel money from their members to the political parties.
But they shouldn’t only be channelling money to the Labour party.
The old labour versus capital divide is over.
It is nonsense to imagine that every member of a union is a Labour
supporter.
And I believe it undermines the unions’ brand - their endeavour to represent every worker equally - if they are so rigidly affiliated.
On the other side of the fence, the Conservatives have a different set of interests.
Their last general election campaign, and their plan for the upcoming one, is built on the premise of massive central spending to prop up local campaigns.
Michael Ashcroft, a Conservative peer, is pouring millions of pounds into marginal seats.
Their inbuilt cash advantage means the Conservatives are very reluctant to see spending limits reduced, or a real cap on donations.
But spending has got to be slashed too: no party should spend more than £10m a year.
Not just in an election year, but every year.
There have been many calls for state funding for our political parties.
My concern is that it will seem like a discredited establishment propping itself up with taxpayers’ money.
I would rather put control directly into the hands of people.
So I want us to seriously consider following the proposals of the Power Commission, which suggested allowing every voter to donate £3 to a party of their choice via the ballot paper in a General Election.
The money would come from public funds but only if people wanted to donate it - there would be an extra box on the ballot paper for them to choose.
However we support political parties, we shouldn’t put up taxes or cut vital investment to pay for it.
Schools and hospitals come first.
The money must come from cutting the cost of politics in other ways.
We must use the opportunity of a shift to fair votes to reduce the number of MPs and Peers. I’d like to see 150 less MPs, which would save us about £30m a year.
And we should cut the government’s £200 million advertising budget.
Some government advertising is important: public health campaigns, for example.
But there’s plenty that serves no useful purpose except to promote incumbency by telling everyone how marvellous the government is.
Do you know, in the months before the last general election, the government spend on advertising suspiciously doubled - and then doubled again?
This isn’t legitimate marketing, it’s self-promotion, and it must stop.
The plans I’ve set out tonight would be a massive transformation of our political system.
And they would be the catalyst for fundamental change.
Because they would free parties and politicians to listen to the people, instead of just major donors.
It’s the change that makes the rest possible.
When we think about why people hate politics, we have to remember that Britain is not a nation of grouchy misanthropists.
People care about issues.
Climate change. Poverty. Their local school or hospital.
There are marches and campaigns and petitions launched every day of the week. You’ve probably all been on one.
People care. They just don’t care about politicians.
And that should give us hope.
If we build a new kind of politics, that engages with people in a different
way.
We can harness the side of people that cares, that is interested, that is
engaged with society around them.
And, hopefully, triumph over the hatred.
My party, the Liberal Democrats, is in a unique position.
We’re on the outside of the system.
So we’re the ones who can prise it open, and drive the change we need.
That’s why I’m in politics.
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