Woolsacked

After the defeat of AV, expect the next epic battle (and the next poisoned wooden spoon Cameron hands the Lib Dems) to be House of Lords reform.  At this point I’d better declare an interest as having worked there (as an erstwhile Hansard reporter).  Despite knowing the institution more intimately than I do any other, I don’t think I’ve written much about it before; this is because I find it quite difficult to make up my mind about what to do about the damn place.

Walter Bagehot famously quipped that “the cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it”.  Having sat through several postprandial hours of a debate on ‘the benefits of the Segway personal transporter’, it’s hard to disagree.  It’s also hard, on the other hand, to keep one’s rational faculties clear when in the building and not be seduced by the awful, artificial and amusing work of Augustus Pugin and Charles Barry and its supremely confident Gothic (that is, explicitly non-Roman) assertion of British exceptionalism.  I find it takes a great effort, and I can’t be alone in this, to disregard the indisputable aesthetic and technical accomplishments of the age of empire when weighing up its social, economic and moral pros and cons; too easy, in other words, to use beauty as a proxy for truth, justice, virtue.  The whole place is a spectacular triumph of Victorian propaganda: the Soviet Union had its stirring anthem and its heroic art, the US has its sexy movies, and we had the Tudor rose and the portcullis.  In the little reporters’ corner of the chamber, with some anonymous lifer suggesting to half a dozen of his fellows how to decide the makeup of a committee to determine the composition of a working group to investigate the regulation of the makeup of the committee, the eyes are inevitably drawn by the carved lions and unicorns, by the heraldic oak panels of the four patron saints, and eventually by the dazzling gilded ceiling whose ornaments and chandeliers seem to melt off it like stalactites, and your distracted reporter, overcome by a sort of reactionary Stendhal syndrome, finds himself transported to his own Burkean Ambrosia.  (The Commons is much less ornate and perhaps cosier for it, but the most profound sensation to be had in the estate is to be alone at night in Westminster Hall, gazing up at the hammerbeam angels still keeping watch nine centuries on, and only dimly aware of the restless metropolis beyond the buttressed walls: on such occasions I always find myself communing with Bede and his sparrow.)  So perhaps Bagehot would have been more accurate to say that the cure is to go and listen to it, while keeping your eyes shut.

I digress.  The question is: what use does the place serve now, and how could it be improved?  Here the traditionalist and the radical democrat in me clash (a problem Orwell had all the time).  A few perceptions about the noble and not-so-noble Lords persist that are no longer quite accurate.  Only 88 of the old hereditaries — Wilde’s old unspeakables — remain.  The vast majority of the rest are life peers, appointed by various prime ministers; a few bishops are left (and are we really about to see a Conservative prime minister eject them?), and the law Lords have moved across the road to the Supreme Court.  A lot of these are former or failed politicians, but a great many are also those who’ve excelled in various non-political fields: the arts, law, media, sport, business, academia, war.  In this sense, at least, they could be considered more diverse than the Commons, which with every election becomes more and more the preserve of PPE Oxonians in their mid-40s from north London who have only ever worked in politics.  The Lords, unlike the Commons, still has plenty of endearingly amateurish speakers (whom I always hope to avoid having to report on) and endearingly unsmooth operators.  And despite Cameron’s additions, Labour still has more peers than the Tories.

The balance that needs to be struck is to combine the resilient independence of the incumbent Lords (who stood up to the previous government on, among other things, the chilling effects of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act) with a greater (that is, any) popular mandate.

It seems inevitable, with the defeat of the AV referendum, that the Lords will become proportionately elected before the Commons ever does.  There is one serious objection to this: that, by picking who appears on the lists and in what order, the party managers would retain or even strengthen control over this occasionally rebellious House.  The Lords aren’t so easily whipped now, but their replacement senators (most of them presumably seeking re-election) could well be.  Might the coalition, then, use this opportunity to strengthen the executive relative to parliament?  That would surely be the opposite of what we should hope for.

So the extent to which we should welcome reform really depends on what sort of PR is on offer.  If Cameron, Clegg and Miliband have complete control over the party lists, then what comes next might if anything be worse than what we have now.  But if the government is actually willing to give power away — perhaps in the form of multi-member STV wards, or even open primaries, as are now used to pick some Commons candidates — then the public will have more say than the politicians, and the reformed chamber will have more legitimacy than the one it replaces.  There is a great opportunity for something better, but we will have to wait and see whether we are given another stitchup instead.

Our zeal for reform shouldn’t lead us to assume that what is done in its name will necessarily be more truly democratic, rather than a pale imitation of the deeply dysfunctional Commons; instead, we have to hold the coalition to account and insist that the upper House becomes as democratic as it possibly can, and that it gives power away from politicians, both elected and appointed: on this occasion, we have to keep our eyes wide open.

Read Full Post »

Revolt in the desert

“They were weak in material resources, and even after success would be, since their world was agricultural and pastoral, without minerals, and could never be strong in modern armaments.  Were it otherwise, we should have had to pause before evoking in the strategic centre of the Middle East new national movements of such abounding vigour.” — T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1922

There’s only so long any self-respecting blogger can ignore writing about the news when there’s only one story in town.  I’ve watched transfixed this evening as Colonel Gaddafi has appeared as a sort of reactionary situationist, appropriately enough in what looked like a Trabant, under an umbrella, mumbling a few words of defiance.  With this surreal performance he seems to have stolen the spirit of Plastic People of the Universe and turned it on its head, offering the world a slice of performance art while dropping heavy ordnance on his citizens.

Anyway, here’s my dinar’s worth on the revolutions there, in Egypt, and across the Maghreb and the Levant.  It seems to me that, if you can’t buy your people off with a decent standard of living (as the Gulf states have), then brute force on its own is rather shaky.  Regimes that have explicitly co-opted hardline Islam into their rationales for power look like they’re on safer ground.  In Egypt and Tunisia, Facebook-friendly teens in jeans have made common cause with conservative Muslims to bring down secular, military dictators: neither had any stake in the status quo ante.  In Iran and Saudi, though, the regimes have ruled by division, giving the hardcore peasantry the sort of hardcore religious rule most of them still apparently want.  Now the mullahs and the al-Sauds are all that stand between their pious populations and the abyss of Western modernity and liberalism (and, having had a night out on the Reeperbahn, I can’t really blame them).

In Egypt, then, the very supportive Western media have downplayed the potential of the Muslim Brotherhood, and up-played the legit gripes of hip, godless youngsters who only want nuff respec’ from the olds.  I don’t see any reason not to go along with this analysis, but I don’t think we know enough about what goes on behind Gaddafi’s iron veil to say with any certainty that the same applies in Libya.  (I also don’t blame the Israelis for being nervous, but I would remind them that democracies that trade with each other never go to war with each other.  I would also remind them, as a critical well wisher, that they do themselves very few favours by continuing to build on occupied Palestinian land.)

Either way, for a while I’ve said that history was stuck with Islamism after the failures of socialism and Arab nationalism.  If it turns out that democracy as we understand it has more appeal than Islamism after all, then I will happily find something new to say.

Here, then, is my first go at cod historiography.  No doubt Wikileaks and Twitter will take the credit, but these revolutions, like revolutions generally, are about unemployed young men unhappy with rising food and commodity prices.  For this, perhaps, they have the BICs’ (I refuse to include Russia) entry into world wealth to thank; perhaps the Arabs are just slightly ahead of us in realising that economic globalisation really does sort the men from the boys.  It may be, then, that when the dust settles, those who predicted that the rise of China’s middle class would bring a fourth wave of democracy to hundreds of millions of people will be proved half right: they were just wrong about it happening in China.

“Our race will have a cripple’s temper till it has found its feet.” — King Faisal I of Iraq, quoted in Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Read Full Post »

That’s Chinaworld, Jake

Last night I went to a discussion on the future of globalisation featuring the BBC’s roving man in a white suit Humphrey Hawksley, Time reporter Alex Perry and French egghead Dominique Moïsi, as part of Glasgow’s cringe-inducing ‘Aye Write!’ book festival.  The debate has moved on a bit since those heady post-Berlin Wall days when excitable chaps like Thomas Friedman raved about being able to buy Big Macs that tasted exactly the same in Greenland as in Timbuktu, and when foolish futurologist Francis Fukuyama hailed “the end of history”.  History, of course, came back with a vengeance, and now all the talk is of the relative decline of the West and the return to the early modern period when Asian civilisations were globally dominant.  US-led globalisation in the noughties was a victim both of its own success (in lifting hundreds of millions of people in Asia out of poverty) and its failure (9/11, Iraq, climate change, credit crunch, etc).  If there is a defining feeling today, it is that we in Europe, and to a lesser extent America, are like those Mesoamerican tribes chasing each other through the jungle in rags in Mel Gibson’s hilarious romp Apocalypto, before stumbling onto the beach to the incredible sight of the massing Spanish galleons that would put their own squabbles into some perspective.  As you know, I’m firmly in this “we’re finished” camp.  No-one in India or China sits around writing ululating blogs like this.

Moïsi, halfway between Said and Huntington, argued for a new cultural understanding between West, East and Middle East, languidly positing that the great divisive forces today are emotional rather than economic.  Hawksley and Perry were more practical, arguing that the West’s imposition of instant democracy (or IMFocracy) has often been worse than useless and that many countries at the lower levels of development are better off with benevolent dictators: neo-Hobbesian princes like Paul Kagame and Lee Kuan Yew.  Certainly, Rwanda is joining Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore as countries who’ve developed impressively from war and poverty through enlightened despotism, with democracy an afterthought.  I asked the panel whether this argument might give a figleaf to regimes, like the al-Sauds and the Castros, who don’t want democracy because it’s a threat to their own power, rather than because it’s supposedly unsuitable for their stage of development.  Perry ummed and erred and admitted I’d hit the nail on the head; Hawksley didn’t even try to answer; Moïsi proffered a Gallic shrug from his ivory tower.  For every benevolent dictator there are a dozen malevolent ones; for every Kagame or Lee there are plenty of Mugabes, Amins and Kims Jong-il.

I haven’t been to Africa or to Taiwan or Korea, but I can certify that Singapore presents a huge challenge to anyone who instinctively believes in the moral and practical supremacy of liberal democracy.  Here is a country – or, rather, a city-state like old republican Venice – that had an African standard of living at the end of WWII and is today a beacon of trade and civilisation.  Yes, it helps that they are an entrepôt perfectly situated at one of the world’s prime crossroads for mercantile activity; yes, they have the advantage that any addition to their infrastructure, in such a small place, automatically benefits almost everyone, and unlike Londoners they don’t have to pay for the upkeep of a ruinous hinterland.  But look at their achievements, without democracy: the streets are spotless, transport and healthcare make ours seem even more embarrassing than they do anyway, the people are universally hard-working, well-educated, and don’t run around shooting, knifing and swearing at each other.  Under a soft, subtle authoritarianism they’ve willed not just the ends of a civilised society, but the means: they’ve won their wars on drugs and crime by caning criminals and killing drug dealers, and unlike Dubai there are very few signs of either extreme of selfish wealth or hopeless poverty.  They have a wonderful, vibrant melting pot, but without the bombs going off.  There are plenty of immigrants and a mix of cultures and languages, but all children wear uniforms, sing the national anthem and pledge allegiance to the country at school each morning.  We scoff at such things, fooling ourselves that we are more sophisticated, but look at the results.  Compare it to the mess our individualism has brought us to: yes, left and right, that means both of you.  As Hawksley pointed out, for the 99% of people who play by the rules, the system works.  The rest of the world should stand in awe of Singapore’s works.

Where does this leave China and India?  The panel pointed out that, beyond the glittering façades of Bangalore and Shanghai, both countries are hamstrung by some pretty epic social and environmental problems: the unreported Naxalite war in India (all the violence of Veerappan, not much of the Robin Hood charm), casino capitalism in Shenzhen, and massive corruption, inequality and gendercide in both countries.  Before democracy can take hold in China, the rule of law and property rights have to be established much more firmly.  This is the mistake we made in Iraq: to imagine that elections alone, in the absence of those criteria and of civil institutions like a free press, would transform a country buggered by dictatorship, war and anarchy into a functioning liberal democracy overnight.  In China, then, we should agitate not for the end of the party but for the end of its abuses.  But would India have been better off by beginning as a dictatorship than a democracy?  I doubt they could have arrived at a dictator as enlightened as Nehru – and, even now, the relative dispersal of power and information there gives them an advantage in solving their great problems that China lacks.

But Lee Kuan Yew is a hero in China.  If that country, on a huge scale, can replicate what he achieved on a small one – then the world will deservedly be theirs, and we will either go the way of the Mayan and the Inca, or, if we are lucky, end our days as tour guides in the museum of Europe.

Read Full Post »