Political Parties Do Not Deserve Public Funding

The latest scandal to afflict the finances of political parties has revived the old demand for public funding. Strangely enough, this demand always seems to proceed from the presumption that parties must be funded somehow, rather than justifying such a premise.

Public funding derives from either taxes or borrowing. We have an unsustainable fiscal deficit, so perhaps now is not the best time to suggest yet another call upon the public purse.

The calls upon tax revenue already have to be rationed; there are far more causes worthy of state support than there is state support available. Who will explain to the patients queuing in ambulances outside A&E that in our wisdom we decided funding political parties was more important than their medical needs? Who will explain to our troops in the field that they are short of equipment because we allocated higher priority to political funding?

The party system in this country may have evolved as a method for the legislature to seize power from the executive but it has been sustained to a point where legislative tyranny has supplanted executive tyranny. Politics as a civic duty has given way to politics as a career to be pursued by an entire class of professionals who are without knowledge or understanding of real life as lived by taxpayers and who do not appear to understand that before money can be spent it must first be earned.

These professionals believe that they should be allowed to spend our money on the communication to us of party-biased misinformation. The more of it they are allowed to spend, the more distortions their advertising campaigns put out and the more special advisers they are able to appoint in order that ministers may be surrounded by yes-men rather than impartial civil servants.

The party system in the UK is moribund; parties used to be mass movements, now they are largely hollow shells inhabited by few but careerists. Nevertheless they maintain a stranglehold on government. In the 1950's over 90% of voters supported one of two parties and election turnout exceeded 80%; now over a third of us don't vote at all and the two big parties only poll two thirds of the votes that are actually cast.

When our great metal bashing industries lost market share at such a rate we reluctantly closed them down and learned as a nation to make our living in other ways. Likewise we need to reinvent our democracy not just subsidise dying political dinosaurs.

There are public services for which British taxpayers have shown themselves more than happy to pay. Funding political parties is not amongst them.

As long as it's black ....

I used to teach my students that the need for marketing was primarily the result of oversupply.
 

In undersupplied markets the producer is sovereign to the extent of consumers having little choice beyond taking what is on offer or going without. During the early industrial period and right up to the middle of the twentieth century, merely possessing the latest exciting consumer durable such as a TV or a washing machine was enough to make you the envy of your friends.

A combination of mass production technologies and cheap labour resulted in a reversal of this order of things in the third quarter of the century. In oversupplied markets the producer who lacks a good marketing mix will lose out to competitors who understand the customers better, even if the latter has a technically inferior product. The least successful at selling will see their products remain on the shelves or in the display rooms.

In some ways I think the established political parties in the West are behaving like early twentieth century industrialists. They assume that grassroots members can be safely ignored and voters will continue to vote for the big old parties because only they can assemble the majorities needed to control government.

Just because voters are concerned about EU regulations, migration, and in Scotland home rule it doesn't mean their concerns need to be addressed. Since the days of Edmund Burke politicians have hidden behind the defence that they are not delegates but experts, whereas voters are basically ignorant.

Before the information revolution this position might have been sustainable. In an age of 24/7 news and minute scrutiny of public officials it is not. We see the rise of populism all over the West, some of it unattractive to say the least, but all of it responding to the neglect of the citizenry by the traditional plotical classes.

It is long past time our politicians stopped behaving like feudal barons and started taking the views of their constituents more seriously.

More Thoughts on Democracy

Hardly anyone in the West can be found to argue against democracy; indeed, it is considered a truism that democracy is the best form of government. Countries moving towards democracy are regarded as making political progress, whilst those with other systems are trapped in political backwardness. When applied to systems of government, the word ‘undemocratic’ has become almost a synonym for ‘bad’.

You would certainly be excused for thinking that we believe ourselves and most of our immediate neighbours to possess democratic systems. Yet can we even define the concept? One hears elected politicians, who presumably ought to know what they are doing, regularly make a simplistic equation between democracy and majority rule.

If democracy were indeed the same thing as majority rule then of course it would be far from the best possible system of government. It is not hard to show examples of what J S Mill called the tyranny of the majority. Suppose a society to be divided upon ethnic, religious or economic grounds, such that one section was always outvoted. Would it be democratic for the majority to rob, persecute, or enslave that minority? If not, then democracy must imply limits to what the majority may do. These limits are usually understood to be human and civil rights.

Even more crudely, the doctrine of the ‘mandate’ is nowadays widely taken to mean that an elected government is empowered to put into practice any element of the manifesto upon which it stood. The voters who supported a government are held to have endorsed everything that it proposed, despite the fact that, except for the occasional referendum, there exists no mechanism by which the electorate may disagree.

Democracy means rule by the people, not the dominion of the majority, not the dominion of the largest minority (which was the UK norm between 1945 and 2010), and certainly not the dominion of the professional political class.

A Democratic Country?

John Wyndham asked “Why was I condemned to live in a democracy where every fool's vote is equal to a sensible man's?”

In the Platonic tradition everyone should stick to what they are good at and most people are no good at statecraft. The same may well be true for any specialist subject. If you were about to undergo brain surgery would you be inclined to rely on a brain surgeon or take a vote amongst all the patients in the hospital? Would you rather your airliner was flown by a pilot or elect someone from amongst the passengers?

If you agree that specialist tasks should be performed by specialists and yet consider yourself a democrat then perhaps you are either a person who believes that running the country requires no expertise, or else someone who conflates the idea of the most popular with the idea of the best.

Yet the alternative is even less attractive. Of late a whole class of politicians who know no trade but politics has grown up. These professional politicians are not in the service of democracy.

It cannot be democracy where most constituencies are safe seats for a particular party and where the choice of representative is effectively restricted to the person approved by a small number of that party's activists.  In practice we have even less of a democratic choice in politics than we do in electricity supply. The sooner we move to open primaries the better.

Moreover, although we have travelled a long road from the days when the leading citizens of each borough used to select two of their number to travel to the capital for short assemblies, decide basic issues of taxation and supply and thereafter return and explain matters to their fellow citizens, I see no good reason why we should not require  any prospective MP to live in a constituency for at least two years before being eligible to represent it.