by Mark Curtis
Select committee scrutiny of the government’s policies towards the global economy and WTO, for example, is frankly laughable, with generally uncritical endorsement of policy and the barest of accountability required of government ministers. British government positions on many global economic policies are often not even discussed in parliament before the government promotes them at EU and other international meetings.
Under globalisation, ‘national’ policies can quickly have ‘global’ impact, and vice versa. Yet the public’s ability to hold political leaders to account by scrutinising their policies in this new interdependence has not increased – rather, powers have become more centralised and accountability reduced. British leaders can be promoting an enormously negative global ‘liberalisation’ project, but no new formal democratic means have been established to even detect it, let alone stop it.
Select committees are more part of the patronage system, either acting as a parking place for loyal backbench MPs or as a launch pad for promotion for the up-and-coming. Perhaps most importantly of all, the government is only obliged to provide a written response to the committees’ reports; there is no obligation to accept recommendations or change policy in any way. Thus committee reports operate within the elite consensus, but when they do make some awkward recommendations for government, they can simply be ignored, and invariably are.
So it is with parliament more generally, where backbenchers have no formal powers, and few informal ones, to press for changes in government policy. As Andrew Marr – currently the BBC’s political editor – has written, backbenchers influencing the executive is so rare that ‘it’s more like children shouting at passing aircraft’. Indeed, parliamentary government – a virtual absolutism of landowners – preceded parliamentary democracy by 250 years. In many ways it is this absolutism, not the democracy, that remains the dominant influence in British politics.2
Many things have barely changed in 500 years. Consider the following description of parliament’s role in foreign-policy making in Tudor times:
Parliament was an institution which, usually but not always, enabled Tudor governments to pursue their own foreign policies more efficiently than would have been possible without it. Occasionally, it resisted or embarrassed governments as they pursued their chosen policies. Parliament was not, however, the soil in which wholly new policies grew to be an influence in the councils of state.3
When the group Charter 88 was set up in 1988 to campaign for transforming British democracy, it noted the ‘parliamentary oligarchy’ that had been created from the shift away from absolute monarchy in 1688. It said that the ‘inbuilt powers of the 1688 settlement have enabled the government to discipline British society to its ends’, to impose its values on the civil service, to menace the independence of broadcasting, to threaten freedom in universities and schools and to tolerate abuses committed in the name of national security. These showed ‘how vulnerable Britain has always been to elective dictatorship’ and ‘authoritarian rule’.
Indeed, power has in many ways become more centralised over recent decades. In 1867, Walter Bagehot wrote that the Cabinet acted as a ‘board of control … to rule the nation’. By 1964, Labour Cabinet Minister, Richard Crossman, could write that the post-war epoch had seen Cabinet government transformed into prime ministerial government, with huge power invested in ‘one single man’ whose powers have steadily increased. Policy decisions, Crossman stated forty years ago, are nearly always taken by one person after consulting ‘with a handful of advisers he has picked for the occasion’.4
How true of today. Former Northern Ireland minister Mo Mowlam has said that ‘Cabinet itself is dead, it doesn’t have a function to play.’ Her former boss ‘makes decisions with a small coterie of people, advisers, just like the president of the United States’. Indeed, the prime minister today probably has fewer checks on his power than Charles I had.5
This huge centralisation of power in the prime minister was partly what Lord Hailsham was referring to in 1976 when he called Britain an ‘elective dictatorship’. The prime minister can take Britain to war without even consulting parliament. The Falklands and Gulf wars, for example, were never put to a parliamentary vote; the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was barely even debated in parliament before the campaign was launched. Neither do international treaties need to be confirmed by the House of Commons. The Attlee government’s agreement to allow US military bases to be established in Britain was entirely secret. The Treaty of Accession to the EU was given under royal prerogative and when prime minister Heath signed it, the text had not even been published. The government could have signed the Maastricht treaty in 1993 in the same way, had it chosen.6
According to political analyst Keith Sutherland:
The majority party in parliament and the executive are effectively one and the same – a clear travesty of the principle of the constitutional separation of powers. Given the power of the party whips, and the impotence of the Upper House, this means that the leader of the majority party has a five year electoral mandate for dictatorship.7
The Blair government has of course devolved some political authority from London by establishing a parliament for Scotland, an Assembly for Wales and a mayor for London – all important developments. But the centralisation of local government – a postwar trend – is continuing while reform of the House of Lords has replaced one form of illegitimacy with another. The prime minister’s opposition to a wholly elected second chamber in the Lords has led to the replacement of hereditary peers with appointees of the government, with only some elected members. Thus one undemocratic body was replaced by another.
Together with the prime minister, the centre of power in Britain is the ‘permanent government’ of the senior echelons of the civil service. Most important is the network of civil service committees, especially the committee of permanent secretaries, known in Whitehall as Cabinet (o). George Young, former deputy head of MI6, has said that ‘the higher reaches of the civil service undoubtedly make most of the decisions for Ministers and put them in front of them and say “Minister, do you agree?”’8
The lack of real democracy in Britain is so obvious that it is often openly recognised across the political spectrum. Indeed, the totalitarian nature of British democracy is sufficiently complete that elites can recognise it as such without a fear of change.
Outside of parliament, there are only very limited ways to influence government policy, all of which are informal. Consultations with civil society groups on key government policy statements have been a feature of New Labour. As well as consulting on its major policy documents, the Department for International Development, for example, holds an annual series of ‘development fora’ around the country to elicit people’s views on key issues. But my experience of this is that it really is window-dressing and a fig leaf. It is hard to spot any ways in which significant government policies have ever actually been influenced in any major (or even minor) way by these consultations. The process is more about securing public support and NGO acquiescence in government strategy while offering the pretence of influencing the process.
‘Insider lobbying’ by groups to persuade decision-makers to change foreign policies by reasoned arguments is generally unlikely to get you very far, in my experience. This route can only influence minor, incremental policy change on more technical issues. The bigger shifts in policy will not come from this route. My experience of running advocacy strategies in development NGOs is that only sustained public pressure makes major policy change possible. For example, the Jubilee 2000 debt coalition raised significant public awareness about the injustice of debt, pressing the British government to become one of the more progressive governments on debt relief for developing countries (although the amount of debt relief delivered so far remains well below the promises).
The popular international campaign to stop the OECD’s proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment – involving a variety of NGOs and civil society groups – helped to scupper
the proposal. And the ‘fifty years is enough’ campaign against the World Bank in the US severely embarrassed the Bank and forced it to make some changes, albeit mainly cosmetic. There are limits, though, to possible success in this area. It is simply not possible, for example, to have a public campaign on everything. And elites usually find ways of deflecting public pressure before it threatens them.
Clearly, the British political system does offer benefits for many people outside the elite. It is not only the people at the very top of the tree who benefit, clearly many others do. But the severe hardships that large numbers of people face in Britain – like poverty, decline in many public services and job insecurity – all relate to an elitist political system which does not generally promote policies in the wider public interest.
For the subject of this book, the lack of democracy in foreign policy-making is extremely serious, with huge human consequences. It is no exaggeration to say that Britain has visited widespread destruction on many parts of the world, overthrowing popular governments, trampling over human rights, undermining democratic forces in favour of repressive elites while helping to impose economic strategies that further impoverish many of the world’s poorest people. It gets away with this largely because of the domestic structures of power. Foreign policy is made by a relatively small number of people who are protected from serious accountability, with no formal obligations even to consult outside a small circle, and still less inclined to depart from pursuing traditional priorities – and therefore virtually impossible to influence in any meaningful way. The ‘mother of all parliaments’ has in reality become the midwife of a generally unethical foreign policy. The disastrous nature of Britain’s ‘democracy’ for foreign policy is surely one of the great untold stories of the modern political culture.
To me the most useful public campaign would not be on a single issue but one that united the public and civil society groups from various sectors in a revigorised campaign for real democracy in Britain. If that existed, we would end the totalitarian decision-making that is the hallmark of domestic and foreign policies, and which produces British policies so abusive of human rights, development and peace overseas. I return to this in chapter 23.
Democracy for the elites
In chapter 10, I looked at how independent development and democratic forces are generally seen as a threat to British foreign policy. At the root of this lies the same issue that underpins Britain’s domestic political system – the elitist conception of democracy.
‘Liberal democracy’ in Britain has been shaped above all by elitist thinking, rooted in the great liberal philosophers and political thinkers since the seventeenth century. In all this variety of political thinking across the liberal spectrum, one thing stands out: a belief that a special cadre of people should govern, often combined with virtual contempt for the public. The roots of our current democracy lie not in conceptions of popular democracy where people are to play a central role in decision-making. Rather, they lie in subordinating the majority of people to dominant groups seeking to preserve their property rights and the freedom of the market.
The great seventeenth-century liberal philosopher John Locke rejected democracy and argued in favour of a ‘legislative or supreme authority’ that would rule with the consent of, and in the interests of, the community. The task of government was to preserve the right of property, Locke argued. His thinking has been interpreted by many as arguing against arbitrary monarchy in favour of upholding the interests of the propertied class.
In the eighteenth century, John Stuart Mill, usually regarded as the greatest British liberal thinker, believed that only through the influence of an enlightened minority could the public aspire to self-improvement. Although accepting universal suffrage, he rejected the view that everyone should have an equal say on policies, arguing that some should have ‘a superiority of influence proportioned to his higher qualifications’. He viewed democracy as a ‘tyranny of the majority’ which would pursue ignorant policies. Mill warned of the ‘opinion of masses of merely average men’ becoming dominant. The counter to this should come from the ‘more pronounced individuality of those who stand on the higher eminences of thought’.9
Another eighteenth-century political thinker, John Austin, a follower of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian school, favoured the idea of government helping to make the poor into good citizens and opposed the political power of inherited wealth. He contrasted ‘the multitude’ with the ‘enlightened opinion … of the higher and more cultivated classes’. The latter’s task was to ensure the provision of education for working people in order to ‘extirpate their prejudices and correct their moral sentiments’.10
The theme of the unfitness of the ‘multitude’ for the exercise of power which had been dominant in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, continued into the twentieth. This was also true of the early socialist Fabians, especially George Bernard Shaw, who argued that ‘a country governed by its people is as impossible as a theatre managed by its audience’. Government was rather ‘a fine art’ requiring ‘a mental comprehensiveness and an energy which only a small percentage of people possess in the degree necessary for leadership’.11 Shaw’s allusion is an apt one – people are to be passive spectators, watching their superiors govern ‘for’ them.
The British ruling class held out for an exceedingly long time in opposing the universal right to vote, believing that power should reside only in the propertied classes, or men of enlightenment. But these elitist beliefs continued well after conceding universal suffrage. In the 1930s, for example, Barbara Wootton, an economist involved in government wartime boards that managed various economic activities, believed that the electorate should not concern itself with policy but defer to people of superior quality to let them get on with the business of governing.
This echoed the view of Harold Laski, a leading socialist intellectual who became the chair of the Labour party and who believed that democracy should be ‘an aristocracy by delegation’. The administration of a modern state was a ‘technical matter’ and ‘those who can penetrate its secrets are relatively few in number’. What was required was ‘a body of experts working to satisfy vast populations’, and the latter were ‘uninterested in the processes by which those results are obtained’.12
John Major rejected proposals for holding a referendum on the Maastricht treaty in 1993, saying that the issues were ‘highly complex’ and that the electorate might be swayed by ‘irrelevant’ distractions. He was simply echoing his predecessors among the elites – like former Labour minister Douglas Jay who said in 1939 that ‘in the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for the people than the people know themselves’.13
These conceptions of elitism, though conceived in different ages, are firmly rooted in British political culture, indeed across the political spectrum. Contempt for the public has always had cross-party support in Britain.
At stake in these conceptions of elitism has of course been the preservation of power and wealth. Before the First World War, the top 5 per cent of the population owned a massive 87 per cent of personal wealth. From this staggeringly unequal benchmark, income gaps have narrowed in the UK over recent decades. But in 1996, the top 1 per cent of the population still owned 20 per cent of all wealth. Over half the total wealth was owned by just 10 per cent of the population. And the wealthiest 50 per cent owned nearly everything – 93 per cent. The gap between the highest paid and the lowest paid workers is now greater than at any time since records began in 1886. There are good reasons why many wish to preserve an elitist political system.14
The public as a threat
Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s press spokesman, once told American journalists in an off-the-record briefing:
There is no freedom of information in this country; there’s no public right to know. There’s a commonsense idea of how to run a country and Britain is full of commonsense
people … Bugger the public’s right to know. The game is the security of the state – not the public’s right to know.15
His view was echoed by Britain’s Adjutant General, Sir David Ramsbottom, who told Guardian readers in 1991 that the media too often tried to press the government to release information ‘on the pretext that the public has a right to know’.16
British leaders tell us that the major threats to Britain’s interests are terrorists, drug traffickers, those seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction and ‘rogue states’. But my view is that the major threat to elites is really genuine democracy abroad and at home. The fact is, the public is viewed as a threat.
In democracies, the public can vote governments in and out but in between elections it is kept far away from decision-making to allow elites to ‘govern’, as outlined in the previous section. In times of crisis like wars, however, public opinion can definitely influence the way elites prosecute their priorities, and can even stop them.
This danger has long been understood by elites. As prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Guardian at the height of the First World War: ‘If people knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But they don’t know and can’t know.’17
The danger that the public might oppose the state’s major policies was recognised by British planners in the 1950s. Then, the big strategy was to combat – often brutally – nationalist forces in the colonies. A problem was that planners understood that the public was on the wrong side: ‘British public opinion is in the main largely in sympathy with nationalist trends in the colonies’.18 It was partly for this reason that leaders needed to invoke other demons Britain was supposedly fighting, the ‘Soviet threat’ being the most common.
