Interns, expenses and our broken politics

By Darrell Goodliffe

Two separate stories this week have drawn painful attention to fundamental problems with our democracy and our politics. I refer to the continuing expenses saga, the successful prosecution of Elliot Morley, and the furore over Nick Clegg’s social mobility faux pas and the scandal of unpaid internships.

We have to see the two issues as linked. This isn’t going to turn into a ‘its all about the money’ rant but we have to acknowledge its part of the problem. However, to say it simply is the problem is to mistake a symptom as being the entire disease. Representative democracy is expensive (and therefore naturally predisposed to increase the power of money) by its very nature. It costs an absolute fortune to run a proper campaign that ‘touches base’ with an electorate that is vast, even if you’re talking about a local council ward; let alone an MP’s constituency. This is why open primaries are likely to cause more problems then they solve because to be a successful candidate you would have to run two constituency-wide campaigns and need to have substantial financial collateral to do that. Primaries make the problem worse.

Given the costs involved, both obvious and hidden (time-off, etc), it’s not surprising that candidates are drawn from a narrow social base. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of how our politics is structured. I suspect it also partially explains the origins of the culture of entitlement that gave rise to the expenses scandal. When in power, this elite then behaves in a self-perpetuating way, which is part of the problem relating to internships.

Both problems are therefore ones of access and accountability and you have to solve both. Whatever the merits of electoral reform or not it’s therefore totally bogus to say it will ‘fix’ our politics because at best it only solves one side of a two-sided equation.

While nothing is done about the cost of politics there is little chance of any caps being that effective. They will be circumnavigated by fair means or foul as a matter of necessity. Giving state cash to political parties as a form of subsidy is abhorrent democratically speaking, however, there is nothing to stop the state taking measures aimed at reducing costs. The provision of cost-free routes of campaigning – a certain amount of free advertising space at election time; maybe the capacity to also provide certain services that cost as well.

Interns meanwhile should be brought into the employment fold and given full rights and remuneration for their role. Worthwhile reforms do exist that can be pursued without major structural surgery; however, in the long-run a dialogue needs to be opened about moving away from the representative model for our democracy. Rather than asking what we want from our politicians, I think the crucial question we should be asking ourselves in response to our broken politics is ‘what do we want from our politics’?