The first point is that anyone seriously committed to a political ideology, at least one aligned to a particular party, pays for it. How much they pay will vary - from membership of the Conservative Party to the political levy I declined to pay when I was a union member - but everyone pays. What they are paying for is not, obviously, access, but something more important: they are supporting a cause that they hope, through their actions, will control the political agenda as a government. The editor of Conservative Home, Tim Montgomery, suggested on The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that there is a difference between funds given in opposition that reflect a particular viewpoint, and those given in office that are about more general influence. But I'm not sure this is a particularly big distinction; it is all about influence ultimately, and the best way to get influence is to get access.
Crudely put, what is being funded and argued over in all this are votes of electors in the UK. To some degree, this could be seen as a commodity that is going for the highest price - the discussions around budgets at election time in the UK, as with the super-pacs in the USA, suggest that votes are there to be won largely by means that can be paid for with hard cash. It seems it's not as important to have the best argument, one that voters can rationally make up their mind about through balancing their own direct interest with that of others, as to have the right 'message'. And messages are advertising, and advertising is bought. And what isn't directly bought can be influenced through actions that don't need paying for in cash - message boards, letters pages, phone-ins and so on. To some extent therefore, this story only works if you believe this narrative - that big spending is what matters. The fact that political commentators and politicians believe it is unfortunate and evidence of that rare thing, a self-fulfilling fallacy. It's also symptomatic of a wider problem with politics - no-one seems to want a fair fight anymore. We are losing track of the idea that the most rational argument should win, and weak arguments are carrying the day, held up by a deluge of coverage. That is wrong, but it's not the argument that's being had today.
The other issue here, I think, is one around representation, taxation, and influence. We like to think that we have a government made up of elected members, answerable to those electors. In reality it is not so simple: wars have been fought over issues around representation and taxation, and it seems to me to be self-evident that bodies that find themselves handing over taxes will feel the need to influence the discussion around those tax policies. So whilst we have a 'one person, one vote' democracy, we are taxing institutions such as companies that cannot directly influence that debate. There are two ways around this under the current system: use everyone's 'one vote' to reflect the interest of the company, or (to put it more colloquially) go straight to the top with a cheque book. Neither is ideal - why should employees of company X feel they have to reflect a specific economic interest in voting, when it might not chime with their other viewpoints - but both are symptoms of the problem of getting a business interest (which should really be in everyone's interest) into the discussion. Oddly, the one area in the UK where this does happen - the Corporation of London - is seen as profoundly undemocratic as a result. Well, it is democratic; it's just a different type of democracy. In the same way that having as your MP the Leader of the House of Commons will also feel like a different type of democracy (in that no-one will stand against them from the major Westminster parties, by convention).
So, what is to be done? Actually, a lot is done already. A policy obviously devised to benefit a narrow group of stakeholders will in all likelihood be exposed by the Impact Assessment as such. It's quite hard to get through a policy without having some assessment of what it will do - government is not, in that sense, arbitrary, and therefore policies that are specifically targeting an interest group will appear as such. I suspect that the argument over the 50p tax will show that it didn't raise much money - taxing the rich is never as easy as it looks - and therefore the argument that the abolition of this rate can be linked to companies paying for access, will look correspondingly weak.
What, I think, should not be done is to make a distinction between seeing the head of the Conservative Party in someone's private home, and seeing the PM at 10 Downing Street, or even at Chequers. You would have to be quite mad to believe that this solved the problem, and all it would do is create barriers and bureaucracy. In other words, it's a waste of time.
The problem is one around party funding: the one thing that I find quite spooky is that some of our leaders in business - the ones who create the wealth and the jobs we all rely on - feel the need to pay to talk to the Prime Minister. I would have thought it's in everyone's interest for that access to be free. And, as such, it could be non-ideological and not supporting one party or another. And we would all benefit from this, because it's not in anyone's interest for the people who create wealth to feel that they have no direct means of talking to government.
What would be sensible is, of course, greater transparency. I would want to be assured that any government was not partisan in terms of who it met and who it refused to meet. But the idea that companies should feel the need to pay to influence policy? That just seems wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment