party funding

There's been a bit of a giggle going round the blogs over Johann Hari's three point plan for revitalizing our democracy. The Centre Forum's Free Think blog described them, I hope with tongue firmly in cheek, as "radical"; they do not even trim the overgrown leaves of our democracy, let alone get at the root of the problem. Tom Papworth offers a characteristically more critical appraisal and says much that I would have said about Hari's ideas themselves ('boneheaded' and 'rent seeking').

But as his suggestion about compelling students to take a newspaper rather shows, Hari is one of the current establishment and it is that centralized establishment that is at the heart of the problem. Our politicians are so remote that we are being told we must rely on people like him, who few of us will ever know personally well enough to tell whether they're honest or not, in the pockets of the trough feeders, or even at the trough with them, to interpret accurately what's going on it the Westmonster village. This is not democracy in anything other than name.

If we want to make politics the topic of discussion around kitchen tables, in the pub or at coffee after Mass, democracy needs to come down to that level. Street level democracy. Most of the parties witter on a lot about "localism" (I notice "localism" seems to have replaced "devolution" largely in their lexicons), perhaps especially the Lib Dems, for whom devolution of power to the lowest practical level is part of the pre-amble to our constitution, the touchstone of our supposed beliefs. Yet even we don't really explore really radical alternatives.

And that's what we need. Our system of democracy was designed in an era in which central government didn't actually do a lot compared with today. Our "representatives" (of curse really only the representatives of the landed population) got themselves elected by a few sheep and packed off to Westmonster for whole sessions at a time - you could hardly hold surgeries in Edinburgh one evening and be back at Westmonster the next.

The civic movement grew up as a more local parallel system often in response to industrialization and urbanization and, at the height of its power was responsible for most welfare, health and education provision, policing and most local infrastructure like sewage, water supply and later still energy supply, whilst private interests built inter-city infrastructure such as toll roads and later railways. And even that was a centralization of power in cities from the previous parish system - you can still go round and see "Parish School" above the doors of those Edwardian school buildings - Glasgow has some particularly good examples. Until as recently as, I think, 1938, Oxford, for example, had at least three pretty well autonomous local authorities responsible for different parts of the city. A few years before that it still had separate public boards to deal with public health issues and so on.

Now, whilst we live in a fast moving globalized world, I question whether we actually need to rely on one representative for sixty odd thousand of us each packing off to Westmonster and fighting for our local hospitals, say, with a bloke from Hull, or having our policing priorities set by a woman from Redditch. I don't much care how they see such things in Redditch or Hull, it's Oxford I'm interested in and all these decisions ought to be more, much more, accessible to me made by much more locally accountable people. Even many of Westmonster's international negotiating functions are much less needed today. We trade for ourselves with people and businesses all over the planet. The sense that we need a national level broker wheeling and dealing in what is almost always rent-seeking and protectionist ways is diminishing rapidly.

Now there are two approaches to devolution and subsidiarity I'd suggest. The one, it seems the preferred one at Westmonster, amongst all the parties, is for we, the people, to wait for the crumbs to fall from the top table. Look at the department for Communities for example. It is this part of centralized government who announces initiatives, looks for councils to fight amongst themselves for a share of the resources to pilot them and ties them up in knots reporting back on outcomes so that "Communities" can decide whether to make those initiative compulsory on the rest of the local authorities, continue funding them and so on. I suggest that this gradualism is an excuse for the centre holding on to power. Each successful initiative dictated from above is a reason to keep these trough feeders where they are. Any ubnsuccessful ones of course are the fault of local authorities themselves or even ourselves, showing us not ready for such freedoms in their eyes.

But far better to my mind is actually reinventing our democratic structures fit for the modern era. Hari, I think, is wrong to say that nobody talks about government and politics. I hear people all the time complaining about politicians. It is, perhaps, comforting even for people to moan about government and politicians - we are able to assign responsibility for cock-ups to someone else. Someone far away in Westmonster and usually, since only about one in six hundred of us actually gets to vote for the individual who will become Prime Monster, someone we didn't put in power. Even local government does it, though often this is with half an eye on political gain at that higher level - persuading your Tory borough's population that something is Labour's doing at Westmonster is part of the "game" of getting a Tory MP elected next time, or vice versa. It is no wonder people are cynical and disengaged, if that's what they are.

And so I'd like to introduce you, if you haven't already heard about it, to the idea of "cellular democracy". Some commentators in the US (where they already have substantially more local freedoms than we do to innovate and compete with other localities of course), in what I see really as a modern development of Hume's "Perfect Commonwealth", suggest that democracy is no longer at a "human scale". Because we elect to remote bodies people we are likely never to meet (at least for more than their allotted ninety seconds on your doorstep when they want your vote) the system itself inflates the cost of democracy. Parties have to spend lots of money getting a nationwide message out. We rely on people like Hari, whom we don't know, to provide commentary and interpretation. Most importantly, perhaps, parties form their policies not around what is good for particular communities but around what is acceptable to the floating voters in a small number of marginal constituencies.

The idea is that we turn our system on its head. We say, as so many politicians like to claim to believe, even if their actions speak to the contrary, that government literally comes from the people, that we cede only so much of our individual sovereignty to some collective body as is necessary to meet those needs we are incapable, for reasons of economic efficiency usually, to provide for ourselves. You have the principal tier of government at a local level. A very local level. A street or small neighbourhood. Usually of no more than a few hundred residents. Candidates are likely to be known, approachable - you bump into them walking the dog or standing at the bus stop. They get their message across to you through real local contact - not some party worker umming and erring for a few seconds on your doorstep or increasingly over the phone, facelessly. Some even suggest that, like a party caucus in the US, these elections could be by show of hands once a year at a local meeting. In a sense, to the successful candidate, knowing who didn't vote for you gives you an incentive to find out why and work with those neighbours, for they will all be neighbours on whatever issues put them off voting for you.

And that's the only vote you get - except for the right of each five hundred strong neighbourhood to recall their representative. By default it is in the remit of those very local authorities - perhaps twenty members each elected by five hundred residents to meet all the needs of that community that must be delivered through collective action, voluntary co-operation. When they find that they cannot possibly meet some need for their 10,000 strong community - they couldn't, for example, justify building a large general hospital just for their small community - but they could decide to join up with other communities to form a second tier of government, to whom a representative will be delegated by the first level authority and a by-election held, or the runner up, or an alternate, would take their place on the first tier authority. These higher tiers need not even be geographically linked. They may decide to join up with others on particular functional issues. Take the hospital again, here in Oxford the John Radcliffe hospitals serve folk from Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Berkshire and so on so even ceding more control to a body based on the boundaries of Oxford or Oxfordshire does not serve all its users.

If a higher tier wants to raise some money, that request is passed down through the various levels and discussed in these local caucuses. People can really decide whether these higher tiers are offering them value for money, or whether they could meet those needs for themselves better. Each higher level authority, however, is only ministering to the needs of its member authorities in turn so it should be easier to follow the money trail and identify whether something is in fact good value for you, the individual, or your small neighbourhood.

Some will say this gives rise to all sorts of problems about "free loading" - communities that decide not to participate in higher level authorities but gain the benefits of their collective efforts. In such a case, perhaps the authorities that have collaborated could decide to charge more for people from the community that didn't collaborate on a particular facility or policy to access that facility - they will, I am sure, soon find it would be better to join to get the "members rate". But ultimately, one has to ask whether "free-loading" is any worse a problem than the egregious rent seeking and bloated costs of our existing system.

Wouldn't Barrie's Palace of Westminster make an interesting "novelty hotel" - just like Oxford's former prison has here. Or perhaps just a prison. That would be quite fitting, considering everything its occupants have stolen from us for decades. David Hume said that we ought to be ready with new ideas of government for the day when, perhaps, by common consent the existing system is seen as broken. I suggest that the epochal changes in communications and trade that have been made in the past twenty or thirty years is just such a moment, and if we are not to lose our democracy through lack of interest on the part of the electorate, it is more urgent than ever.

A few weeks ago this ten year old article by Fred E Folvary was brought to my attention. I thought I had blogged about it before, but in the light of what I said in 'Revolutionary Liberalism: 5 - The "Sovereign Individual"' the other day and the welter of stories of party funding corruption this week it's worth reprinting today I think:

Democracy Needs Reforming

by Fred E. Foldvary, Senior Editor, The Progress Report

Ever since the 1996 elections, we have had wave after wave of revelations about improper or suspicious political campaign finances. Campaign contributions from Asia, soliciting contributions from government offices, overnight stays at the White House, diversion of "soft" money to political parties -- all this money sloshing and influence peddling points to the corruption of government, whether it was strictly legal or not.

The finance reform bill now being considered may be blocked by Democratic opposition to the "paycheck protection act" that would bar unions from using dues for political contributions without the members' approval. Even if it passes, the problem will remain. We've had campaign finance reforms every few years, and 114 votes on the issue by the Senate during the last ten years, but nothing really changes.

The basic problem is the way we elect our representatives. Our system is mass democracy: a large mass of voters elect a Congressman or Senator, or the President. The voters' don't know the candidate personally, so the candidate relies on advertising in the media to project a favorable image. This costs money, and the special interests are happy to contribute the funds.

No matter what laws are passed, the special interests will find ways around them, because of the tremendous gains they can get. Government financing of campaigns only gives more power to the two major parties, reducing even further the opportunity for smaller political parties to challenge the system and come up with new ideas. The problem is the corrupt incentives built into the system. To solve the problem, the whole voting system has to be changed.

Since the key problem is mass democracy, the only remedy is to change it to small-group democracy. Have every election take place in a small group. That would eliminate the need for mass media, and therefore the need for mass campaign funds, and thus the opportunity for special interests to buy out the election. Also, wealthy candidates would no longer have such an advantage.

But if a Congressional district has several hundred thousand people, how can we elect the representatives with small groups? The solution is multi-level voting. Divide cities and counties into small neighborhood districts. Each district elects a council. Then the council members elect one of their members to a higher- level council made up of a dozen neighborhood districts. These then elect members to the next higher level, and this continues on up to the representatives to the city council, state legislatures and Congress. One of the rules is that a lower-level council may recall a representative at any time if they are not satisfied.

Now you the voter are electing someone from your neighborhood for the neighborhood council, somebody you might know or easily have access to. Instead of mass mailings and TV commercials, the candidates would hold neighborhood meetings. All the higher-level elections would also be personal, since only a dozen or so councils would elect representatives to the next higher level council. The President himself would be elected by Congress, and the House of Representatives would only have, say, some 60 members instead of 435. And let's cut the Senate to 50 members, while we're at it. We want smaller groups, right?

Somebody might object that he or she wants to be able to elect the President directly. But one vote out of tens of millions does not amount to much. One vote in a neighborhood election of about 200 voters does count for something, plus your voice will be heard, and those who want to be representatives don't need to raise money.

This bottom-up multi-level voting system would also profoundly change the incentives for taxation. Power would shift dramatically to the neighborhood councils. Decentralized voting would lead to decentralized government and decentralized taxation. With local funding that gets sent to higher-levels of government, income and sales taxes would not longer be practical. Taxation would shift to real estate, especially to land, which does not flee when taxed.

Small-group democracy would be a radical change, but if we want to eliminate special-interest influence and the corruption of government, campaign-finance laws alone won't do it, because of the incentives built into the system. Either we change the voting system, or we will continue to let the special interests have their way.

It seems according to Sunday's Independent that his Priory clinics have been treating 800 British troops who served in Iraq and are suffering from psychiatric illnesses.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think our treatment of British "vets" is scandalous compared with the value some other nations put on looking after those who have put their lives on the line for their country and I am sure that many more probably deserve Priory type standards of assistance. But if this was Haliburton and America we'd be screaming blue murder about contracts for favoured insiders.

Of course the alternative, properly funding public sector mental health services, is just unthinkable these days, isn't it. And a far cry from W H R Rivers at Craiglockhart.

Iain Dale and "Yellow Peril" variously "broke" a "news" story yesterday about a chap being arrested in Spain apparently over some kind of spat over a business deal gone wrong. From what we can understand so far, it appears that his bankers decided to pull the plug after some dealings with another rich bloke that once had something to do with a famous football club that the guy had tried to cover up or some such when they tried to sue him or something.

Great. So? Well of course the political bubble down in London is all abuzz with it now, because the person concerned, one Michael Brown, of uncertain abode it seems, donated a lot of money, by party standards, to the Lib Dems last year. A donation that drew some attention, most notably in the Times, owned by a man who thinks he owns most of the world's politicians anyway, because it was unclear whether it was a permissable UK based donation. You can read Iain Dale getting all excited about it here:

Iain Dale's Diary: EXCLUSIVE: LibDem Donor Faces Fraud Charges:

So, I just want to say that I cannot get terribly excited about this.

First - it was well known within the party at least, if not at the time, then shortly after the donation was made public (the first most of us wee foot soldiers knew of it), that Mr Brown had made his fortune in property speculation in Florida in double quick time and was on a wanted list for one or more rubber cheques he had written while apparently dirt poor at the start of his meteoric rise. No doubt he had pissed off some counterparty in his property deals at some point. If nobody ever accepted money from anyone who had ever issued a cheque their account could not cover, especially when they were hard up, I suspect there would be precious few donations ever made to anyone, political or otherwise. But Americans are more anal about this sort of thing anyway, so on a wanted list he remains.

Second, and probably most importantly for me, I was personally pissed off that the party had accepted any such donation in the first place - I mean size wise and from one person. We have long traded on the fact that as a party we raise most of our money from local supporters and a few charitable type research organisations' donations such as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. I don't eat Weetabix since I discovered they were once big donors to the Tories, and I steer as clear of Sainsbury businesses as I can because of their connection with Labour donations. I don't knowingly smoke Philip Morris products (Marlboro cigarettes in the main) because of their funding of George Bush.

But, from what I can gather, despite people continually dredging the donation up, the Electoral Commission has confirmed that it was permissible and that matter is closed. No doubt someone will correct me, excitedly, on that if they have evidence to the contrary.

What I am pissed off with though is the fact that some chap who apparently did not seek any influence in the party at the time his donation was made has subsequently been pushed, or has pushed himself, into a position of making singularly unhelpful comments about the way the party has moved in the past year or so, with Stewart Wheeler-esque "threats" that he would give more money if they did things the way he hoped they would when he gave the money. As if he actually had some influence, which, in any kind of ballot about it amongst the membership I think I can confidently say he doesn't. I hoped on every occasion that they would have the balls to say "thanks but no thanks" and so far as I can see, they have. And he has gotten increasingly petulant about it. So he did, really, seek some kind of influence, even if after the fact.

I don't know the guy - he seems like quite a fun character. He seems to have gotten involved in funding a political party without really understanding the ethos and independent mindedness of its members. But Ming was right in October - there was nothing at that stage that appeared to make him unacceptable as a donor if he had wanted to give more and the commission said he was acceptable. I would not have accepted it, but then I'm only a foot soldier paying for my own Focuses at election time and so on, and not involved in how much money it takes to run the party as a whole and how easy it might be to raise equivalent sums required in this sad modern world of big money politics from small donations.

And finally, I certainly won't cry for HSBC if they feel wronged in this. As readers will know I couldn't give a fig for the already over-privileged world of bankers and the usury they inflict on society and might even rejoice at one of them having had the wool pulled over their eyes by a relatively small financial operator - if you sup with the devil....

And if somehow, though it seems unlikely, they get the right to demand his money back from us, I will probably be the first in the queue with my thirty-five quid share to make sure we can do so and not have to rely on big donors like this again. And I hope others in the party would do so likewise in proportion to their wealth and level of commitment.

Apparently there's a story going around (in another Murdoch rag) that certain "important funders" of the Lib Dems are threatening to withdraw financial support for the party if Simon wins. They say he is "unfit" as a result of his leftward stance and his supposed "dishonesty" about his sexual identity.

I find this pretty nasty stuff. My reaction is "do your worst, we're bigger than the odd individual, whatever you are worth".

That it costs so much to "play at the top table" is one of the worst aspects of modern politics and it seems to me driven by people who want more influence than they warrant in a democracy. Whilst I'm not likely to be voting Simon at number one, this certainly makes me want to put him ahead of Ming in my preferences, and I would be very pleased to see us eschew such undue influences very publicly in an attempt to reposition ourselves in the public eye as the decent party.

I have some respect, moreso than most in the party I suspect, for the "economic liberal" argument, or at least my "unorthodox" economic outlook permits me to find a way in which freedom of economic life can be maximised whilst retaining a strong social safety net democratically run and managed, but if this is the game the main proponents of "economic liberalsim" within the party want to play, they are welcome to take it elsewhere.

As to Muslim members who are supposedly threatening to resign if Simon were to win because of his sexual history, I say to them, if they are any more than a figment of the Sunday Times's imagination (and we already know that the 20 they claim in Birmingham Hodge Hill are absolutely nothing to do with this but inter-Muslim community politics), I don't want to be in the same party as you. And on this I believe I am the liberal. So find a way to accommodate your faith within liberalism or find an illiberal party to support - there are plenty of them.