Democracy representation and participation

The prospects for a dramatically more representative Parliament post 2015 are bleak

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Catherine Durose, Liz Richardson, Ryan Combs, Francesca Gains and Christina Eason

Whilst the likely outcome of the next election maybe still far too close to call, one feature of the next Parliament is very predictable.  The 2015 Parliament is likely to remain as deeply unrepresentative of the make-up of the UK population as the current legislature.  Although the 2010 Parliament showed some improvements in diversity, while women represent 51% of the UK population they formed just 22% of MPs; and although the ethnic minority population is 8% the number of ethnic minority MPs is half that at 4%.  Representation by other underrepresented groups: for example people with disabilities or openly LGBT is also less than would be reflective of the makeup of society more generally although this is harder to count.

This poor representation is despite all three main party leaders stating their support for efforts to improve the diversity of representation in Parliament in evidence given at a specially convened Speakers Conference before the last election.  While Lord Hurd has argued recently that greater diversity in political representation is a ludicrously radical demand, the Conference argued that improved diversity would support better policy making as MPs would draw on a wider range of experiences, and could act to enhance the legitimacy of Parliament and encourage greater political engagement.

Our research for the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, conducted just after the election in 2010, set out to explore the barriers to representation from underrepresented groups and to examine the pathways to politics taken by successful politicians from those groups protected by the Equalities Act to see what lessons could be learned.  We gathered primary qualitative data from a purposive sample of 62 national politicians and candidates, some who had been successful, and some who had not managed to achieve selection and/or elected office.  We also heard from around 20 lobby groups for under-represented groups within and outside political parties, and other stakeholder organisations.

In some cases shocking examples of sexist and racist attitudes were reported.  One black candidate was asked whether she was ‘one of them happy-clappy churchgoers’. One candidate recounted the experience of a local party member ‘hitting me on the bottom and asking me what a nice girl like me is doing in the Labour Party.’  A female ethnic minority candidate expressed her perception of the “double whammy” of discrimination she faced.  This also ran the risk of reducing support for diverse candidates.  In one example, other women in a candidate’s party assumed that she would get support from ethnic minorities in the party, but the other minority members were: “reluctant to support me because I am female and they are all men”.  Other attitudes towards women were less overtly expressed but still exclusionary. Women in politics perceived themselves as facing heightened expectations to justify their presence in a way that men did not. Yet, women were not taken seriously or seen to have the gravitas of male politicians.

While possibly horrifying, these might be familiar complaints about lingering outmoded common-or-garden prejudice.  However, beyond this, our analysis, published in Parliamentary Affairs, identified a systemic and institutional problem with local party ‘selectorates’.  A key issue mentioned by those we spoke to was the critical veto role played by the local selectorates, the local party activists who are responsible for selecting candidates.   Women and ethnic minorities reported facing ‘selector hostility’ struggling to secure the nomination for winnable seats as local party elites look for so-called ‘archetypal’ candidates.  The archetypal candidate reflects selectors’ own characteristics, but more importantly, those of previously successful candidates.  It is partly based on assumptions about electoral risk, and who different parts of the electorate will be prepared to vote for.  Candidates and sitting politicians saw this attitude reflected in the suggestions put to them to ‘have a go’ in ‘unwinnable’ seats. Analysis by Maria Sobolewska at the University of Manchester  has shown that, pre 2010, the Liberal Democrats selected the overwhelming proportion of their minority candidates in highly ethnic diverse seats, most of which were unwinnable and the Conservatives selected more than half of their minority candidates into hopeless seats.  The Labour Party selected the highest proportion of ethnic minority candidates for safe and winnable seats.

In our research, we argue that where candidates from under-represented groups have been successful, this is often because they were ‘acceptably different’ and shared particular ‘pathways’ into national politics which mitigated against the perceived electoral disadvantages of being from an underrepresented or  minority group.  One younger, male, ethnic minority politician highlighted how other aspects of his identity were able to make his ethnicity ‘acceptable ‘I think my age and colour ticked certain boxes and ex-military, public school boy ticked others’.  For women, this could take the form of being ‘one of the boys’, as explained by one respondent: “It’s how you fit in so they don’t think you’re a girl […] Once one of my colleagues described me as one of the boys, I think he meant it as a compliment but I’m not sure that it is.”  Such candidates are also likely to follow a pathway into politics which emphasises university education and a ‘politics facilitating’ or an increasingly  prominent ‘professional politics’ route.  Many of the new female or ethnic minority MPs elected in 2010 had experience in national politics as advisers, or lobbyists.  Of the 27 ethnic minority MPs, at least ten have legal backgrounds (37%).

Whilst this new type of pathway into politics can help to overcome selector hostility if candidates are filtered both through local selectorates and through professional pathways, then a key policy question in increasing diversity in representation becomes how to open up politics.  One of our interviewees said “When I was trying to become a Parliamentary candidate I was asked on more than one occasion what my qualifications were and they meant academic qualifications. One woman even said it was a real shame because one of the other candidates was a lawyer and another one had a PhD and although I seemed like a really nice woman I wasn’t really [of] their calibre”.

Although the Labour Party is persisting with the unpopular but effective policy of making 50% of its target seats selected from all women shortlists, this willingness for the party elites and the party machinery to work with local selectorates to overcome selector hostility is not found elsewhere.  Although David Cameron is clearly committed to wider diversity, Conservative members are deeply resistant to either interference from the national party or equality measures, as highlighted by recent media reports, and supported by other research by Sarah Childs and Paul Webb. And the Liberal Democrats are also struggling to take any positive measures, with the ongoing furore over sexual harassment claims still making headlines.

Without tougher efforts by all parties to address their own openness, attitudes and ‘selectorates’, the portents for the 2015 Parliament being radically more representative than 2010 do not look good.

This blog first appeared on Democratic Audit, http://www.democraticaudit.com/?p=2540 27 January 2014

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Dr Catherine Durose is Senior Lecturer and Director of Research in the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham and works with the Public Services Academy.

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Dr Liz Richardson is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Manchester, and a Visiting Fellow in the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at  London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).  Her previous roles include Co-ordinator of LSE Housing at the LSE. Liz is co-editor of the journal, Local Government Studies.  She is also a Director of a community charity, the National Communities Resource Centre.

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Ryan Combs is a Research Associate at Centre for Primary Care, Institute of Population Health at the University of Manchester.

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Francesca Gains is a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Manchester. Before entering academia she worked in local government and the probation service, and has both government funded and Parliamentary research experience. Her research agenda explores the relationship between political management arrangements and policy outcomes.

Christina Eason has a PhD from the University of Manchester’s School of Social Sciences and has research interests in British politics, gender, women, representation, and institutions.

The impact of media logic on democratic legitimacy in local governance networks

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Iris Korthagen and Ingmar van Meerkerk

Many policy- and decision-making processes in today’s democracies increasingly take place in governance networks, these are interactive or network forms of governance. This raises an important question of how democratic legitimacy is being shaped in these networks and which factors impact upon this.

The opportunity for citizens and stakeholders to give voice are viewed as important sources for democratic legitimacy in governance networks, with this enhancing the quality of deliberations between stakeholders and accountability of decision-makers. An important factor which is scarcely examined is the impact of media on these sources of democratic legitimacy. The media can give voice to actors, they can provide a forum for deliberation and they can provide an important channel for decision-makers to account for their decisions.

Rather than neutrally transmit information and images the media select and frame news stories by a commercial logic: news needs to be made every day and it needs to be sold. This means that news is relatively more negative than positive, skewed towards dramatic human interest stories and content designed by public relations professionals. This raises the important question of how this media logic affects democratic legitimacy.

We recently examined this relationship by comparing three local governance networks in the Netherlands. Using content analysis of documents, case studies and interviews, we came to the conclusion that the media logic increased the potential of certain sources, while it decreased others.

Voice

The media are a vehicle to generate attention for certain issues and to gain influence in the process. By adapting to the media logic we found citizen groups succeeded in attracting media attention and were able to put their issues on the political agenda. However, the media logic restricted the messages of citizens’ groups that came through. For instance, having harsh, negative sound bites and organizing protest actions were more attractive than a nuanced and collaborative attitude.

Deliberations

The media can function as a watchdog, as checks and balances in the process and as a platform for diverse deliberations. We found deliberative processes were broadened by the perspectives of the citizen groups that gained media attention. Nevertheless, as the media are more interested in entertaining stories, with a focus on conflicts and drama, this partly reduced the quality of the deliberation process. Images seemed more important than well elaborated deliberations. Furthermore, the media, in our cases, were more a platform for citizen groups than for political authorities.

Accountability

The media are a communication channel for generating transparency and accountability. Since the media were at times so negative about the proposed project plans, they forced political authorities into a reactive communication style: they had to fight against a negative image. Proactive communication, such as branding, is difficult in the context of the citizens’ dramatic stories.

We observed that citizen groups deployed active media strategies at times when they were losing faith in the outcomes of the interactive governance process. Indeed, some decisions were partly changed in favour of the citizen groups that gained media attention. In that sense the mediatized reality can have a substantial impact on the reality of governance.

Certain citizens’ groups thus extended their influence on the policy- and decision-making outputs through their media strategies. At the same time these strategies can be seen as go-it-alone strategies that can damage trust relationships with the authorities and the other actors involved and even isolate the group from the interactive governance process. This also raises an important challenge for political decision-makers. To what extent should they listen to those citizens who are barking loudly in the media, while other stakeholders are trying to reach compromises in an interactive setting?

A full account of this research is available in our recent article in Local Government Studies, published online 09 Jan 2014.

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Iris Korthagen is a PhD studenet at the Department of  Public Administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam and a member of the research group Governance of Complex Systems (GOCS). Her PhD project focuses on the mediatisation of public decision-making processes. She studies how the logic of news reporting influences the content and the process of decision-making in governance networks.

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Ingmar van Meerkerk is a PhD student at the Department of Public Administration at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His PhD thesis focusses on the role of boundary spanners and the impact of boundary-spanning activities on the democratic legitimacy and performance of interactive governance settings. For his thesis he has published in several international peer reviewed journals, such as Policy Sciences, European Planning Studies and Environment and Planning C.

The theft of the open primary: can we pin it on Jeffrey Archer?

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Chris Game

It’s rather late for a New Year’s confession, but I need to get it off my conscience: I confess I read Jeffrey Archer books. I’m advised it only ranks as a venial, rather than mortal, sin, and it’s not an addiction; I don’t buy hardbacks, or sneak them on to student reading lists.

archerAnyway, over Christmas I read Best Kept Secret, the third in Archer’s multi-volume Clifton Chronicles, and came across something relating directly, and rather curiously, to a topic I was already planning to blog about: the Conservatives’ increasing use of open primaries to select their parliamentary candidates for the 2015 Election. So it’s me first, Archer later.

From literally his first day as leader, part of David Cameron’s project of ridding the Conservatives of their ‘nasty party’ image has involved, to quote his acceptance speech, changing “the scandalous under-representation of women in the Conservative Party” and generally diversifying the profile of its MPs and councillors. Stirring stuff, were such a change within his power. However, the “scandalous under-representation” – 17 women out of 198 Tory MPs in 2005 – was created not by his predecessors, but by autonomous local constituency associations who jealously guard their right to select their own candidates – with minimal interference from the national party, thanks very much.

Neither the party nor Cameron will accept anything seriously effective, like all-women shortlists or legally enforceable gender quotas. So they’re left with what they call “equality rhetoric and promotion measures” to increase the selection of minority groups – like the notorious Conservative Central Office ‘A-list’ of some 150 favoured women, black/minority ethnic (BAME) and disabled candidates, from which it was ‘expected’ that selectors in Conservative-held target seats would make their choice, at the expense, if necessary, of their own colleagues or preferred local candidates.

Perhaps surprisingly, some actually did, and in 2010 the party’s women MPs rose to 43, or one in seven of the parliamentary party, and its BAME MPs to 11. The A-list had served its immediate purpose, and the plan was for the diversification project to be driven in the new Parliament by another scheme favoured by both Cameron and the Lib Dems: open primaries – shorthand for the nominating primary elections in which US parties select their Presidential and legislative candidates.

Our recent candidate selections have been mostly through what could be termed membership or closed primary elections. Applicants are shortlisted by local party officials, but the final selection is open to all registered constituency party members – either at a meeting, or through a membership ballot – but closed to non-members. Then gradually during the last Parliament the Conservatives started opening up their selection process, eventually allowing non-party members to participate in the actual selection. We had the unrestricted open primary, in which all registered voters in a constituency, including members of other parties or no party, could participate.

Boris Johnson gave a massive kick start both to the idea and to his own successful 2008 London Mayoral campaign when he was chosen, overwhelmingly, as the Conservatives’ candidate in an open primary in which over 20,000 electors invested around £1.50 to call a premium rate phone line and register their votes.

Over a hundred open primary meetings were held between 2006 and 2010, but Cameron’s initial vision was to do the thing properly, Boris-scale, with postal ballots mailed to all registered voters in a constituency. The first in 2009 was in the Devon constituency of Totnes, and Sarah Wollaston, the winning candidate with nearly 8,000 votes, ticked just about all Cameron’s boxes. A Plymouth-based GP and mother of three, who’d only joined the party in 2006 to oppose the closure of the local community hospital, Wollaston would replace an embarrassing veteran MP, forced to stand down following the revelation of his abuse of parliamentary expenses for maintaining his country home and ‘rabbit protection’. A few months later a second postal primary in Gosport, Hampshire, was a virtual carbon copy. This time the expenses fiddler was the MP whose £30,000 gardening expenses included a £1,645 ‘floating duck island’, and his replacement was Caroline Dinenage, a local councillor, businesswoman, and mother of two.

To the incoming Coalition leaders, these postal primaries must have seemed like a magic potion: the key to cleaning up and transforming the membership of Parliament, opening up candidate selection in safe seats, and extending public participation all in one go. Certainly it went to their heads, for, at the height of an international financial crisis, they included in the Coalition Agreement the pledge to “fund 200 all-postal primaries over this Parliament, targeted at seats which have not changed hands for many years” – the funds to be allocated to all Parliamentary parties in proportion to their 2010 election vote.

With Totnes and Gosport having cost roughly £40,000 each, that would be £8 million-plus, and unsurprisingly it’s become one of the less contentious Coalition pledges to have fallen off the cart. What has continued, though, is that local Conservative Associations have been deciding for themselves to forgo the exclusive selection privileges to which their £25 membership fees entitle them, and to turn their final selection – from a shortlist of usually three or four – into an open primary meeting.

It’s a far less radical development than all-postal primaries. Even so, it has more than symbolically opened up a previously private process, has got Ed Miliband wondering if Labour should be doing something similar, and will surely strengthen the successful candidates’ mandate, if they’re eventually elected. As for the profile of those successful primary-selected candidates, my guess is that David Cameron is at least moderately encouraged. By my count, there have been fewer women than men, though a higher proportion than the overall one-third so far selected in the party’s target seats. Our interest, though, is in one in particular: Lucy Frazer QC, a commercial law barrister who, as re-confirmed candidate for South East Cambridgeshire, has already acquired a small, unwanted footnote in British electoral history.

Let me summarise. Safe Conservative seat; 100+ applicants, reduced by the local party executive to a shortlist of three women, one man – none, controversially, with serious local connections. In the first two rounds of voting, no candidate gets 50%, and the bottom candidate in each round is eliminated – leaving Frazer and Heidi Allen, a businesswoman and St Albans councillor. No voting numbers are revealed, even to candidates, who are not permitted scrutineers. Third round: Frazer is declared winner, by 84 votes to 48 – somewhat surprisingly, Allen having been ante-post favourite.

The presiding officer then, quite improperly, takes the ballot papers home, decides to recount them, and discovers a serious case of incompetence and/or malpractice. In the final vote, a pile of 25 ballot papers was marked as being for Frazer, although apparently only the top two actually were, the rest being for Allen.  The true result, therefore, should have been 84 less 23 = 61 for Frazer; 48 plus 23 = 71 and a majority of 10 for Allen.

Thus far, real life mirrors almost precisely a key plot device in Jeffrey Archer’s Best Kept Secret. In Archer’s version, Sir Giles Barrington narrowly retains his Bristol Docklands seat for Labour at the 1955 General Election, thanks to his sharp-eyed young nephew, Sebastian Clifton, having spotted that one of the piles of 100 ballot papers allocated to his Conservative opponent, Major Alexander Fisher, “has a Fisher ballot paper on top, and the 99 underneath are for Uncle Giles” (p.256).

At this point, however, fiction and fact diverge. Archer arranges for the mis-allocation to be discovered and confirmed during the recount already requested by Sir Giles [forget all the improbabilities – it’s a story, for goodness’ sake!]. The correct result can therefore be officially declared: a victory by 4 votes for Sir Giles, instead of the previous announced 184 for Major Fisher.

Heidi Allen was less fortunate. Not having been told her first and second round votes, she was unaware when the result was announced that she had apparently, and inexplicably, ‘lost’ more than a dozen of her supporters between the second and third counts. Others in the room, however, must have known, which seems to suggest an element of malpractice amidst all the incompetence – reinforced in my mind anyway by the fact that, as the world knows, the Archers’ home at The Old Vicarage, Grantchester is in – yes, South East Cambridgeshire.

Conservative Campaign HQ, confronted with this total car crash, reacted pleasingly predictably – first claiming that the ballot papers should have been shredded (which they shouldn’t – not for three months), then walking away from the whole thing. The South East Cambridgeshire Association then compounded their self-inflicted fiasco by refusing to contemplate a recount, calling instead an emergency closed meeting to which they invited Frazer but not Allen, and voted to reaffirm Frazer’s election in the interests of ‘party unity’ (some hope!).

As an outsider, I’m both amused and, because of the Archer coincidence, mildly intrigued. There is, though, a serious point. Open primaries are one of the more interesting electoral initiatives in recent years, and one hopes that other local parties aren’t deterred by the disaster of this single case.

Chris Game - pic

Chris is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political  leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

Local democracy at the sharp end: diary from a Parish Council

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Ian Briggs

It starts in the autumn of 2013. The Secretary of State knocks back the latest submission of the Core Strategy from the District Council – more homes needed please. Suddenly, the Parish Council becomes inundated with requests for meetings from developers – the story here being that this rural village has the postcode where houses change hands on the market the fastest for miles around, and for the highest possible price.

By November 2013, eight potential housing developments are highlighted and the community becomes ‘punch drunk’ with consultations for housing developments. Plans are submitted to the District Council but mysteriously they do not appear on the website.

Early January 2014, the Parish Council calls a community meeting to discuss development, the fact that HS2 Ltd are now proposing permanent road closures, and the Environmenet Agency is looking at proposals for an advanced form of ‘fracking’ – underground coal gasification for the area.

It is hardly surprising that those local residents present at the meeting are up in arms and demanding answers. Council Council member is present at meeting but rather quiet and makes sharp exit at the close. No District Ward councillor present and no apologies sent.

The following morning, the members of the Parish Council are given sight of resignation letter from District Councillor.

Week two, January 2014. District Council meets to agree new proposed core strategy. Shock – areas within the Parish Council highlighted to absorb thousands of houses – sets out case that it is at the periphery of the District so should be little trouble – wonder why ward councillor resigns?

Still no sign on the District Council website of plans submitted by developers in December 2013. Then, find they have put them on the website but believe they relate to a totally different parish – oops!

Letter sent to the Leader of the District Council requesting urgent meeting – no acknowledgment, no reply after ten working days. Leader of Council is in London for extended period according to Council staff. Wonder what on earth he is up to and who he is talking to?

All of the above is a trust story. But the important issue here is that this is set against a backdrop of ‘localism’ – if the intention is to give greater powers to local communities then we need to look closely at the decision-making mechanisms that we have to work with. There are questions arising as to how we are failing to integrate decision-making across different levels of local democracy.

A fundamental  tenant of any democracy is being clear and open as to where decisions are made. If all this sounds as though it is an attack on the District Council in question, it is not meant to be so – the Council is in the same position as most others. It has made deep and significant cuts to its operations and is now faced with making decisions that are expensive in terms of time and associated managerial costs.

In amongst all of this are the public. They are open to persuasion from a local media that is keen to jump upon any news story that could sound as though the Council is failing, and given that event well educated and sensible members of the public are poorly informed of the mechanisms of local democratic decision-making, it is no wonder that they turn to the most available and accessible form of local representation – the Parish Council.

Next diary entries to start soon…..

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Ian Briggs is a Senior Fellow at INLOGOV, and sits on a rural Parish Council in Warwickshire. He has research interests in the development and assessment of leadership, performance coaching, organisational development and change, and the establishment of shared service provision.

Reason, myth and migration

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Phillip Cole

One of the dominant features of public debate about immigration in the United Kingdom is the absence of reason. Many political commentators have begun to notice the reluctance of people to abandon basic myths about immigration, despite the prevalence of evidence that shows those myths to be false. For example, net immigration has fallen over the past three years, but only one fifth of people believe that. The rest are convinced that net immigration is on the rise.

I think there is something deep seated at play here in the public sphere. I don’t mean to draw attention away from the importance of racism in anti-immigration stances, or the important role of the media in creating a great deal of hostility. But I do want to suggest the idea of ‘Heimat’ can supplement these explanations and help shed light on the persistence of myth within the immigration debate.

‘Heimat’ is an extraordinarily complex idea that plays an important role in German thought and culture, and I can’t hope to do it justice here. It captures the feeling of being at home, or, more accurately, is a reaction to the experience of not feeling at home.

In other words, ‘Heimat’ is a reactive idea, a reaction against the fluidity and change experienced under conditions of modernity, which result in alienation and a feeling of lost-ness. Heimat is an idea of a place where one really belongs, and so is an imaginary home set up against our experience of alienation. It is essentially backward looking and nostalgic, and so it does not exist in the present.

But equally it does not exist in the past. Although it is a place, and exists in the past in one sense, it is not a place that has ever existed. It is an imaginary place when things were, we are told, more innocent and simple and stable: it is motion-less and change-less.

This place is not open to rational criticism. When people say things were better in the past, pointing out to them that this past has never actually existed – it is an imaginary reaction to the present — brings about no change in their nostalgia. And although as an idea ‘Heimat’ has played a role in both right and left politics in Germany, one key element of it is mistrust of the outsider, whose presence is at least one cause of the loss of ‘Heimat’.

So the immigrant brings change, but change of something that lies in an imaginary past. The reality is that the world was never like that and has already changed. In fact the immigrant may symbolize change, but they don’t bring it. The world just has changed and is changing – it always has. And the immigrant is one who lives in the borderlands of change.

Although the idea of Heimat is explicit in the German-speaking world and has no simple equivalent in the English-speaking world, I have no doubt that it is present in the way we think. Patrick Wright’s description of ‘Englishness’ in his article, “Last orders for the English aborigine”, certainly fits the model, and perfectly captures the stance of UKIP and its supporters.

This Englishness “…finds its essence in that sense of being opposed to the prevailing trends of the present. It’s a perspective that allows even the most well-placed man of the world to imagine himself a member of an endangered aboriginal minority: a freedom fighter striking out against ‘alien’ values and the infernal workings of a usurping state”. At its heart is an idea of England “…in which the very thought of difference or change is instantly identified with degeneration, corruption and death” (pp.68-69).

And so ‘Heimat’ is a reactive idea, a reaction against the fluidity and change experienced under conditions of modernity, which result in alienation and a feeling of lost-ness. And it is the migrant – part of the process of motion and change – who is identified as the culprit for this lost-ness. But the key point here is that it is not open to rational criticism. It is an idea that lies beyond reason.

My suggestion is that if we study the public debate about immigration, and the anti-immigration stance that many take, we will find the theme of Heimat running through them – phrases keep re-occurring in those debates, most strikingly, I have found, the theme of not people to being at home in their own country. And the most important aspect of this theme is, of course, that it is not open to reason – the resistance to argument and evidence is an essential dimension of Heimat.

Myths, of course, can be combated through persisting with reason and evidence, and it may be that we can see this in the fact that Nigel Farage, UKIP leader, recently stated that he would rather be poorer with fewer migrants, an acceptance that immigration brings economic growth to the UK, and that it was the social/cultural impact of immigration that was important rather than economic impact.

This seems to show that the barrage of evidence and argument about the economic benefits of immigration have had some effect even within the minds of UKIP, where in the past the economic myths have been pretty much hard-wired. So the fact that we find our attempts to reason rebuffed by myth again and again should not discourage us from continuing with our efforts. The one thing we must never do is abandon hope in the power of reason.

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Phillip Cole is a Visiting Professor in Applied Philosophy with the Social Ethics Research Group at the University of South Wales, and Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of West of England. He is co-author of Debating the Ethics of Immigration: Is There a Right to Exclude? with Christopher Heath Wellman (Oxford University Press 2011), and Philosophies of Exclusion: Liberal Political Theory and Immigration (Edinburgh University Press 2000).

Phillip presented these ideas as a paper for the Migration and Citizenship Seminar Series at the University of Birmingham. See the programme for details of forthcoming events.

Where have all the politics gone? On wildebeest, lions and other political animals

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Catherine Staite

One benefit of spending many days mass catering and washing up over Christmas has been the companionship of Radio 4 news programmes.  Sadly, I now feel a bit like those women who decide on divorce just after Christmas.  Prolonged exposure to political reporting has left me feeling betrayed and irritated in equal measure.

Perhaps it isn’t Radio 4’s fault. Perhaps they can only do the best they can with the dross they have to work with.  Perhaps the lack of substantial topics and forensic interrogation are products of the absence of principle and passion in political debate.

There is the obsession with retail.  I like a bit of shopping myself but retail trends and their reflection of wider society and their impact on the economy are reported with mind-numbing and repetitive banality.  If I hear more bland stories about ‘cash strapped families shopping around’ I’ll cry.

Why aren’t the world’s best journalists digging underneath these seasonal superficialities? What about the differences in spending power and standards of living between rich and poor?  The poor are rarely mentioned, unless negatively and simplistically as  ‘working age benefits claimants’.  What about the places our goods come from and the people who make them? Whether we get our bargains from John Lewis or Amazon – they all come across the sea in big containers  from the same places but the people who make them don’t get a fair return on their labour and are often brutally exploited. This only gets reported on when thousands die at one time, which makes the issue newsworthy  – until it is promptly forgotten again.

Immigration is perhaps the topic where a lack of intelligent, questioning journalism is most evident.  National politicians resemble small boys playing football – all dashing after the ball together with a woeful lack of strategy or even tactics.  The ball they are all chasing is a nasty construction of xenophobia, fear and ignorance, held together by nostalgia for a misremembered past. At other times they resemble wildebeest (other herding animals with a tendency to mass panic are available).  Is UKIP now a lion?  Only if the wildebeest think so.

Where are the facts?  How much do immigrants contribute to the Exchequer, our culture and our quality of life?  Lincolnshire farmers could not harvest their crops without immigrant labour. Our hospitals could not function without  immigrant health professional. So the answer has to be ‘lots’. How many of us – that’s us to distinguish us from them who come in ‘hordes’, determined only on scrounging and/or destroying our way of life – are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants ourselves?  Lots and lots. Instead, we get a diet of unchallenging reporting of the prevailing narrative which is creating bias merely through repetition.

Reporting of the floods has not been accompanied by many facts.  Bald statements about the money allocated to capital works and cuts to revenue  leading to job losses leaves us no wiser about the costs and benefits of flood defences and  the public policy choices to be made about the best way of allocating scarce resources remain uncharted waters.  Cameron was reportedly issuing stern instructions to local government about fulfilling their duties – without challenge.  No reporter questioned the authority of someone who couldn’t navigate his way out of damp carpet to instruct sovereign  bodies to perform their expert functions.

Going back to work has been a welcome relief from shouting at the radio but I’m still suffering from a deep sense of dissatisfaction.  There are questions to be asked and answers that really matter – but who is asking them?

Catherine Staite

Catherine Staite is the Director of INLOGOV. She provides consultancy and facilitation to local authorities and their partners, on a wide range of issues including on improving outcomes, efficiency, partnership working, strategic planning and organisational development, including integration of services and functions.