The consequence of a retreat from politics?

Dennis Skinner - thought to be sceptical about consensus politics. (Pic: Riana Dzasta)

It’s an interesting twist to the question I’ve been asking, on and off, over the past few weeks: What kind of representatives do we want?

So far, the options have included jurors, rogues and public paragons of virtue. But over on Spiked Online, Brendan O’Neill suggests a somewhat alarming possibility: Maybe we need people who are locked in a partisan struggle – people who will die in a ditch to defend the interests of a social class or ideological clique. Maybe we need (shock … horror) politicians to represent us?

In short, he suggests that the whole expenses scandal is the product of a regrettable retreat from politics – a move to make Parliament meet the petty demands of it’s rivals, and a refusal to prioritise and accommodate political conflict:

“New Labour has discovered that transparency begets, not trust, but further suspicion – the more politicians make their personal purity into their major selling point, and the more they imply that parliament is a potentially corrupt and sleazy place, the more they invite scrutiny of their every foible and Kit Kat purchase.”

He goes on…

“Between 1997 and 2001, the Commons’ Modernisation Committee – also known, Orwellian-style, as ModComm – published numerous substantive reports. Only two of them proposed strengthening democratic debate in the Commons; the rest proposed making it more ‘efficient’. One change, which ‘further limited parliamentary scrutiny’, was the introduction of ‘programming motions’, which effectively brought the guillotine down on debates about new legislation in the interests of ‘saving time.”

The whole article is worth a read, begging the question: Do we really want our laws to be made by someone whose prime concern is to demonstrate that they’ve come up with a cost-effective means of arriving at legislative decisions? Surely O’Neill is right to argue that MPs expenses will not be the end of the story, and that some more trivial aspect of the way politics is conducted will take over where the Daily Telegraph‘s revelations leave off?

And do we want to see more political cut-and-thrust in public life? While the conventional wisdom is that partisan politics ‘turns people off’, is it the case that a tooth-and-nail system of adversarial politics is what we really need to get democracy working again? Do we need more politicians like Enoch Powell, Dennis Skinner, Mrs Thatcher, Tony Benn and Barbara Castle?