We need a new politics of accountability

By Michael Calderbank / @Calderbank

If we are to avoid compounding the embarrassing example of the McBride/Draper email brouhaha, we need to take a long hard look at how we have got to this position. Far from frantically aiming to get back to “politics as usual” as soon as possible, Labour’s real source of shame ought to be its very complicity in supporting a decaying political system that remains utterly impervious to democratic will of the majority.

In point of fact, this particular episode is much less politically fatal than the press would have us believe: is any voter really going to determine the way they cast their ballot at a General Election on the basis of email exchanges between backroom staffers and ‘Dolly’ Draper? Will this really outweigh the prospects for maintaining and improving public services? Hardly. But though a minor piece of idiocy, it is nevertheless a telling instance of the bankruptcy of political imagination and strategy that seems to be steadily engulfing the Brown premiership.

The plan to win a fourth term seems to amount to little more than reassuring the public that the government is doing everything it can – in the wake of the financial crisis – to restore the status quo ante, while doing everything in its power to scare the electorate with the consequences of electing a barely reconstructed Conservative party. The latter element is an entirely legitimate and indeed necessary part of an informed political strategy. As it appears Draper eventually concluded, there’s more than enough to go on here without recourse to juvenile mudslinging. But Labour’s positive offer to the electorate has to be based on more than mere competence administration and financial damage limitation. We are in new times; reference to past accomplishments and ideological co-ordinates of Labour’s pre-credit crunch electoral victories are no longer enough.
In the absence of bold ideas that can seize the public imagination, Labour simply appears as the ancien regime in need of being swept entirely away. This way spells heavy defeat.

Clegg and Cameron are already queuing up to pose as the champions of “change”. Labour, too, needs a strategy that recognises the widespread feeling that just as the British economy needs to be actively restructured to demonstrate that markets are there to serve the people, so too our political culture stands in need of a fundamental overhaul. This will not be possible whilst our anachronistic electoral system continues to militate against a democracy based on fairness and choice for the voters. Given the degree of scepticism towards the motives of politicians in general, why not take the decision out of Parliament altogether and give voters their say on political change at a referendum alongside a General Election?

If Gordon Brown won’t bring forward such radical steps to embrace and progressively shape a new kind of politics, he will be the victim of an electorate with no other option but to lash out in frustration. Cameron and the Tories will be the undeserving beneficiaries. Time is against him, but unless Brown really started to deliver on a vision of fairness and change for Britain’s future, then Labour will continue to suffer from a poverty of strategy and the symptoms of political malaise that flow from it.