Make My Vote Count

The campaign for voter choice and a more representative parliament

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reform that goes with the grain of society
Fiona Mactaggart MP

Politics is under assault. To an extent politicians have asked for it. When we exaggerate our achievements people feel let down, if we do not tell the truth, or pretend that it is possible to have world-class public services without paying for them, we debase the currency of politics.

Most politicians in most parties are honourable people who want to serve the public and to make the world a better place. Yet it has become a commonplace assumption of public discourse that we are sleazy liars. Even when their direct experience at a school or in a hospital contradicts this image people still believe it. My constituents tell me that I am more normal and more honest than MPs in general, but so do the constituents of most MPs. It's like the white people who believe that black people they know are exceptions to a general racist picture rather than that the picture itself is wrong.

But even if the cynicism about politics rests on flawed and wrong assumptions politicians like me cannot change those assumptions just by telling people that they are wrong. We have to find a new way of going about the business of politics that allows people to trust their experience rather than believe the popular current myths. Electoral reform is at the heart of a new politics that creates trust in the power of politics to change our world for the better.

To rehabilitate politics, politicians must live in the real world with its real complexities and compromises. The people who you disagree with are not automatically demons while the bland politics that fears to offend is dull. Both are a turn-off for the electorate. Instead we need a plural recognition of the different issues and the way they affect people. Here we will find the energy to put into identifying priorities and engaging people with solutions to the knotty problems like crime. It requires a rebuilding of trust between those who use services, those who deliver them, whether in the classroom or on an estate, and the politicians who articulate our aspirations for that delivery.

It is a commonplace of those opposed to electoral reform that it will lead to greater blandness and blurring between parties, because it more often results in coalitions. But actually it offers a more nuanced choice, instead of coalitions being organised behind the closed doors of political parties. The electorate are adult partners who can see the joins, and have more say about where they should be created.

The electorate of France did this recently when the politically progressive mainstream formed a grand alliance to smash Le Pen. It was a clear expression of values-based politics, of people exercising a clear choice between defeating racism and expressing their traditional enmities. Had the political parties been more engaged with the electorate they would have seen the risk before this alliance was necessary and perhaps avoided the petty tribalism that allowed the racists to slip through the middle in the first round.

And that is where leadership comes in. A crucial part of leadership is creating the vision based on values that people can commit to. That is why there is no difficulty squaring leadership with participation. The strongest leadership can easily relinquish power from the centre if local people and agencies understand and share a vision and sense of direction. Politics is stronger when diverse, locally developed strategies are all working towards the same end.

Change must be a process that people feel engaged with if the change is to be more than superficial. The key point is cultural - today you have to negotiate your way through change - persuade people, form and reform coalitions - deliver by letting go and being honest about the fact that there are few perfect answers and the best ones are developed in partnership. The greatest leaps forward are sometimes made by learning from failure. That's how a the modern state must work - but to enable it we need a different type of electoral system, which does not just focus on the offer made at election time but on how the business of change is developed and delivered between elections. And if we put more energy into that process I think it axiomatic that we will see more participation at election time.

There is a danger for the left in this pluralist approach, that inequality arises from different strategies in different communities and unless there is a widely shared vision of what our values and goals are we can too easily be diverted from them. Politics can overcome these risks by creating a picture of a better world that engages and inspires voters. But the picture is always impressionist: minute detail can provoke opposition, where broader brush strokes are more generously interpreted, leaving less room to fail. This means that unless people have been involved in creating the picture they interpret it as closer to their own aspirations and feel let down when things are not delivered.

So although keeping the vision is crucial to making sense of politics we need to connect our day-to-day political strategy to that vision. We also need to end the tendency exclusively to focus on the concerns of the "swing voter" which fails to express the concerns of many voters who have been loyal to Labour for decades. A classic example of such a concern which has not been mentioned seriously in either of the last two election campaigns is the availability of decent affordable housing to buy or to rent. That was one reason for the decline in voting at the last election: people who considered themselves to be in the Labour tribe wondered if we had forgotten them and did not feel inclined to register their vote.

So although electoral reform and more plural politics may require a reduction in tribalism it also helps us to more carefully address the issues that most concern our core tribe. First past the post politics have resulted in a focus on the concerns of others, who perhaps only worry about affordable housing when the lack of it means that there are no teachers or police officers in their neighbourhood.

The way we have traditionally done politics allows politicians to avoid uncomfortable truths, leaving voters feeling that we do not respect them. For nearly five years we pretended that you could have excellent services without paying extra for them. The picture we painted of the good society was painting by numbers, ticking off the concerns of groups, which could threaten our success, and inspiring nobody. It did not share the complexities of delivering change, so when change was hard to deliver voters quite reasonably felt let down.

We have learned some of the lessons. The 2002 budget was a very good start, marking the end of fantasy politics and the beginning of sharing the real consequences of our national aspirations with the electorate. Being honest about the price tag that accompanies better services could be the rebirth of real politics.

And in the 2002 local elections the electorate themselves showed that a strategy of shooting at the middle is not enough. The differential results around the country demonstrated sophisticated judgement by voters and a clear awareness of what is deemed success. Labour Councils that had failed to inspire or to deliver were punished. In communities where Labour was showing leadership and had delivered service improvements we made gains.

Sometimes the gains were founded not on change already experienced but on hope that Labour's local vision would deliver. Hope is an essential lubricant of successful politics. In a local election it can more easily grow out of real contact and experience than at a national level. One way of rebuilding trust may be to recreate the experience of politics from the bottom up. That requires us to devolve power so that people can feel what exercising it is like and be won slowly to a shared vision. Devolution works better when there is pluralism - not the monolithic party structures that first past the post encourages.

It is time to ditch the brittle command and control politics which served to rescue Labour from the outer darkness of the eighties and much of the nineties because it is destroying trust in politics and politicians. When politicians radiate an assumption that 'we know best' it can be comforting for a bit, but the shine wears off, as it did for Margaret Thatcher, and voters feel disrespected.

Another weakness of Labour's message is a narrow instrumental emphasis on delivering services. While the electorate rightly punish parties that fail to deliver, if that was all there was for politicians to do, a tendering process for contracts to manage public services could replace democracy. Politicians have become wedded to targets and outcome measures in order to get things done. Too often these lead to unintended consequences: the emphasis on convictions for local police forces has, for example, led to greater priority being given to cases of shoplifting, where the perpetrator is to hand, than street robbery where he usually is not.

There have been consequences of this instrumentalism. Many people feel that politics does not really matter, even activism today is often anti- political, most obviously expressed in the approach of the anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation movements. The failure to paint a picture or create a narrative which underpins and makes sense of what we are trying to achieve leads many people, who have benefited from changes such as a right to trade union membership or paid holidays, to assume that would have happened anyway, without a Labour government.

Politics can also seem irrelevant because the way we go about our business has not been modernised: the House of Commons still appears to have more in common with a gentleman's club than a modern legislature. Even the Labour Party in government has seriously contemplated a largely appointed second chamber at the start of the 21st century. More open debate and opportunity for politicians to criticise the implementation of policies would help people to understand and support what we are trying to achieve. Failure to do this has meant that on tough issues, like asylum policy, we have allowed debate to be conducted in slogans and to fail to address complicated realities. This in turn has further polarised public opinion.

Electoral reform could create a more adult from of politics, which goes with the grain of real complexity and self-determination that is driving social, economic and cultural change. But electoral reform is just one expression of a modern more plural politics with the capacity to engage more people and to attract more participation.

Decline in participation is not an inexorable trend. When people feel connected to political decisions and feel that their vote will make a real difference there are often very high levels of participation. In Slough 75% of tenants on one estate voted in a recent ballot on stock transfer. In Birmingham 65.5% turned out, rather more than in local and general elections there. Local ballots for the boards of regeneration schemes regularly attract over 70% participation. People don't vote when they think the result won't deliver a difference to their lives. Too often we create a pretence of participation which is just a ritual designed to provide an alibi for leadership to proceed with business as usual: the electorate can spot this and sensibly decline to join in.

In 1997 the feeling of hope for the future of politics, that I think Tony Blair was trying to express when he once described Britain, rather oddly, as a young country, grew after the general election. It soon dissipated when people became less clear about what the modern Labour Party was actually trying to do, when their personal interpretations of our vision seemed not to be matched by events and when Labour's modernisation seemed to be a code for abandoning its values.

The values are there, too often deeply buried in a mass of detail and mechanics of delivery. They include a belief in human rights and opportunities for all, coupled with an expectation that people should as far as possible help themselves and a recognition that the state has a responsibility to equip people to do that, not just by providing services such as education and health but by providing and protecting our rights. Sometimes values, such as the commitment to freedom of information, which Labour expressed in opposition, seem to have been diluted by the experience of power. And to prevent that happening it is important to express these values explicitly, not just to focus on delivery mechanisms.

At a time when neither of the other parties seem to have any values, it is particularly important that Labour clearly restates ours. A vacuum could really deliver the end of politics. Signs of decline are there, with election of fascist council candidates and falling participation. An electoral system which requires more clarity and energy could contribute to a revival not just of democracy but of the values of the left. Sometimes, as in the slogan "education, education, education", an expression of values also sums up a campaign for delivery. That is when politics can be relevant, giving people hope that we can make a better life. But so far we have not worked enough at a very local level so that politics is also engaging, giving communities power, responsibility and opportunity to deliver those values and use politics to build a better society.