The commentariat and their version of democracy

Simon Jenkins - paid to adopt the easy high-ground?

I’d like to start a national campaign – if you’ll join me in it  – in which the columnists who denounce the actions of elected politicians are obliged to step forward, say what they are in favour of themselves, and defend it.

If this were to happen, I’d ask for The Times / Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins to be first on the stand:

In the Guardian the other day, he started a piece on ‘localism’ thus:

“When I hear a politician proclaiming his localism I count the spoons.”

I have to say that, when I read a member of the professional commentariat claiming some sort of superiority over elected politicians, I count mine. This isn’t an attack on one political position against another. It’s a general dig at politicians.

Jenkins – perhaps more than any commentator I’ve read in the UK broadsheet press – specialises in a promotion of populist direct democracy without ever actually coming out and formally making the case for it.

He presents himself as a plain-and-simple democrat when in fact he is advocating a widespread use of referendums instead of the election of representatives. I’ve never seen him stick his head above the parapet and defend plebiscites against the many moral criticisms that they should attract.

Take this post, for example:

“Have you noticed how the political establishment hates elections? It regards them as vulgar, foreign, exhibitionist and unpredictable. To those in power they are mere concessions to mob rule. If electors did not insist on them, elections would have been abolished long ago as Victorian gimmicks to appease proletarian sentiment.”

That article requires a very close reading before you realise what’s wrong with it. In every case here, when he advocates ‘elections’ he actually means ‘referendums’ – read the article and see if I’m wrong about this. And if he had used the correct word, then I suspect that a large proportion of his readers would have sided with the politicians who ‘hate elections.’ But the intention of the piece can only be to sneak an argument for referendums in under the guise of a more general argument for more local democracy.

So, it was with some relief, initially, that I read his criticism of the Conservatives’ proposals for local government – heavily reliant upon plebiscites as they are. Curiously – for someone who has so consistently promoted this populism, he refrained from endorsing Cameron’s proposals for directly elected officials and numerous referendums. Reprising the De Tocqueville quote that was used here, he concluded that it was not in the DNA of national politicians to promote decentralised government, and that you can tell what they really mean by following the money.

But then it struck me: For all of his calling for more powers to be held locally, his berating of …

“the reluctance of politicians to trust people to reach mature decisions on how they are governed”

…the word ‘councillor’ is entirely missing from the whole 1000+ word article. Very odd in an article that demands stronger local government, don’t you think?

I wonder what we need to do to smoke him out on this one?