20.04.2005

Trust the people, not the politicians

The crisis of the political system is highlighted at election time. Republican answers are needed, writes Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group

The Iraq war is not a major issue in this election. Of the main parties only the Liberal Democrats have an interest in raising it and they are keeping fairly quiet. It is, however, a major issue for socialists, whose internationalism aligns us with the suffering of the Iraqi working class. Bring all troops home immediately. It is a major issue for the families of young soldiers, whose lives have been wasted by Bush and Blair. It is for young muslims, who empathise with the plight of fellow muslims in Palestine and Iraq. But it is not the main issue for most voters. Charles and Camilla: royal mumbo jumbo Politicians may be playing their 'health' or 'immigration' cards. But the number one issue is 'trust'. People do not trust Tony Blair. He has been caught out lying and deceiving the people. He has manipulated public opinion and led the country into an unpopular war in the service of a foreign power. Anybody with a modicum of interest in public affairs has worked out what happened. And they do not much like it. This does not help Michael Howard. People still do not trust the Tories after 18 years of misrule. Selling off the nation's assets to their friends in the City ended with them drowning in sleaze and corruption. After handing over hospital cleaning to cowboy firms who pay their non-union workers minimum wages, we have been left to face the Tory superbugs which infest our dirty hospitals. It is a wonder anybody trusts them at all. However the issue of trust goes much wider than these two politicians. It is their parties that have lost credibility. The capitalist do not trust the Tories to run the economy and the working class do not trust Labour over anything. But it goes deeper than that. People are losing trust and confidence in the system of democracy itself. Our constitution is a busted flush. We have no control over the government. We cannot hold them to account. Our rights and liberties are under threat. Clare Short MP says: "The mistakes on Iraq and support for the US war on terror are the most spectacular and serious manifestations of a deep malfunction in the British political system and in British constitutional arrangements. Under the Thatcher government, but much more seriously under the Blair government, the checks and balances of the British government system have broken down" (C Short An honourable deception? London 2004, p277). In her resignation speech as a cabinet minister she explained that "the problem is the centralisation of power into the hands of the prime minister and an increasingly small number of advisors who make decisions in private without proper discussion" (see cover ibid). "The consequence of this is that parliamentary majorities are taken for granted. Parliament is downgraded and ignored, the power of the prime minister is enhanced and the cabinet sidelined" (p278). Writing in The Independent, Andreas Whittam Smith asks why we are governed so badly. He considers a new book by Sir Christopher Foster entitled British government in crisis, which argues that no part of our constitution is performing effectively: not parliament, not cabinet, not ministers, not the civil service, not local authorities, not other parts of the public sector. Whittam Smith concludes that Blair has hollowed out Britain's democracy. He says: "The forms are the same. But the reality is that the prime minister and the state are steadily gaining arbitrary powers while our freedoms as citizens diminish" (The Independent April 18). Trust is not, therefore, as we might first think, a question about the moral strength of individual politicians. It is about power. Who runs the country and how do they do it? We thought we knew. Now we realise we do not. Many people thought we lived in a democracy. Now they realise that this is not so. The crisis brought on by the war - including the '45 minutes' fiasco, the suicide of Dr David Kelly and even the Hutton Report whitewash shed light in the dark corners of the state. Trust is not about troops out of Iraq. It is about the growing alienation from a political system we cannot control. Of course it is not in our name that foul deeds were done to the Iraqi people. The credit for that belongs to the crown. At least the Windsor dynasty, born to gleam over us, is trusted by the people - isn't it? Surely our brightest star, symbol of all that is wholesome about our constitution, is burning bright above the gloom? This brings us back to 'that wedding'. Charles Windsor has just married Camilla Parker-Bowles in a registry office in a small English town. No concern to anybody except the family and friends of the happy couple, like hundreds of weddings the same day. Yet the media coverage alone would have surely convinced the uninitiated that all is not what it seems. It was an event of constitutional significance. It is about the crisis of royal succession. The subtext is whether Charles is fit to be king and whether making Camilla into a queen undermines the whole royal mumbo jumbo. So sensitive is this issue that she is now only Duchess of Cornwall, and not Princess of Wales. She has offered not to annoy us by being no more than the future king's consort. This is nonsense. A queen is of course the wife of the king. But it shows how sensitive and vulnerable they feel to public opinion and how they try to manipulate us. They think we are stupid and will not see through their little games. We can see the controversy in letters pages of the popular press. N Burgess from Stoke, in a letter published in The Mirror, speaks for many of her majesty's subjects when he writes: "They have made a mockery of the monarchy and no amount of spin will convince me otherwise." No trust there then. A recent YouGov survey found that 58% thought the Prince of Wales should relinquish his right to the throne and a Mori poll found only 40% supported Charles to be the next king. Not surprisingly the foreign press go to the heart of the matter more quickly than many of our own sycophantic editors. Spain's El Pais described it as "the most threatening event which the British crown has had to bear in the last hundred years". The Los Angeles Times was more optimistic, seeing the wedding as "an important act of tidying up for the oft troubled monarchy". The words "oft troubled" and "threatening event" confirm what a few socialists have been pointing out. The British monarchy is stuck in a period of crisis. Try as they might, they cannot clamber out of it. This wedding is only the latest of many debacles since the truth about Charles's fairy tale marriage to Diane Spencer emerged. Then Windsor Castle burned down, the queen had her "annus horribilis" and something mysterious happened to the other Mrs Windsor in that tunnel in Paris. In a 21st century capitalist so-called democracy we are not allowed to elect our head of state, but it is expected that we 'approve' and 'support' them. What happens if we do not? Charles will automatically become king. But he still has to conduct the longest ever 'election campaign', where his every move and utterance is scrutinised by the press. How many presidents do you know with servants that squeeze out their toothpaste? What has gone wrong with official secrecy? It was designed to prevent us hearing about this stuff. This notorious British disease has its roots in the fact that our state is built around maintaining and disguising the secrets of the constitutional monarchy, which cannot survive on the basis of freedom of information and full public scrutiny. The more we know about monarchy, the less we will like it. Charles Windsor has divided the nation. Not the best recommendation for the top job. He already displays the fatal characteristics of every last king. No wonder his mother is worried. No wonder sections of the ruling class are thinking out loud about whether they can jump a generation. Yet, even as Charles is thwarted at every turn, he has become more determined to have his way and meddle in matters of state. There is hardly a government minister who has not been lobbied or had some advice from the prince. Behind the scenes Camilla, the only women who really understands him, has been encouraging her man. Sue Carroll, another letter-writer to The Mirror, says that together Charles and Camilla are a "formidable force, fused by a steely determination to have their own way regardless". Perhaps that is why some people - like C Cunningham - have come to the conclusion that "Camilla and Charles are the most selfish, spoilt, self-seeking, self-centred, arrogant pair". CA Lee describes them as "a crowd of greedy, selfish misfits" (Letters The Mirror April 11). We can almost feel sorry for the royalists. James Whittaker, also writing in The Mirror, describes himself as an ardent but critical royalist. Like the queen he has reservations about the newly married couple. His worry is "how will they be accepted by the people over whom Charles is destined to reign; whether they have a positive place in our affections, our dynasty and our constitution. The path forward will not be easy for them or us." Paul Burrell, an ardent royalist and former butler to the queen and later Diana Spencer, now comments on royal affairs. He too is quoted in The Mirror: "The queen is like the nation. She is happy for Charles, yet struggling to accept Camilla. The prospect of queen Camilla will spread republicanism like cancer." He explains that "we [royalists] want a people who revere our monarchy, who believe positively in it" (April 11). Difficult times then! The monarchy is more than just the symbol of the state. It is our official national religion. Its ceremonies and rituals confirm our subservience to the state in the guise of a secular divinity. It is has to be something we believe in. It is a matter of faith, not science. Yet clearly it is a religion in decline. We are moving step by step to towards a crisis which will either revive monarchy or bring it to an end. But political crises are resolved by human agencies. In class society that means political action by a definite class, which comes to consider the constitutional monarchy a barrier to its rule. The term 'constitutional monarchy' is not, therefore, a reference to the queen, but to the system of government. This system is the means by which the capitalist class governs the country in the unity of 'constitution' and 'monarch'. The monarch clearly has an important, but limited, constitutional role. Its value is ideological and helps to distract attention from the constitution itself. Nevertheless the crown has a pivotal position is tying the system together - the knot that ties the robbers' bundle. The British constitution is a set of laws, customs and traditions which places real power in the hands of the prime minister and the state bureaucracy (crown powers). It renders parliament an impotent bystander. The relationship of bureaucracy to parliament was satirised very effectively in the 1980s in the TV programme Yes, minister, but now the Blair government has concentrated and centralised even more power into its own hands. Now the issue of trust points to a growing crisis of democracy. The Iraq war raised the question of the failure of democracy to new heights. The war did not cause the failure or bankruptcy of the political-constitutional system. But the question of war put the system of government under closer public scrutiny. When two million march in protest, the failure of democracy and the manipulation of public opinion are brought under the spotlight. The government was caught out lying and manipulating the people. It taught people that we have a system that cannot be trusted. The long-term consequences of this are yet to fully unfold. About 150 years ago Walter Bagehot wrote a classic account of the British constitution. He divided it into the "efficient" and "dignified" parts. The latter included the monarchy and House of Lords, whose role was to divert popular attention from the way the system really worked. All this dressing up and parading around in funny clothes and silly hats was to keep the masses distracted and in awe, before the power of the state. The same is played out today. The left think the monarchy is for fooling the masses and do not see that it is fooling them. The left is convinced that it is such a lot of feudal tosh that it can be safely ignored. But this distracts us from really examining how political power is used. It has distracted us from making a positive case for a democratic, secular republic. It has reduced the politics of the left to a puerile anti-monarchism which has much in common with anarchism. Serious republicans are not distracted by the monarchy. Its irrelevance is not a reason to ignore it. On the contrary, it is the reason to get rid of it more quickly. If your house is full of rotten old rubbish, the best way to ignore it is to chuck it all out. Then the problem is dispensed with. The more quickly we do that, the more quickly society can move on and take the next steps forward. Republicanism is not about Charlie, his mum, or his wife. It is about fighting for a genuinely democratic system of government. It is wrong, therefore, to think of a democratic, secular republic as if it were a constitutional monarchy without an hereditary monarch. There is much more fundamental change required than simply getting rid of the crown. Democratic republicanism is fundamentally about the transfer of power to the people. This is not handed down from above. It must be taken from below. The people become the republic through struggle, mobilisation and self-organisation. It means in effect a popular, democratic revolution. This is what the left has forgotten when it sees the constitutional monarchy as no more than feudal remnants. So what is the answer to the breakdown of trust in the system? What should we tell people during this election campaign? Who should the people trust? The answer should be obvious. We must start to trust ourselves. We must take political matters into our own hands. That is what the republic is all about. The people can only trust themselves when they genuinely exercise power. We, the people, must turn ourselves into a democratic, secular republic.