If only all decisions were made by jurors, right....? (Click image for credit)
Like a minority of people who have watched what will surely be 2009′s official leitmotif - the demand for full disclosure from MPs – play out, I’ve wondered when similar demands will be applied to those who rival MPs for power.
This phrase of Larry Elliot’s – explaining the roots of the current economic crisis – underline the problem here:
“But there is a motley band of discontents for whom business as usual, in whatever form, means that another crisis will erupt before too long. They argue that the exiguous nature of current reform proposals is explained by the institutional capture of governments by the investment banks, the world’s most powerful lobbying groups.”
Certainly, politicians have been teed up so that they can be whacked squarely whenever they get ideas above their station. Right now, it would be hard to make the case that MPs are the right people to take on Tom Wolfe’s over-powerful Masters of the Universe.
In the same way that the Ross-Brand affair was used to tee the BBC up by politicians who don’t wish the corporation well, there’s an argument that demands for transparency rarely come from an organisation’s friends.
Much of this has been led squarely from the political right. The Taxpayers Alliance and a range of right-wing anti-BBC bloggers have worked in tandem with media owners that have been frustrated with what they see as the BBC’s anti-competitive influence on the media landscape. Certainly, at this moment, the libertarian right is the key mover behind the UK’s anti-politics campaigns on MPs expenses for reasons that have more to do with a pro-direct democracy position than more short term party political advantages. The current scandal has, after all, hurt the Conservative Party as well as Labour.
It’s hard to seperate this question from the differing political attitudes to the decline of newpapers. In no less a place than The Washington Post, we see this:
“For the first time in American history, we are nearing a point where we will no longer have more than minimal resources (relative to the nation’s size) dedicated to reporting the news. The prospect that this “information age” could be characterized by unchecked spin and propaganda, where the best-financed voice almost always wins, and cynicism, ignorance and demoralization reach pandemic levels, is real. So, too, is the threat to the American experiment.”
From the left, there appears to be an emerging response. The first is to harass the newspapers, those who use the libel laws to suppress inconvenient truths and other pedlars of perverted science. Jan Moir, Trafigura, and the British Chiropractic Association have all felt the sharp end of this kind of crowdsourced hostility in recent months.
Over on OpenDemocracy, Tom Griffin wants to see lobbyists put more firmly under the spotlight. Certainly, this idea has some traction with the liberal centre, and in the US, the Sunlight Foundation is at least as concerned with transparency on the question of lobbying as it is on the personal conduct of politicians.
It’s hard to see where this will end. There is a case to be made for…
- Significant reforms to media ownership rules to ensure that the media is sufficiently pluralistic
- Similar reforms that ensure that commercial lobbies can be uncoupled from self-serving media interests (I argued this point in a good deal more detail over on Left Foot Forward)
I would suggest that this argument has a long way to go. The left doesn’t appear yet to have recognised the importance of rescuing journalism in the way that the right has embraced it’s decline, otherwise the NUJ’s Jeremy Dear wouldn’t be struggling to raise his arguments for new forms of journalistic funding to a level where anyone would hear them.
And if you’ll forgive me further self-linking, there are a number of posts here that raise the question of what happens if we treat politicians as jurors. If MPs are only really allowed to meet advocates in a recorded way, that would surely be the consequence of Tom’s proposal?
Either way, I’d suggest that advocates of transparency from all sides need to spend more time outlining what they think is permissible and desirable in representation, campaigning and media behaviour. We all seem to know what we’re against, but the interesting question, for me, is what we are in favour of?
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
