Cummings and the constitution
(Photo by WIktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Dominic Cummings has made his aim clear: he wishes to break the hold of Whitehall and the antiquated procedures of Westminster so that government can get things done without the restrictions and frustrations which, he thinks, holds the economy back. Planning laws, the parliamentary processes that both slow down and water down legislation, the inability of the executive to act swiftly and autonomously, are irritations to him. He is impatient for change. Reform is too slow; destruction is quicker.
Somewhat like Harold Wilson of yore, Cummings is impatient to see the white heat of a technological revolution — a computer and AI revolution — transform the UK, enabled by tax concessions, attractive inward investment terms, the award of government subsidies and contracts unencumbered by due process constraints, readily available building land, and quick, supportive planning permissions, all thus expediting the transformation. A jungle-like growth of regulations, procedures and norms stand in the way of his impatience.
To tear down and rebuild he needs to replace the senior civil servants who stand in his way with “weirdos” (his term) — the latest such who can no longer tolerate this government’s way of doing things is Sir Jonathan Jones, the government’s top lawyer, who resigned yesterday. Cummings also needs to circumvent parliamentary scrutiny, the select committees being the most obnoxious to him. With an inflated majority in the House of Commons rendering it a dead-letter as a constraint on intemperance and incompetence in Downing Street, it is only the select committees and the House of Lords who can be a nuisance. Circumventing the first, and polluting the credibility of the second with absurd appointments, appears to be his current choice of remedy.
Dominic Cummings is right that there is much wrong with our systems and structures. But he is completely wrong about which systems and structures need to be changed, and wrong about how to effect change.
What is wrong with our country, as I have explained in my latest book, The Good State, is its constitutional and political arrangements. A competent civil service, and membership of the EU, have jointly disguised the inward rotting of both these orders, and propped us up. Brexit and the Cummings assault on the civil service is collapsing the functionality of national administration, and in the process of replacing it with corruption, cronyism and diktat as an alternative form of government.
On the constitutional front, the egregious problem is the First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system and what it creates. FPTP is inherently profoundly undemocratic. It almost always results in government with minority support, effectively disenfranchising the majority of voters and depriving them of representation. One consequence is that most voters feel they make no difference — and because they are right, they disengage.
A simple example shows how undemocratic FPTP is: consider a constituency of 100 voters in which 10 candidates stand. Suppose eight of these candidates get 10 votes each, one gets 9 votes and the last gets 11 votes. The candidate with 11 votes has “come first” and goes to parliament; 89 electors have no representation and their votes have been worthless.
This is exactly what happens in real elections. The current Conservative government has a massive 80 seat majority over all other parties combined. It secured this majority on 43 per cent of votes cast, representing less than 29 per cent of the total electorate. On this small minority of votes with a big majority of seats it is driving a coach and horses through the country’s institutions, economic prospects, and some of the most important rights of its citizens.
A majority of this size reduces parliament to a rubber-stamping mechanism for the executive, because in the Westminster system the combination of two factors — “parliamentary sovereignty” and the formation of the executive from the majority in parliament — means that the legislature does not hold the executive to account, but instead is its creature. In the hung parliament between the elections of 2017 and 2019 we saw what parliament should truly be: holding the executive to account, obliging the executive to make a case for each and every single item of legislation or action on its merits, not on an automatic majority doing the executive’s bidding because of the whipping system and MPs’ career considerations. A proportional system of representation would make parliaments more like the parliament of 2017-19, and government more controlled and accountable.
Moreover, if our legislature were representative of the diversity of preferences, interests and needs in the population, and if legislation had to be agreed on a consensual basis, the outcome would be closer to the national interest than the interest of a faction within a party, as is now the case: the European Research Group and rich donors controlling Tory policy, the far left and power-hungry trades union leaders controlling Labour policy. James Madison warned against the poison of “faction” in his 10th Federalist Paper; we see the bitter truth of his words in today’s government of the UK — government by the Brexit Leave campaign.
We need to reform how we govern ourselves by reforming our electoral system and therefore the degree of representatives’ scrutiny and control of government. But here is where our other problem bites; the political order is itself an artifact of the FPTP system because it forces two-party outcomes, making politics a war of opposites, two contending groups trying to get their hands on the levers of power in order to push their agenda through. The either/or nature of two-party politics generates the imperatives of party discipline, itself profoundly anti-democratic — think: whips, careerism, blind obedience of party infantry. MPs do not represent their constituents but the party line, which is the line dictated by the faction in control.
The problem with achieving electoral reform is that the opposition political parties are sclerotic, mired in their internal disputes and compromises, hampered by ideological pieties from serving the interests of the whole nation because of the need to feed offcuts of sacred cow to their most active followers. This prevents them from making effective common cause to achieve reform, to the great detriment of us all.
At this juncture in our history, as the disastrous mistake of Brexit continues to accumulate ever-worsening consequences, and as majority public opinion swings more and more against leaving the EU, both Labour and the Liberal Democrats are too timid and internally paralysed to grasp the fact that the great hope for that majority is for leadership — leadership to rectify the mistake and get our country’s future history back on track. The opposition parties should accordingly be making common cause on reforming our electoral system so that, once that is done, the question of the future of our country can be returned to the people.
Those are the two promises of hope that we need now. What we see instead is a massive strategic error by Ed Davey as soon as he became leader of the Liberal Democrats, reneging on his membership’s passionate commitment to the European cause. Keir Starmer, who is estimable in many ways, is mute on the gaping, haemorrhaging wound of Brexit devastating our nation.
Because of their sclerosis, the opposition parties are exercising a chokehold on the nation’s need for reform and rebooting. The majority does not want this nightmare of Brexit, so for the immediate future their only hope is to get the opposition parties to see sense, because FPTP and sclerosis between them make a new political movement predicated on those aims a practical non-starter.
The few, muted but friendly remarks about electoral reform from Labour of late may be an acknowledgement of a pair of truths: that without Scotland Labour will never again get a majority in the UK parliament, and that it is not going to recover Scotland to its cause. Therefore Labour’s realistic hope is to be the lead party in a coalition. To get that, it needs electoral reform.
Another point: to make proper common cause with other opposition parties on an electoral reform platform, Labour has to suspend the article in its constitution requiring it to stand a candidate in every constituency. This is so that where it has no chance of winning, but another opposition party can, it will stand aside; and vice versa. This is the acid test of Labour’s realism, and its desire to serve the country — the whole country.
One can point at many factors that have led to the current debacle, but there are two that stand out. The first is David Cameron’s need to silence (as he thought he would) the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservative Party by granting them a Brexit referendum. The second is Ed Miliband giving carte-blanche to entryists to elect the unelectable Jeremy Corbyn, who is probably the greatest reason why we have both Brexit and a Prime Minister today who is incompetent and unfit for office. Cameron and Miliband are the unholy outputs of a dysfunctional, rotten constitutional and political system.
Cummings has been keeping a low profile since nearly being caught out about his trip(s) to Durham and beyond. A Savanarola-like figure, a machinator, he is full of confidence that the very system he wishes to bring down will protect him for the time being because it is rusty and slow. The tabloids will not hunt him long, and the populace has a short attention span. It is important to keep an eye on Cummings, because — an inside source tells me —Johnson will resign early in the new year, saying that despite persistent ill-health following Covid he manfully stayed at the helm to see the UK properly out of the EU. He has lost the trust and liking of his party, he is indeed unwell, he is bedevilled by domestic difficulties, he hates the detail of office and finds that he has bitten off vastly more than he is competent to chew. His days are numbered.
The contenders will be Gove-Cummings — a long-standing coupling — on one side, and (again according to a reliable inside party source) Sunak, Raab and (believe it or not) Patel. The passionately anti-immigration party could be led by one of these latter three within six months: irony has no bounds. It is perhaps the Tory’s only saving grace, that not even racism and xenophobia will stand between it and its great goals of paying as little tax as possible and not having a Labour government. Sunak’s stock has, however, fallen as dramatically as it rose among the party faithful, because of his remarks about the need to raise taxes. The fact that Raab does not know that France and England are separated by water will not stand in his way: being well-informed is no longer required for a political career. As for Patel, whether suppression of the report on her bullying is related to her aspirations, one could not possibly say.
The foregoing says something about how things stand, and the urgent need for reform of our electoral system as the way out of our current debacle. To get that reform, the opposition parties have to come together. It is either that, or the Cummings cronyist dictatorship will reshape our country in ways hard to reverse — or to bear.
