I find it almost impossible to take a blog seriously when its central claim is that any British government in the recent past of forseeable future is really lurching towards totalitarianism. It is with this proviso that I offer a semi-approving link to this post.
The elected police chief – like the elected Mayor – cannot seriously be seen as a democratic step forward, can it? If one were to apply the logic that places ‘distributed moral wisdom‘ at the heart of a functioning democracy, then it is very hard to make the case for elections that foreground single individuals.
Surely, it is very hard to make the case that one vote every four years can endorse one individual’s approach to almost everything in a particular sphere? Surely this is little better than holding a plebiscite on a policy issue that most people don’t understand?
The recent London mayoral elections provides a very good case-in-point. Whatever you think of Ken Livingstone’s personal politics, he was an adornment to the Labour Party and he was a net contributor to the quality of parliamentary life while he was there. The same can be said for Boris Johnson in the context of his own party.
I’d go even further than that. Though they were /are all quite controversial figures, George Galloway, Ian Paisley, or Enoch Powell – in the context of 600+ other MPs – improve(d) the quality of the House of Commons. Variety is not only the spice of life, it’s also one of the magic ingredients of parliamentary democracy.
My argument is that this kind of distributed wisdom is the least unlikely way of getting competent and humane policymaking.
But distributed wisdom – whether it’s the type that was promoted by advocates of some versions of public choice theory, by Hayek, or the more swishy up-to-date ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ – only works if groupthink isn’t in evidence. And party groupthink is one thing you can’t – by definition – accuse these mavericks of.
So, should we be comfortable in voting for a political party that we generally favoured if it had one or two candidates that we really deplored? I would suggest that it is almost impossible to find a functioning party that doesn’t have a few problematic characters – after all, organisations tend to thrive as long as they have a diverse base. In fact, the presence of most mavericks – whether one personally finds them acceptable or not should makes a party more attractive to one, rather than less – if our starting point is that a good democracy is the product of a distributed moral wisdom.
Now, what if the unpalatable candidate is standing for one’s favourite party in the local constituency? How do we address that one? That’s a tougher one – but I’d still vote for them secure in the knowledge that they will be emerged into a more acceptable whole. This would be very different in a contest that would hand them fairly untrammelled power as an individual.
Now, if the party I voted for started doing what The Conservative Party did in Ealing Southall (David Cameron’s Conservative Party went on the ballot paper) , I’d struggle to vote for that party – not because of their overall policies, but because it would interfere with the notion of distributed moral wisdom.
This seems to me to be the paradox of political parties. On the one hand, if they are highly centralised, they are a damaging competitor to any decent model of democracy. But if they aren’t, they could make the whole shooting match work the way that it should.
For this reason, this proposal from the New Local Government Network (NLGN) makes sense. In summary, they want to replace the Greater London Assembly with a council made up of the leaders of London’s boroughs.
Again, on the principle of distributed moral wisdom, I’d go one step further and get rid of the elected mayor as well – and just have a regional assembly made up of nominated councillors, who in turn nominate a mayor.
Perhaps this would not only be a very good idea in principle for London. It would also provide a template for regional government throughout the rest of the UK. You could sack all of those MLAs in Northern Ireland, the MSPs and the WAMs. And you could set up regional assemblies where they don’t really sit properly everywhere else.
It would mean that councillors would have more power, and people would have a reason to care about which councillors they elect. And it would allow you to establish real regional government throughout the UK – without having to have a referendum!
Dear Paul, I obviously need to brush up on my “central claim” communication as I have not one jot of a belief that the British government is “lurching towards totalitarianism”.
Indeed, if that did occur, I would worry less about how much personal liberty and privacy my children might enjoy in the future as it would undoubtedly create the type of political and social reaction that would (the optimistic, maybe innocent part of me believes) radically move the agenda back to an accepted belief in the primacy of individual over state.
What will continue to happen is the gradual chipping away of liberty (however you might define it and that’s too big a subject to be debated in a comments box), erosion of the individual’s freedom of choice, and the hard wiring of the state into more areas of personal activity with a consequent decline in individual responsibility and social cohesion.
Unlike a genuine “lurch to totalitarianism”, each element of this process will have a majority or significant minority of support from people or groups who might otherwise oppose a strengthening of state power. The increasing influence and power of single issue groups gives any government the opportunity to exploit their exceptionalist responses to build a patchwork of control. Unfortunately, each group only sees a single dot, but the government has a tendency to join them into a picture (pretty or not depending on your perspective).
Best
thegrimpeeper
ps – re-read The Road to Serfdom
I think that the claim in your title bar – “Labour’s bullying regime…stamping on individual freedom, liberty and privacy” and the claim about how Honecker is the current government’s ‘guiding star’ is some way on the road to being a central claim that we are lurching towards totalitarianism GR, but as you wrote it, I’m sure you know what you meant.
You seem to be arguing that there is a one way street down which governments are reducing individual liberty, and I don’t particularly agree with that view (I’m familiar with Hayek’s work as well). I think that other developments mean that we enjoy many new liberties that we would have only dreamed of a few years ago.
There are plenty of other places to debate the the whole question of the individual v the state (in my experience, most political blog comment boxes are dominated by it) and I don’t want to get tied up in it here. However, I do think that this part of your comment….
“The increasing influence and power of single issue groups gives any government the opportunity to exploit their exceptionalist responses to build a patchwork of control. Unfortunately, each group only sees a single dot, but the government has a tendency to join them into a picture (pretty or not depending on your perspective).”
… is a very very good point and I may pinch it from you to use it elsewhere
I think that it reinforces the central premise of this (new) blog: That liberty depends upon *representative* democracy in which pressure groups of all kinds are very weak.
[...] pm on December 3, 2008 | # | Tags: Mayors, Referenda Wondering if electing police chiefs or mayors is almost as bad as calling a referendum? [...]
While I can see the need to create a formal process where the borough’s political leaderships can act as a check and balance to the Mayor I wonder if getting rid of the GLA is such a good way of achieving that.
In my experience leading a council can be pretty much a full time job on its own, finding time to focus on whether the Mayor is making the right decisions for bendy buses and so on strikes me as asking too much of them.
Also, without having read the NLGN paper, doesn’t ridding ourselves of the GLA mean loosing the capacity for the proper and detailed scrutiny that the select committees run?
I take your point Andrew – but surely that could be dealt with by providing the council leaders with more resources with which they could carry out their representative role?
It’s not that councillors don’t have the ability to assess and provide decisions on more issues, as long as those issues are being researched and framed properly.
We don’t have a different foreign secretary to negotiate our agreements with each foreign country, after all?