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Lord Norton of Louth: My Lords, would the noble Lord like to tell us the percentage for professors, which I believe is about 80 per cent?
Lord Tyler: My Lords, the noble Lord has made his point very effectively.
In his speech to the Power conference, which of course was attended by the leader of the Conservative Party and my right honourable friend the Liberal Democrat leader, Ming Campbell, Sir Ming announced that he would be launching an online virtual conference in the run-up to the party conference season—very much in the spirit of what has been said this afternoon. It will maintain the momentum and spirit of the Power inquiry by inviting citizens to exercise their rights to contribute to the continuing debate on the commission's analysis and to make suggestions for reform. For us, a principal purpose of taking power is to give it away. That will be demonstrable in this exercise. Ming Campbell emphasised on that occasion that we would,
in a genuinely interactive conference. That is the first step towards enabling people with a bottom-up input into this debate so that the momentum so effectively started by the Power commission can continue.
My colleagues and I trust the people. We believe that they deserve to be trusted with a truly responsive political system. We believe, with the Power team, that that is the only way to regain their trust.
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Lord Wallace of Saltaire: My Lords, this has been an excellent debate, and the Power inquiry deserves no less. I think we all agree that the Power inquiry addresses all our questions even if we do not necessarily agree that it provides all the right answers.
It has been a pleasure to have had two maiden speeches with which I could feel particularly familiar. I spent five years as a boy living not far from Holbeach, in the fens. My first paid job was picking daffodils, although not on the noble Lord's farm, and I can remember those occasions when the Wallace family would cycle out to one of the villages for tea, going
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against the wind at five miles an hour in one direction and coming back with the wind at what felt like 25 miles an hour—those are the fens.
On Conservatives Abroad, we should debate on another occasion the question of representation without taxation, which is the question of voting from abroad. The right for British citizens abroad to vote here was, after all, introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Thatcher, when she was Prime Minister. It was intended to raise the level of Conservative voting. In the United States, foreign voting is allowed, but you are supposed to pay tax. If noble Lords are following the American press at the moment, they will know that there is a great deal of argument about non-resident taxation in the United States, so we may need to consider that question a little more on other occasions.
It is a great pleasure to have my noble friend Lord Lee of Trafford here. He and I have known each other since 1974, when we both fought Manchester Moss Side, a constituency with many problems of political alienation even then, although we were fighting at that point for different parties. I had great pleasure in taking part in one of the largest political meetings that I have ever addressed, in Pendle, a couple of years ago, which my noble friend Lord Lee was chairing. It was good to see that there is still mass participation in some parts of Britain and in some of our communities.
Of the range of speeches that we have had, one of the most interesting and which we need to discuss a great deal further was that of the noble Lord, Lord Gould, on participatory democracy. Participatory democracy offers us greater promise but also has great problems. We need to explore further how we can make sure that it is proper participation and not manipulation from the centre.
As for the noble Lord, Lord Norton, as a professor myself I suddenly realised that I was hearing the authentic voice of the external examiner in a PhD thesis viva as he unpicked the weak points and the challengeable assumptions of the thesis, drew attention to the academic studies not cited and marked it finally as in need of major revisions before receiving a doctorate degree.
We are now all agreed that the problem of political disengagement is an enormous one, not only for Britain but for many other countries. The solidarity of the traditional two-party system belonged to the industrial age, with mass membership and strong popular identification with parties and political leaders leading to a high turnout in a real sense of engagement, although largely on a ritual basis. There was mass industry, mass society and class politics. We now have a dual problem. With the middle class, we have the paradox of a highly educated electorate, more prosperous and more leisured than their parents but less engaged in representative politics. That is paralleled by the wider alienation of the less well educated and prosperous, so that political competition in the past two or three elections has focused increasingly on the middle classes who vote rather than on the marginalised people who do not vote. We are
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still stuck with a political system built for the industrial age with government and opposition, masses against the classes and an entrenched two-party system.
One thing that we in Westminster need to learn from our benighted but struggling local government is the extent to which local government in many areas has moved beyond the two-party system, with more than three parties—Greens, nationalists, UKIP, even the BNP on occasions and, in many cases, independents—leading to cross-party co-operation and coalitions and a different style of government. When we look at other countries, it is worth remarking that the worst alienation from politics in Europe, apart from in Britain, is in France, a system where power is also concentrated in an executive presidency—although in France they actually call it an executive presidency—scarcely accountable to a weak National Assembly.
The drift of British government in the past 25 years, which started under Mrs Thatcher and has been taken further by Tony Blair, has crushed local democracy. There has been a deep distrust from the centre for local democracy as such. Then we have seen the growth of the quango state, a Government who love businessmen and give them legitimacy while denying the legitimacy to people who have been elected at the local level. We have personal leadership at the centre much more than collective government, with Cabinet committees that do not meet and a Prime Minister with a direct relationship with the media—and, as he sees it, with the people. My noble friend Lord Maclennan criticised the Prime Minister for his high degree of self-belief, which made me stop and think, "Which British politician in the past 150 years would compare with our current Prime Minister for his degree of self-belief?" I came to his conclusion that it was W.E. Gladstone, who, I may say, almost destroyed his party in the process. One should warn Members of the Government Benches that he not only resigned but kept coming back again afterwards because he was not sure that his party was doing what he liked.
We have politicians who lead against their parties, who are marketed almost as anti-politicians—almost as personal brands. We have a Government who cultivate the media and indeed follow them, so when media campaigns build up, the Government make new announcements and new Bills. For example, there have been 40 Home Office Bills since 1997. After the Blair brand we will be offered the Cameron brand as the sort of new Blair that washes whiter—younger, cleaner, non-conservative, also running against his own party. We need a different style of government, one which is more open, local and consultative. That means less concentration of funding in the hands of the national campaigning organisations; it means an acceptance of multiple parties—and I suggest not just a three-party system but a multiple-party system, with room for UKIP and the Greens as well—and it means looser parties. It means having a more independent Parliament, not seeing itself with the Commons subordinate to the Executive, a more consultative style of government and, please, slower government, with fewer Bills and government announcements.
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Necessarily, as part of this, there should be a more open voting system. I do not believe, nor does anyone on my Benches believe, that a change in the voting system is somehow a magic bullet that changes everything, but it is part of a package. We know that multiple constituencies bring more balanced representation, with more women and more members of ethnic minorities automatically. We know that more open voting would mean wider campaigning, reversing the dreadful trend of all political parties including my own to focus on marginal voters in marginal constituencies rather than on voters as a whole. In the past two elections, travelling around and working for my party, I was increasingly disturbed by the number of constituencies in which you could see that none of the parties was actively campaigning because other constituencies were target seats. I regret to say that it was the Liberal Democrats who taught other parties how to target specific seats. It is hardly surprising that turnout in safe seats where no one was campaigning has gone down more heavily.
I have some doubts about the version given by the noble Lord, Lord Gould, of participatory democracy. I entirely agree with him that the internet opens up new avenues for information and debate and happily undermines the concentrated power of the national media. That is extremely encouraging, but it is open to manipulation and marketing. There is a real risk of the illusion of popular participation without the reality. We need a dialogue between representative democracy and participatory democracy. One needs political elites to interpret what the choices are; otherwise, as the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, remarks, we end up with the Californian problem, in which voters when given the chance will always vote for higher spending and lower taxation and you are forced to jump between one form of populism and another. Populism is, after all, one of the great dangers of the age that we face. If we look at Berlusconi and various other examples that we have had around Europe, we have been lucky so far that the potential populists in Britain have self-destructed before they made too much progress—I am sure that noble Lords all know which particular well tanned, double-barrelled university professor I am talking about.
We need to talk about citizenship rather than consumers. Marketing politics means that voters have been treated as if they were simply consumers. That means that the citizenship agenda is one that we all have to engage with. We debated this a little in this Chamber on other occasions—and I have to say to the Minister that the replies that we have had from some of her colleagues about the idea that the Labour Government can themselves define what national identity and citizenship will be taught in schools is not enough. We need a wider consensus for this that teaches rights and responsibilities and which will encourage people from school on to become engaged in local self-government and national participation. The Education Bill that we will be discussing next week goes in the opposite direction from much of that, in so
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many ways. Schools, after all, are at the heart of local communities, but the Bill wants to take them further away from local control.
We face a serious and long-term problem of popular disengagement from representative politics. Our political institutions have to adapt in response, and there is in Westminster and Whitehall a deep reluctance to adapt. The danger is that we edge further in the direction of political marketing, treating voters as passive consumers of politics. That is only likely to fuel longer-term disillusionment as each plausible new leader—David Cameron being the latest—falls by the wayside, and eventually we will end up with populism of the kind we have seen in other countries. We need to think about changes and how we fund political parties in the voting system, as well as the relationship between Parliament and the Executive—a package of constitutional reforms for which many of us on these Benches have argued for years. I hope we also agree that the revival of local democracy is a key part of all of this, because local participation in issues that directly affect each individual voter is the beginning of political participation, as such.
There is, as the noble Lord, Lord Gould, also touched on, a tremendous problem of international accountability as globalisation takes decisions further away from the citizen. I know and immensely like Professor David Held, but I am not entirely convinced by his models of cosmopolitan democracy. I am a committed European, but I recognise that attempts at a European level to build a sense of citizenship, participation, representative accountability and popular referendums have all raised severe problems. How we combine democracy, participation, accountability and a global economy is one of the biggest problems the next generation will face.
Lastly, I repeat that one of the most important areas that the Government have half-addressed, but have not yet taken far enough and certainly have not consulted about on a wide enough basis, is political education, the concept of citizenship, and citizenship within the context of local, regional and national communities.
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