I plan to argue that the 1979 election of the Conservatives, and the 2010 election that resulted in the Conservative/LibDem coalition, illustrate crises of representation as well as crises within the economy.
The first being the argument between the unions and the government about who should rule, and the second showing the tensions between party, electorate, elected representatives, party leadership, and government; and in both cases in response to the underlying economic and structural changes that have developed as capitalism has globalised.
Democracy is seen as the most legitimate method of government, in so far as it allows the people to rule, in a direct translation of the word. However, only the earliest, relatively primitive instances of democracy allowed all the people to rule day by day, and even those only allowed free male citizens to do so. In practice, every actual democracy has been a representative one, where, by some process, a number of individuals are selected to represent the will of the people for a period of time. Typically the process will be an election, and the key question to be asked is how the selection of those allowed to vote, the process, and the relationship between the people and the selected representative works : how does this machinery result in legitimacy. Because if it does not result in legitimacy, those who lose out in the resolution of the irreconcilable will not accept it. I will argue that the need for representation to be, and be seen to be, legitimate, is essential for the continued functioning of politics. The willingness of political representatives to engage in political negotiation and for their constituencies to accept the resolution of differences that results from this is dependent on the belief that the representatives do indeed legitimately represent them, rather than acting on their own behalf. It’s possible that the recent public anger in the UK over the misuse of expenses has less to do with the actual money (which in terms of the total UK Government spend is trivial) and far more to do with the suspicion that a representative who spends their time fiddling expenses is more concerned with their own well being than that of their constituents. The corruption removes their legitimacyas representatives. The contest over whether any particular representative, government, or form of selection of representatives is legitimate that results from these situations is indicative that “representation” is indeed a living political idea, and I will expand on the various ways in which it lives in what follows.
In economic terms, the 1979 election was a response to the changing terms of trade, such that simple primary and manufacturing jobs were more economically carried out in developing countries, and the result in the UK was that those jobs were largely eliminated, putting large groups into long-term welfare dependency. The 1997 election represented the hope that having rebalanced our economy, we could continue to have the levels of social welfare that had been in place from 1945 – 1979, while the 2010 election seems to be an attempt to make the best of the financial market disaster that has engulfed the UK along with the rest of the world. But each of these underlying economic situations had the political effect of creating an apparent crisis in representation also.
One strand in the political crisis of representation is demonstrated by low turnout for elections; another is the widespread idea in the UK that all politicians are the same, David Marquand (2008, p53) “if you ask people...they say... there is nothing to choose between them”. A further strand is a loss of trust: (ibid, p55) “there’s been a...precipitate fall in the level of trust by the public...in their politicians” All these symptoms may indicate a perception no matter who governs the UK, similar undesirable things happen. For example when Kraft took over Cadbury, almost immediately the Cadbury UK factory was closed, but further investigation revealed that the UK factory would likely have been closed anyway, whether or not the factory was taken over. “The plant, ..., had been slated for closure in 2011 by Cadbury, with most of the work moving to a new production site in Poland” (Wilson, A & Russell, J, 09 Feb 2010, Daily Telegraph) . David Held remarks (2008, p43) that “in the era of intensification of globalisation” labour power and the state have remained immobile, while capital “has escaped....the...triangle of power” enabling the relocation and international division of labour to capital’s advantage. It is unlikely that the electorate see the situation as analytically as this, but the feeling that promises will always be broken, for whatever reason, is evidenced by the above.
In the years leading up to 1979 the settled political consensus was of an alternation between “one nation” Tory governments and pragmatic Labour governments whose main ambition was to make capitalism work slightly better for the working class, rather than undertake socialist revolution.
But underneath this cosy arrangement, the world was changing. A large fraction of the UK’s working population worked in extraction industries, and unsophisticated primary manufacturing. The globalisation of the energy market, particularly in coal, and the discovery of North Sea Oil, deprived the miners of their crucial position in the UK’s energy market. Meanwhile, the union leaders in the car industry waged guerrilla war with incompetent managements, ignoring the growing economic threat of Japanese car makers, and the dock workers ignored the changes sweeping over international trade with the coming of containerisation.
The last years of the Callaghan government seemed to illustrate the view that the union “barons” were the true rulers of the country, while the democratically elected government could do nothing. Surely the union leaders were representing the desires of their members, the working class? And therefore, surely the government would similarly represent those desires? The breakdown in the links between the electorate, the unions and the government illustrates several key ideas. The idea of union leaders representing their membership had become institutionalised in ways that were not convincingly democratic. Michels argues that the interests of the leadership of a group or political party diverge from those of their members. “As a result of organization, every party or professional union becomes divided into a minority of directors and a majority of directed.” (Michels R., 1996, p70) Further, that this is in the nature of groups, rather than because the leadership is corrupt in any way. In the case of the unions the apparent detachment of the union leaders from their membership and the electorate at large shows how their claim to represent the working class lost legitimacy. The union leaders were more interested in increasing their own power and influence than protecting the interests of the working class as a whole, even if they did aim to protect at least most of their immediate membership.
Union leaders negotiated directly with the government (famously over “beer and sandwiches”) but it was far from clear that either side represented the desires of the people.
The Heath government attempted to deal with the problem, but ineffectually, and when he went to the country on a question of “who governs” the “commonsense answer was: 'not you, mate’” (Marr, A , 2007) After several years of the following labour government, with the well known “Solomon Binding” agreements between government and unions, the ability of the political class to control union power fell apart in the 1978/9 “winter of discontent”.
Underlying this was the change in the way global capitalism was working. Containerisation was many times less labour intensive than manual dock labour, open cast coal quarrying in Colombia and Australia vastly cheaper than deep mined coal in the UK, and manufacturing was migrating to Japan and later to the Asia Pacific region, fuelled by capital mobility and the availability there of cheap and compliant labour. So the attempts of the union leaders to protect their own interests, their members, and the working class in general rested on a presumed political settlement where the state, labour power, and capital all needed each other equally, while in fact capital had the alternative of disconnecting the expensive resources, and reconnecting with less expensive ones elsewhere in the world.
Stuart Hall, using a Gramscian/Marxist analysis of the Conservative political response to the situation (Marxism Today, June 1987) “Thatcherism aimed for a reversal in ordinary common sense. The ‘commonsense' of the English people had been constructed around the notion that the last war has erected a barrier between the bad old days of the 30s and now: the welfare state had come to stay; we'd
never go back to using the criterion of the market as a measure of people's needs, the needs of society. There would always have to be some additional, incremental, institutional force -the state, representing the general interest of society - to bring to bear against, to modify, the market.” However, once global capitalism had escaped serious control by any individual state, the UK government had little or no choice but to accede to the demands of the market. In many ways the defining act of the Thatcher government was the defeat of the miner’s union, not merely a strike, with considerable violence on both sides of the dispute. Who, in this conflict, legitimately represented the will of the British people? For some, perhaps, it was the working class miners and their union leadership, but the Conservative government at this time could claim more legitimacy, as the representatives of the whole of the public. Madison (1987 pp122-321) argues that representative government, allows the representative governing elite to deal with the potential problems of faction (party) in a constructive way that would likely be impossible in a pure democracy, because representatives are wiser and more thoughtful than the citizens themselves might be, and that this checks the danger of tyranny of the majority. He does seem to ignore the risk that once a party has control of the government, it may act in accordance with the interests of its supporters. If the analysis of the international competitiveness of deep mined British coal and the ability of the global economy to reconfigure its sources of supply is sound, then no government could have protected the British mining industry. But perhaps the impact on the miners and their communities could have been handled less confrontationally. At the same time, large parts of the UK industrial infrastructure were being shown to be uneconomic, and a massive restructuring of the UK’s economy was underway. Hall, S (1987) “Gramsci has give[n] us a profoundly expanded conception of what politics itself is ... We are living through the proliferation of the sites of power and antagonism in modern society” We see that government is only one of the organisations that claim to represent the people, and perhaps not the most powerful, while in the background the decision makers of the global economy represent no-one, or perhaps their shareholders. Castells (2000, p 374) writing in 1998 describes this: “global financial markets, and their networks of management, are the actual collective capitalist, the mother of all accumulations” and the mother of all financial crises, too, as we now know.
The changes I’ve described and the development of a new structural arrangement between the state, labour and capital were by no means immediate – and of course many other developments were in train at the same time. In particular the simple labour/capital split of 19thC Marxism was far less useful as an analytical framework as it ignored the development of knowledge workers and the simultaneous creation of a large underclass excluded from society for whom work was no longer a realistic option.
The 1997 election was another watershed election – Labour had clearly broken the link with the unions by the removal of Clause 4 from the constitution. Blair (1996) writing in the Times: “we are a democratic socialist party. It says so in the new Clause Four in words I drafted and the party overwhelmingly supported.” They had become electable because they no longer were attempting to change the economic basis to how it had been – and the 18 years of conservative rule had resulted in a vastly improved economyfor many, but simultaneously the reduction of the welfare state’s ability to provide the social necessities and safety net that the market would not provide. In the event, while Labour possibly did their best, in the end they failed to restore the secure infrastructure that was being looked for, and merely provided – as they had in the years leading up to 1979 – a slightly more equalitarian version of the capitalism of the previous 18 years. By breaking their link with the unions, they could represent the people, but of course were unable to change the underlying economic structure. Not that they tried.
During the 2010 UK election there were a number of significant issues that would have been exercising the minds of the electorate. The dire financial situation had been ongoing for over 2 years, and while few understood exactly what had happened, or why, it was clear that somehow the global financial system had collapsed. Simultaneously there was a further loss of trust in the political class caused partly by the expenses scandal, and partly by the fin de siècle behaviour of the Labour government, and underpinned by suspicions about corruption in other areas such as “cash for peerages”, campaign funding, etc. Dahl, R(2008 pp19-24)) theorises that in the real world democracy as such is approached, not actually achieved, and he calls the real world instances of democracy “polyarchy” By polyarchy Dahl implies that there are a number of competing power sources, rather than a clear line from the electorate to the representatives . The simple idea that the government is the dominant power in the country, and that it is created by MPs who are elected by the people, is only partly true. There are many other power sources, some external to the country – treaties, the European Union, for example; some internal to the organisation of government – while the civil service may be theoretically willing to carry out any government instruction, they often have views and interests of their own. And there are newspapers, pressure groups and on and on. One recent example was the way the Barclay brothers, owners of the Telegraph, used the expenses scandal as a long running story, which diminished the salience of the financial situation.
A particular concern with representative democracy is turn out. If only just over half the electorate vote, and their vote (in the UK, for example) goes mostly to the three major parties, it’s possible to have a majority government that claims to represent all the people, but it has been elected by say 40% of the voters , who themselves are only 60% of those eligible to vote. In such a case the mandate to govern would have come from less than a quarter of the electorate. Not an overwhelming endorsement and perhaps insufficient if truly unpopular measures were needed. “if people are repelled from politics, and if you were to go down to turn-outs of under 50 per cent then that would be a crisis. But we’re not there yet.” (Heffernan, R, 2008). The result of the 2010 election gave the conservatives a plurality of the seats, but not an overall majority. The possibilities that were available to the 3 major parties were limited. The conservatives could have formed a minority government on their own – possibly relying on the Liberal Democrats ( LibDems)for “Supply and Confidence” support in exchange for some relatively minor concessions. Labour could have tried to form a majority by forming a coalition with the LibDems and some other minor parties, or the Conservatives could form a majority by coalition with the LibDems. The idea of coalition government is not new, but it’s unusual in UK politics and people needed to try to understand how it would work, adapting practices from countries where it has been used more routinely. Part of the challenge of developing a coalition in the UK was the tension between the representation that actually occurred, and what was needed to create a working government. The party leaderships that agreed the coalition obviously had their own interests which would have differed from the bulk of the elected MPs, their own parties at large, and the voters who voted for them. Michels (1962, p365) “Every party organization represents an oligarchical power grounded upon a democratic basis.” And both party leaderships would have had to judge how far they could stretch their mandates, what they could give up, what they could agree, and on what they would have to agree to differ.
Manin, B. (1987, p352) states that “legitimate law is the result of general deliberation, not the expression of the general [averaged] will.” To construct policy, the representatives deliberate, and the result of that deliberation is then voted on. Similarly, the process of electing the representatives in the first place involves a general deliberation among those to be represented, with the candidates making their case to be the representative.
By contrast, Schumpeter theorises that the collective will is created by the political elites “Human Nature in Politics being what it is, they [the elites] are able to fashion and, within very wide limits, even to create the will of the people. What we are confronted with in the analysis of political processes is largely not a genuine but a manufactured will.” (Schumpeter, J, 1976 p263). It’s evident in the control over the political agenda exerted by the media and the political elites that the issues discussed may allow no meaningful choice to the electorate, one example being the lack of dissent among any of the three major parties to the UK’s involvement in the Afghan war.
The elected MPs are a long way from being representative in the sense of containing similar numbers of various groups, with a surprisingly large number of white, middle/upper class public-school educated men compared with the public at large.. The idea of rule by an elite is a living thread through many discussions of politics and representation. Jeremy Mitchell (2008, p2) mentions that “Mosca, Michels, Pareto thought ...there was always rule by a minority”. Schumpeter and later Dahl develop this analysis, arguing that the people select a ruling elite in free and fair elections. It’s important to note that while the electorate are interested in probing the views of the competing elites on various matters, what is happening is a competition for the right to rule, not a competition to identify the group which espouses policies which best represent the pre-existing views of the electorate “A party is a group whose members propose to act in concert in the competitive struggle for political power.” Schumpeter (1976, p 283)
One of the ideas that came to life more than usual during the 2010 campaign was that of appropriate voting models. The inspiration for this came from two directions. First, there were repeated analyses that indicated that a hung parliament was likely, and second the discussion of the relative percentage of national vote compared with likely outturn in number of seats. Also, Leader debates on television increased the visibility of the LibDems in the campaign, and that enabled them to get their long standing objective of a proportional representation (PR) voting system onto the agenda. These ideas were changed and adapted, and have surfaced as part of the coalition agreement in the form of an agreement to a referendum on the Alternative Vote system. While this is not PR, and not what the LibDems would ideally want, it’s a significant step for the Conservatives who previous to the election preferred the existing single member plurality system. The process of representation in a democracy depends on the electorate voting for their representatives, and the development of democracy has gradually extended the franchise. However, this argument is about the idea that it is not just one’s immediate representative that matters, but the government that results, and that for many, perhaps most, voters it is the government, not the local representative, that matters most. Burke (1854-6, pp 446-8) argues that Parliament is a deliberative assembly, where an MP is not a delegate of their constituents, but their representative retaining their own views. Sometimes this may be true, but often an MP votes in line with their party whip, representing neither their own, nor the constituency view. The electorate are aware of this, and would therefore wish to control the composition of the government as well as their representative in the legislature. Dahl would, no doubt, argue that this was one of the areas where there can be no perfectly democratic solution; and we adopt the best possible solution in a political way – the processes of political representation itself being as subject to political debate as any other part of politics. Berman, D. in the political blog 538 points out “There have...been cases where... the bias of the electoral system was so systematic that it eventually undermined the (albeit) limited legitimacy of the system in regards to its own voters, and eventually led dissenters to opt out of the political system entirely.” (Berman, D, 22/May/2010). Low turnout as discussed earlier is a symptom of opting out.
Marquand supports my view that these watershed elections are in some sense a response to the current capitalist crisis “The newly untamed capitalism of the last 30 years has ... been driven by stampeding herds of electronic gamblers. It is not only monstrously unjust, it is also unsustainable” Marquand, D. (Guardian 25/May/2010), although his view is that the response of the political elite in forming the LibDem/Conservative coalition was incorrect, and that the correct response would have been “a realignment of the mind, socialist in economics and republican in politics.” (ibid) Maybe he would have preferred the near impossibility (post election) of a LibDem/Labour/others coalition, and his position is reminiscent of DickTuck's concession speech following his loss of the 1966 California State Senate election: "The people have spoken, the bastards." (Gutel, R, 22/10/ 2004, National Public Radio). Castells, writing in 1998 makes a similar point as part of his Network society thesis “The relationship between globalisation and the state...is the dominant political issue at the turn of the millennium” (Castells, M. 2000, p337). The common ground between Stuart Hall’s Gramscian/ Marxist analysis in the 1980s, Castells in the 1990s, and Marquand’s contemporary view is that there is a powerful and unresolved tension between representative governments of states and the global economy on which we all now rely, and the recurrence of this theme over a 30 year period indicates that the idea of a lack of democratic representation in the global economy is still inspiring critical analysis.
We have a situation where the political structure of the organised parts of the world is based on states, while the underlying economic forces have escaped state control and become globalised. Simultaneously: identities, whether nation, group, sexual religious, or any other form of shared meaning have also detached from the state, linking across or inside state boundaries, but no longer with the presumed integration of a national culture with the state. “...nations, independently from the state, become the sources of identity based legitimacy...” (Castells, 2000, p359)
In conclusion it seems that there is always a tension between what the electorate want, and what their representatives actually deliver. The discussion above indicates that some of the distance between the two is down to the intrinsic nature of representation and social organisation. On the one hand representatives are bound to represent their constituents in the light of their own views; on the other the leadership of any organisation, in this case a political party, whether one forming a government or not, naturally takes account of its own interests in preference to those of the wider organisation. However, at these watershed elections, the UK’s scheme for turning the electorate’s desires into votes, MPs and hence a government, delivers an arguably legitimate result. The 1979. 1997, and 2010 elections each in their different ways reflected the mood of the country, and the electorate’s judgement of the most likely political structure to deal with the combined crises of the underlying economy and of representational legitimacy. Indeed, one benefit of the 2010 coalition is that the combined percentage vote (of those voting!) for both parties was well over 50%, giving additional legitimacy to the probable unpalatable choices ahead. One might go further, and wonder whether they have made the right choice, but that way dictatorship lies. However representative the government of the UK might be of the UK electorate, it seems that many of the economic forces that shape our world have escaped state control – so the people have no real democratic control over the global economy. That remains a challenge for the future development of politics in the UK and worldwide.
(Actual words 4138)
References/Bibliography
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