Plans for consistent democracy

Submitted by AWL on 30 September, 2014 - 5:42 Author: Matt Cooper

Solidarity 337 was right to pose a plan of consistent democracy in response to the Scottish referendum.

This is far better than the wrong-headedness of much of the left’s “Cuba of the north” fantasies about Scottish independence. It is also the right riposte to the inconsistent and undemocratic response of the mainstream Westminster parties. Solidarity was, however, wrong in both its overall approach to the democratic demands raised and the detailed content.

It is fair enough to outline what a new democratic settlement for the UK would look like, but it is also important to identify the agency that will carry out that programme.

It is right to reject the Labour leadership’s demand for a constitutional convention which is clearly modelled on the Scottish Constitutional convention of 1989 which included the leadership of the main parties (except the anti-reform Conservatives), TUC, churches, business groups et al. However to call for a constituent assembly is, at best, abstract propaganda.

A constituent assembly (an elected body which draws up a new constitution) is something the left should call for only when it takes forward a struggle to recast a political system. In the absence of any such a struggle it becomes an expression only of the lack of political leadership and political culture in the working class. Like elections for police and crime commissioners, it is an election in a vacuum.

Worse, it would give those views that dominate current political debate (anti-EU, anti-immigrant with a fair bit of anti-Scottish) political form, and it would codify demoralisation and defeat of working-class forces into a constitutional settlement.

The left and the working class movement should take an interest in British constitutional reform and the political system in the way that they have not done for several generations. It is notable that the only recent constitutional reforms of any note in Britain were those of the Blair governments which saw them as a cost free form of radicalism (although many of them, however, half-hearted, had some positive content). The left and the labour movement should have its own agenda, but at the moment it does not.

And what should the reforms be? The monarchy is of course worth abolishing in itself, but the broader question of an overly mighty executive operating in its name is the key issue (as some campaigners for a republic in Australia recognised in 1999).

The big demand is federalism. But it makes little sense to call for federalism in the UK — federalism cannot operate where one unit (England) is far bigger than all the others put together. It would require that all the units have the same powers. Replacing the House of Lords based on such a four (or five) nation federalism could not work if eighty per cent of the population represented lived in one of the constituent federated states (England). Of course, England could be broken into several federal states, but where is the demand for that other than among a few parochial idiots in Cornwall and Yorkshire?

Devolution is a good approximate answer to the desire of Scottish people to have more say over their own affairs. The West Lothian question is a non-question since it contains the false assumption that the votes in Westminster that affect only England and Wales have no effect in Scotland. They do have an effect. Devolution is a constitutional compromise but a compromise with the least problems.

Solidarity says that the Republic of Ireland should consider federating with the UK, that this can unpick the sectarian compromises of the Good Friday settlement. This is an ambitious statement and it needs to be more than an aside.

It is time that the left and the labour movement took up the question of democratic political power. If this article is perhaps a start, it does raise more questions than it answers.

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