There is a growing confusion, both in the right and the left of politics in Britain, regarding what MPs should be and who is it that they are meant to represent. The British Tory Party is opening a debate about whether or not Britain should stay in the EU. 40 Tory Party Constituency Secretaries have already raised the question of who it is that MPs really represent when they attacked their Prime Minister, Cameron, for insisting that Tory MPs should vote on the matter ‘with their hearts’ and not according to the views of their constituency parties. (PM Cameron has done this because he knows most Tory constituency parties and their meager membership are opposed to the EU and Cameron is standing down before the next election.) The 40 local Tory Grandees feel affronted. Their MP belongs to them.
This sort of confusion is general. But it actually starts from a very unconfused and indeed popular sentiment that in Britain MPs have ended up representing themselves. From this generally held perspective MPs are miles away from the lives of ordinary people; they pursue their own interests via a privileged and well-paid career. This view is wide spread across Western Europe and the USA and therefore joins up with popular attitudes more associated in the past with colonial and semi-colonial regimes.
There are deep material roots for a jaundiced view of late capitalist parliamentary type politics. Currently 2000 Spanish politicians face corruption charges. Belgium has 7 separate Parliaments. Italian MPs have 5 times the average Italian salary and huge privileges and (perhaps not surprisingly) 169 parties and movements made it onto their last ballot papers. In Germany only the selling and buying of votes is actually a punishable offence. The UN, in its 2005 convention against corruption called for a greater distance between politicians and business. Ratified by 160 countries the UN convention would make it illegal to offer, promise or grant advantages to third parties, but not in Germany. There have been 15 major political corruption scandals in France since 2010.
And, of course, there is the largest parliamentary institution in the Western world, the British, unelected House of Lords. It is full of peers from all parties living within walking distance of the chamber who are able to claim up to £300 a day just to turn up. Baroness Wilcox, a former Conservative minister – lives in a £4.5m house a mere 200 yards away from the Palace of Westminster and received £74,400 from these payments over the last two years. Peers who have said almost nothing during House of Lords’ debates have received more than £1.6m in allowances and travel expenses during the past five years. The Tory MP who claimed moat cleaning on his MP’s expenses has been handed a peerage. The chair of the Lords’ privileges and conduct committee resigned in disgrace after allegedly taking cocaine at his London flat, in the company of prostitutes.
No wonder an average of 65% of western voters think their mainstream politics are corrupt and MPs or their equivalents are self-seeking. It is 75% of voters in the USA.
The popular and negative view of MPs is buttressed by a strong feeling that MPs in general and governments in particular are essentially ‘run’ in a way that supports the interests of big business. Elaborating the evidence would take several volumes and is sufficiently agreed by leading academics and researchers in the field to be taken as an obvious truth. The consequence is however more pertinent in that it adds to the picture of political corruption the fact that the power and influence of MPs and governments is strictly limited by the influence and power of big business. MPs are therefore taken to represent their own interests in a context, the context of the over-weaning power and influence of big business. MPs work for their own interests by working for the interests of big business, partly because they have no choice.
This picture of modern parliaments is of course fluid, depending on different large-scale moods, challenges and movements that sweep across society’s political life. But the ideas outlined are now well established in western populations – and it is difficult to see any substantive change to them without major structural change.
With this in mind it is possible to raise an essentially abstract generalisation to a more concrete level and explore how the British labour movement has addressed MP’s’ roles in the recent past. Inside the current British Labour Party there is a hot new debate about what Labour MPs should do and who it is they should represent.
Joe Haines, who worked for decades for the Labour supporting mass circulation Daily Mirror, explains
‘For every vote ... that Corbyn won ... there are 36 Labour voters, 9 million in total, who are represented only by the Parliamentary Labour Party.’ (NS 4 Feb.)
Haines is arguing that the big majority of Labour MPs should chuck out Corbyn as their leader, because the MPs (and not the Labour Party) represent the Labour voters in the country. But what is it that Labour voters voted for in May 2015?
Many Labour MPs who oppose the Corbyn leadership argue that the 2015 Labour Manifesto was what Labour voters voted for, and this is what they stand for, and that Manifesto is the baseline for any future Labour leader, policy or position. The paradox here is that Labour’s 2015 Manifesto was not even read by many Party stalwarts. It is absurd to say that 9 Million Labour voters voted on that basis. They voted Labour in the overwhelming majority of cases because of a vague but fundamental belief that the Tories were against them, that Labour should be the party for the less well-off, that the NHS was safer with Labour, that things in Britain were very unequal. All this is born out in attitudinal surveys of voters taken around the election. These ideas are distinct in British society and profound because they begin to define what it is that the Labour Party, including its MPs, should be representing – a profoundly distinct challenge to the status quo based on deep social and historical experience of a particular social group or class.
This comes closer to the original purpose of the Labour Party. It was to be a party, within a wider movement that would represent an up to then unrepresented class. There was always another side to this purpose as promoted by some of the Trade Union leaders of the time. They saw political representation as a narrow means to widen the power of the union, their union, their leadership of their union. At the time these differences of interest were not resolved, although their existence was to create a permanent fissure in Labour’s future. Nevertheless the distinct purpose of building a different sort of society, based on the experience and hopes of subordinated classes, was a prize won effecting (albeit mostly unsuccessfully) the Labour Party’s development through to Blair’s destruction of the famous Clause 4 of the Party’s Constitution.
What is it then that (Labour) MPs should represent? How can genuine ‘representation’ be renewed in Parliament given the experience of the last decades of the emergence of a political class, servants to the seduction of corruption and the power of big business?
To answer this question it is necessary to raise the argument again towards the actual, towards the concrete. Studying the Labour Party’s current internal conflict over the Trident question opens out the issue of the representation of Labour MPs.
Trident is a far bigger question for the future of British society than the EU. The EU referendum ‘The most important vote that British people will caste in their lifetimes’ (various politicians, including Nigel Farage, Duncan Smith etc, etc.) is in reality unlikely to change the direction of the British economy, or its society, which will remain tied to the City of London’s international (seamy) financial leadership, relentless (un)fair deals on international trade, a tax system designed explicitly to ‘attract’ foreign investment, continued depression of both the monetary and the social wage at home and slavish dependence on US led geo-politics. Removing Britain’s ‘independent’ nuclear weapon is another kettle of fish entirely.
Britain’s nuclear weapon is the main bridge in Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the USA. Its presence assures Britain’s continued place on the UN’s Security Council. It defines Britain as a front line contender in world politics and war. It is the military arm of the City of London’s international financial reach. Britain would have to fundamentally redefine itself in the absence of Trident, as a medium sized country, perhaps as a federal group of nations, with an economy and political system dedicated mainly to the welfare and future of its citizens. A German or French proportion of national spending on Health; a Scandinavian based tax system closing the British owned, meaning most of the world’s, tax havens; a humanitarian view of immigrants; a totally new direction for Britain in the modern world.
How should Labour MPs represent us and make Parliament powerful and decisive again over the Trident question? It is unclear where the majority of the British people stand on the renewal of Trident. Most polls register a majority for retaining Trident in England but this not in any sense a debated issue in British society at large. If Labour MPs want to really represent those who are in the majority classes that do the work and who face roaring inequality for their efforts, they should start by opening a wide debate on the issue inside the movement dedicated to defend those interests, the wider labour and trade union movement, in alliance with all those committed to challenge austerity and war. The argument needs first to be taken there. Why? Because that movement is the organised kernel of those in the whole of society whose work, whose imaginations and creativity and lives are exploited.
If that movement, after as wide as possible debate, decides (as it should) to get rid of Trident, then Labour MPs who want to represent the people should direct the movement to take the leadership of the whole of society on the Trident issue. Labour MPs should demand a referendum and set one up if the establishment refuses.
Should Labour MPs who still believe in Trident do this? Of course. They represent the movement of which they are part and its battle to win society or they represent nothing but themselves.
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