From Functional Constituencies to Party Dictatorship, From a British Political Idea to British Political Practice

(Peter Oborne, The Triumph of the Political Class     Equal and Universal Suffrage - the Way to the Promised Land of Democracy¹)

Professor Tony Carty

Professor Tony Carty, Sir Y K Pao Chair of Public Law of the University of Hong Kong, was the Foundation's guest speaker on 21 December 2009. Below are the text of his speech.

I was talking with George and Alan over oysters and champagne in the club in August. They were trying to get me up to speed about the political situation in Hong Kong and about the struggle for equal and universal suffrage. I responded that I was not sure what the point of that was. We have that in Britain and it's not working very well. Nonetheless, they chased after me and invited me to come and talk to you today.

I will try to confine my remarks to about twenty minutes. I speak as a committed citizen within Britain. I'm not an expert on Hong Kong so I'm very excited and delighted to be able to follow the debates that you have about constitutional reform. Those remarks or qualifications are quite important because what I am offering you today is not at a very grand level of academic or intellectual analysis. I am commenting upon debates of freelance philosophical journalists in Britain, particularly Peter Oborne, who have commented on the British political system, also Hywel Williams I will bring in toward the end. I have a great regard for these because academic life in Britain is increasingly stifled by government control. For fresh ideas you have to go outside academia.

The single problem identified by Oborne most acutely is that of a breakdown of representative government in what he calls a post-democratic society. This has arisen with the collapse of the public domain in politics since the mid-1980s. Its relevance to Hong Kong is, in my opinion, that here equal and universal suffrage has become the single recipe for democracy in Hong Kong, almost precisely a 100 years after it came to Britain and just as it is perceived in Britain to be unable to assure anything remotely resembling a representation of the people by the people.

This is an immensely complex topic and I want to try to break it down into elements of description and explanation. The description is more important than the explanation because at least it proves there is a problem, even if it does not help us to understand its nature. My ambition is to suggest that Hong Kong is seriously mistaken if it thinks that equal and universal suffrage can, in the 21st century, bring anything remotely resembling representative democracy, without bringing into place numerous other building blocks which seem to have fallen away in Britain.

There has been a steep decline in electoral participation in the last 25 years, down from an average of 80% in the 1950s and 1970s to 59% to 60%. In the 2000s. However, it would appear on the face of it the first past the post electoral system contributes to producing governments with comfortable majorities that are attributable to no more than 35% of those actually voting on a turn out of only 60%. That means governments are elected by little more than 20% of the total electorate, including those not voting.

General election turnout 1945 - 2005, by region

Year	UK	England	Wales	Scotland	N.Ireland
1945	72.8	73.4	75.7	69.0	67.4
1950	83.9	84.4	84.8	80.9	77.4
1951	82.6	82.7	84.4	81.2	79.9
1955	76.8	76.9	79.6	75.1	74.1
1959	78.7	78.9	82.6	78.1	65.9
1964	77.1	77.0	80.1	77.6	71.7
1966	75.8	75.9	79.0	76.0	66.1
1970	72.0	71.4	77.4	74.1	76.6
1974 Oct	72.8	72.6	76.6	74.8	67.7
1974 Feb	78.8	79.0	80.0	79.0	69.9
1979	76.0	75.9	79.4	76.8	67.7
1983	72.7	72.5	76.1	72.7	72.9
1987	75.3	75.4	78.9	75.1	67.0
1992	77.7	78.0	79.7	75.5	69.8
1997	71.4	71.4	73.5	71.3	67.1
2001	59.4	59.2	61.6	58.2	68.0
2005	61.4	61.3	62.6	60.8	62.9

Source: House of Commons Research Papers 01/54 & 05/33

General Election Results: 1918-2005: United Kingdom

	Votes (millions)						Share of vote (%)
	Con(a)	Lab	Lib(b)	PC/ SNP	Other	Total	Con(a)	Lab	Lib(b)	PC/ SNP	Other
1964	11.98	12.21	3.10	0.13	0.24	27.66	43.3	44.1	11.2	0.5	0.9
1966	11.42	13.07	2.33	0.19	0.26	27.26	41.9	47.9	8.5	0.7	1.0
1970	13.15	12.18	2.12	0.48	0.42	28.34	46.4	43.0	7.5	1.7	1.5
1974	11.83	11.65	6.06	0.80	1.00	31.34	37.8	37.2	19.3	2.6	3.2
1974	10.43	11.46	5.35	1.01	0.95	29.19	35.7	39.3	18.3	3.4	3.3
1979	13.70	11.51	4.31	0.64	1.07	31.22	43.9	36.9	13.8	2.0	3.4
1983	13.01	8.46	7.78	0.46	0.96	30.67	42.4	27.6	25.4	1.5	3.1
1987	13.74	10.03	7.34	0.54	0.88	32.53	42.2	30.8	22.6	1.7	2.7
1992	14.09	11.56	6.00	0.78	1.18	33.61	41.9	34.4	17.8	2.3	3.5
1997	9.60	13.52	5.24	0.78	2.14	31.29	30.7	43.2	16.8	2.5	6.8
2001	8.36	10.72	4.81	0.66	1.81	26.37	31.7	40.7	18.3	2.5	6.9
2005	8.78	9.55	5.99	0.59	2.24	27.15	32.4	35.2	22.0	2.2	8.2

 

The descriptive element of Oborne's argument makes these figures much worse even than they already appear. He refers to two dimensions of electoral campaigning practiced by all the major parties, but particularly the Conservative and Labor parties: focus on the swing voter in the swing seat AND triangulation. The first strategy cannot be completely understood without an understanding of the nature of the political class itself, but I prefer at first to describe how the party system works unrepresentatively. Oborne takes a test case of Dagenham, a depressed east of London Labor constituency, with unemployed ex Ford car workers, rising British National Party and disappearing white population. He relies upon a "renegade" No.10 Special Adviser, Jon Cruddas as a witness. The latter describes how focus on swing voters constructs policy for an aspirational middle class and excludes the core working class systematically. Dagenham needed social housing, decent schools and a voice. Instead they were offered an Academy School and when the borough turned this down, it was starved of all funding.

Cruddas explained that policy is not deduced from core economic or philosophical assumptions, but "scientifically constructed out of the preferences and prejudices of the swing voter in the swing seat". The government is not a coalition of interests and traditions but a power elite, focused on the retention of power by appealing to "middle England". The effect is to eliminate from political choice whole poorer sections of society in favour of the prejudices of swing voters codified with respect to Conservative intellectual traditions. A deracinated political clique has broken its roots with the trade unions and stripped away the powers of the National Executive.

Oborne is himself a conservative in so far as he writes primarily for the Daily Express and The Spectator. However, he insists the swing voter syndrome is itself a result of the political party as a power elite within a new political class, which sweeps across the political spectrum. The Tories remained in the wilderness after 1997 because Hague and Duncan Smith were anti-political class figures who clung to traditional Conservative values or prejudices, such as Europe, taxation and fears about immigration. The Media were ignored. The Tory modernizers argued that the Party could only succeed if it turned away from its traditional supporters. Duncan Smith was eliminated through "modernizer leaks" to the media that he had been fiddling his expenses, a story which was subsequently shown to be false. Michael Howard understood himself as merely preparing the way for the Tory modernizer, David Cameron. Even by 2005 the Tory Chairman, Liam Fox accepted that the election depended upon a so-called Voter Vault dedicated to just 900,000 voters, 2% of Britain's 45 million adult vote. These voters - who mattered - lived in about 167 target marginal constituencies, had not voted Tory last time and had to be persuaded to change. To win them one had to ignore the traditional beliefs of the majority of an anyway hemorrhaging Tory Party membership. Campaigning would not be an exchange of ideas but the adaptation of New Labour style marketing techniques of communication, taken from the advertising industry and based upon empirical attitudinal studies of the key 900,000 swing voters.

The second key element of electoral campaigning is triangulation. This means espousing beliefs and ideas the politicians do not believe. It comes from a borrowing by New Labour in 1997 from Bill Clinton and subsequently taken over by David Cameron. It is based on the idea that political leaders must occupy political territory in order to deny space to opponents. Then the Opposition is forced to take up territory which can be marked as extremist. This tactical movement is not about winning ideas but about laying claim to a positional victory. So in 1997 Blair's European strategy, according to his economic adviser Derek Scott, never worked out what being pro-European meant, made easy by the doctrinal, dogmatic chaos in the Tory Party. This became standard Labour practice until David Cameron became leader and adopted the same strategy. By now Labour had become tougher on Law and Order (Brown's 42 day terrorism detention strategy could only be defeated in the Lords) and Brown tried to crown his economic policy with a 2p reduction in income tax in April 2007. The combat in the autumn of 2009 between Osborne and Darling over reducing inheritance tax showed the Tories becoming more skilled at occupying the ground of middle England, with better crafted policies to cope with the effect of escalating housing prices on certain middle class family inheritance problems.

Oborne concludes that politics is thereby taken out of the public domain and is practiced as the private activity of the political class, a specialized science comparable to the restless focus on short term profits in banking resulting in giant bonuses paid to City Traders in contemporary, equally distorted capitalism, This is a post-democratic style of politics, which bears all the characteristics of a pre-democratic court, where most actors in the Political Class lack any influence outside the frame of a political patron, e.g. Alistair Campbell under Tony Blair or Ed Balls under Gordon Brown. Hardly any such political operator has any roots or place in the political philosophies or interest groups of the Party, but merely a place due to patronage within its organization.

So one has to come to the more fundamental question how Oborne explains what has happened to the Political Parties themselves and what wider implications this has for the traditional institutions of the British state, especially Parliament, the Civil Service and civil society generally. Oborne replaces the concept of party with that of political class. The concept is taken from Gaetano Mosca.  Mosca's enduring contribution to political science is the observation that all but the most primitive societies are ruled in fact, if not in theory, by a numerical minority. He named this minority the political class. Mosca defined modern elites in term of their superior organisational skills. These organisational skills were especially useful in gaining political power in modern bureaucratic society. In Mosca's conception, elites are not hereditary in nature and peoples from all classes of society can theoretically become "elite". He also adhered to the concept of "the circulation of elites," which is a dialectical theory of constant competition between elites, with one elite group replacing another repeatedly over time.

Oborne notes how this concept of elite was developed in 1896 to do with Italy which had been united by what he calls a centralizing clique. Then in Britain the political elite had its roots outside Westminster and had little common awareness. The ruling class was entrenched in the nation: in the north, the manufacturers, the agricultural interest, the High Church and the Non conformists, the trade unions and lower working classes. The Labour Party long retained the structure of an extra parliamentarian organization. The leaders and parliamentary party were answerable to Annual Conference and the National Executive Committee. The Conservatives were also a provincial party, businessmen, farmers, landowners, doctors, retired officers, organized at a local level. Stanley Baldwin was an iron-founder from Worcestershire. Thatcher delayed the appearance of the political class by being a daughter of a Lincolnshire grocer, lower-middle class and provincial.

However, as a wider European phenomenon, from the 1970s there has arisen across Europe the pattern of political classes no longer rooted in their wider communities or engaged in ideological struggle. Instead, they began to represent themselves, self-interested and dependant for their economic and moral status on the resources of the state. The political class is already recruited from party associations at university and with a capacity to fit naturally into a mainstream business environment. It works through the Executive Branch of government and separate from the traditional civil service. It prefers to work though the commercial or service sector. The media are a defining political class activity, likewise advertising and public relations.

The mainstream parties have lost the overwhelming majority of their members. The Conservatives peaked at 2.8 million after 1945 while Labor had well over 2 million in the 1950s. There has been a 90% drop to about 250,000 for the Tories and under 200,000 for Labor. It is this absence of grassroots membership which leaves political parties lacking in an overriding moral purpose, deracinated figures, without close ties to a community. This absence of mass party base means modern parties have to become capital intensive methods of communicating with voters, such as phone banks, advertising etc. To avoid bankruptcy they can be financed by the state or they can exploit their privileged access to government to make decisions which are meaningful to large corporations. There arises a covert exchange between donors and politicians, whether expressed through distorted decisions on public policy, the exchange of honors for donations etc. The purchase of access to senior politicians by the business elite is extremely visible at annual conferences of all the parties. While the opportunities for ordinary party members to influence policy is extremely limited, the conferences are now a marketplace for business leaders to press their cases. For example at the 2006 Conference of the Labor Party Bell Pottinger Public Affairs offered clients a package of meetings with ministers at a cost of 5000 pounds. Equally the Conservative Party has a so-called "Leader's Club" which gives business people who pay up to 50,000 pounds to party funds regular access to David Cameron by attending dinners and through private conversations. This club is based upon the Labor Party's Thousand Club, set up in the late 1990s to get business men to exchange cash for access to senior party figures.

Examples of benefits to business are provided in terms of the scope for private equity business in government policy, the dropping of plans to tax venture capital funds, abandonment of plans to improve employee pension rights, and the slashing of capital gains taxes. There are large scale correlations between donations to the government party and the awarding of honors and the attempt by the police to investigate this (Yates) was subject to harassment by both the political class in Parliament and the Media.

There has been no resistance from the Liberal Democrats or the Conservatives and Oborne concludes that all three parties constitute a homogenous social and economic unit rather than separate organizations with distinctive ideologies.

The common ideology of Blair and Cameron is one of modernization. This goes back to the legacy of Peter Mandelson. It is a word related somehow to globalization and the market, although it avoids the ideologically loaded word "capitalism". It appears enthusiastic for the market economy and admires contemporary business practice. It is pragmatic, business-like, managerial and avoids flights of ideological principle that appear to open the way to intense controversy or confrontation. While it means exchange and manufacture, it also means supposedly complex administration. Blair himself contrasted modernity with the fanaticism of militant Islam and used the language to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oborne concludes by identifying Alan Finlayson's discussion of the concept of modernization in his book, Making Sense of New Labor:, "as having a solipsistic conceptual structure that is almost theological or cultic in its capacity to encompass everything or anything the movement might choose to do, while rejecting criticism as a kind of nonsensical heresy".

The difficulties which these reflections point to concern how to achieve representative democracy in mass post-modern, consumerist, privatized western societies. Whether democracy is populist, concerned with close representation of actual wishes, or whether it is elitist reformulation of democratic intentions, either way there are real difficulties. What has been described in the UK is effectively a form of the first type of representation, which is not working, because the political class is not strong enough, in whatever sense, to achieve an autonomous policy apart from the pressures of business, finance and the apparent logic of technological, economic development. In a chapter on Manipulative Populism Oborne directly addresses these issues. He borrows the idea of Colin Crouch, in Coping with Post-democracy, that at first in the 20th century mass societies in the West seemed unable to compete with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, who discovered the secret of power through mass communication. Then the US advertising industry developed the skills of the persuasion business and while it was devoted primarily to the selling of goods and services, politicians as a class finally came straggling along after them, making themselves as analogous as possible to the business of selling products.

Manipulative populism becomes necessary, says Oborne, when the simultaneous weakening of traditional authority and collapse of deference towards existing institutions and structures causes the ruling elite to engage directly with the voters. This stimulates the political class to form an alliance with the media, which is itself subject to the identical need to sell products to a mass audience. Oborne stresses that the generation of politicians now in power in Britain came to maturity in the late 60s and early 70s at a time when the traditional institutions of British civil society, the so-called establishment of the Civil Service, the Judiciary, Parliament, the Anglican church all came under attack in favour of a wider "liberation" of the masses from traditional restraints of authority. All of this is what is meant by the establishment of mass society. With a weakened traditional party base the political class - whether Conservative or Labour - is dependent upon direct access to the masses through the media, where its only resource is its power over the instruments of the state. That makes its power base similar to the Nomenclatura which existed in Eastern Europe. To ensure its survival in the long term the political class has no choice but to secure a massive increase in the reach and scope of the centre. This means further emasculating parliament, suborning the judiciary, consolidating its hold over a client press, widening an alliance with big business, strengthening the powers of the intelligence service and sustaining the attacks on the freedoms of ordinary citizens.

The triumph of mass society took much longer in Britain than continental Europe and its impact on the party system did not occur until the 1980s when Thatcher's lower middle class victory within the Conservative Party led to the two stage Labour response of aristocratic Marxism (Michael Foot and Tony Benn) followed by the modernizing Blair/Mandelson syndrome in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Manipulative populism was already in place with Thatcher's policies, but it was only in 1997 that (Oborne) Max Beloff hinted that the new manipulative populism represented a systematic hostility to institutions which has much in common with totalitarianism and could mutate extremely easily into fascism. Human emotions against which wise governments have traditional sought to guard - greed, fear, sentimentality - are converted into mechanisms for elite rule. In pre-modern societies, like Czarist Russia or 18th century Britain/England, under skillful direction from above, class resentments could be diverted away from propertied interests onto vulnerable and comparatively defenseless targets such as Jews in Russia or Catholics in England (the Gordon riots). Beloff points out that now the danger of totalitarianism is that manipulative populism is wholly dependent upon a virtuous governing class in order to function without causing terrible damage. This is because the SMP (system of manipulative populism) lacks the institutional protections against malign actions enjoyed by representative democracies, with strong parliaments, a free press, an autonomous civil service, powerful judiciaries. The essence of the spread of fascism in Nazi Germany was the political intrusion upon the civil service, the judiciary and Parliament. So far in Britain SMP has made government short term and reckless, less likely to press ahead with intractable issues which require a long term commitment and do not generate immediate results. Apart from the Iraq War, Oborne focuses on the Mad Cow Disease Crises and numerous instances of Home Secretaries manipulating the press and opinion over criminal law matters, e.g. Jack Straw and the Myra Hindley case. The strategy of successive Home Secretaries such as David Blunkett, Jack Straw and John Reid (both the latter involved in the Megan's law, Sarah's Law naming and shaming of sex offenders) has been to form an alliance with the media against the Judiciary and the rule of law.

This is some of the background and context in which in the 1980s the British Colonial Administration first introduced the idea of functional constituencies in Hong Kong². The Chief Secretary introduced the 1984 White Paper on the Further Development of Representative Government in Hong Kong, with the words that a system of representative democracy should be rooted firmly in the community and thereby be directly accountable to the people of Hong Kong. The legislature's method of selection and composition must ensure that it is broadly based in a way "which will minimize any tendency to factional politics and divisiveness…" The concern was expressed that the representative system should not put at risk those factors which have secured the social stability and economic prosperity of Hong Kong.

More specifically, with respect to the origins of FCs the Green Paper explains the historical reasons for FCs. The system of government in Hong Kong "operates on the basis of consultation and consensus. It is not based on parties, factions and adversarial politics but one of broad agreements which seeks to take a pragmatic approach to the problems of the day." General consensus follows full and frank discussion and nothing must be done which would lightly throw aside sustained periods of economic growth and internal stability. The system of consultation has grown up around two speared approaches to representation, of shared interests among people, those arising from place of residence and from occupations. FCs identify common interest such as commerce, industry, law, medicine, finance, education, trade unions. The use of geographical constituencies alone was not accepted because "direct elections would run the risk of a swift introduction of adversarial politics and would introduce an element of instability at a crucial time" referring to the Sino-British negotiations.

A 1988 White Paper: The Development of Representative Democracy: The Way Forward provided guidelines by which to consider whether a group should become an FC. It should be substantial and of importance in the community, should not be based on ideology, dogma or religion. Only two new constituencies were created for accountancy and health care sectors. The Patten system offered a more radical approach to FCs. There was to be a replacement of corporate voting via authorized representatives with voting by individual members or employees in all FCs and the creation of nine new FCs to include all of the working population, increasing the voters from about 200,000 to 2.7 million.

I am aware of a sharp critique of FCs for instance from Christine Loh in her Government and Business Alliance: Hong Kong's FCs. The colonial ideology was that, with the rule of law and economic liberalism, and a political system based on "consensus" with local elites, Hong Kong avoided the divisive politics so common in Western democracies. The active cultivation of business and professional elites, also through the transition to the PRC handover, is seen as essential to the smooth running of Hong Kong. Beijing's choice of the Selection Committee for the Chief Executive, in the Basic Law, continues to reflect the same priorities. The concluding impression, in the minds of the Hong Kong public, is that Government is too close to the business elite. Most of the FCs represent either old or newer sectors of business and professional elites. If it is argued that business must retain at least 25% of the seats in Legco this would rule out equal and universal suffrage for the 50 year period. Ms Loh argues that the Hong Kong public are left with the impression that "balanced participation" linked with Executive led government reminds people of colonial governance. In this context pushing for equal and universal suffrage means concretely breaking away from any special formal status for business in governance.

It is no part of Oborne's argument that institutionalizing the place of business and the professions could be a way of restoring representative democracy in Britain. Indeed a virtually companion study to Oborne's, Hywel Williams, Britain's Power Elites, The Rebirth of a Ruling Class, offers an identical description of the political class and how it is both dependent upon manipulation of state patronage and utterly penetrated by corporate power. However, the main weight of the book is to delineate the penetration of the professions, above all the legal professional, but also the Civil Service - itself fragmented by the introduction of political advisers - by links with and service of the corporate sector, and, finally the universities and academia, eager to be instrumentalised by both the political and business sectors. In other words, both authors dispute that there is any magical expertise in professionalism that assures an objective, or impartial competence in government. The professions provide services to the financial and corporate sector.

The problem raised by Oborne and Williams (also Finton O'Toole in Ireland, Ship of Fools, How Stupidity and Corruption sank the Celtic Tiger; and Tom Gallagher in Scotland, The Illusion of Freedom, Scotland Under Nationalism) is that equal and universal suffrage, i.e. mass democracy, has not been able to resist the penetration of the corporate and financial sectors, nor have the professions, their own subordination to so-called market forces. The crucial question is the nature and possibility of representation in mass, late capitalist, advanced consumerist society. The catastrophic character of the party system, in terms of democratic culture, is more graphically and succinctly described by Williams. He stresses the elevation of obedience to leadership and the suppression of all internal criticism as the distinctive features of British party culture. The party is a hangover of the Cold War which seems, organisationally speaking, to have strayed from behind the Iron Curtain and established itself on the conqueror's soil. The political party, and those who join it, appears weird, secretive and dictatorial. He continues

"The Tory and the New Labour professionals are offered a Faustian pact which entails subservience to empty purposes…At the same time, the party's defenders are reduced to offering lukewarm justifications which explain that while the party is horrible, the alternative is worse. Party politics is a nauseating but essential feature of parliamentary democracy and is the only thing that stands between us and the dictator…"

Williams concludes, as does Oborne, that Britain is back in the pre-reform days before 1867 or before 1832. Post democracy has become pre-democracy. That means concretely, in Oborne's words, that Sir Lewis Namier's classic study of the British ruling class on the eve of the American Revolution ( The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III) is equally applicable today, that idealism, party division and disinterested public service had no relevance at the time. Or as Williams puts it, in more post-modern terms, suitable for advanced capitalist but also consumerist society:

"For common to all elite chatter is the assumption of the impossibility of disinterestedness . Everybody in this world of the clash of opinions and the battle for position operates on the basis that everybody else is a chancer, too…(T)he insistent, undercutting assumption (is) that public concerns and public statements can always be reduced to the urges and needs of the private life of the person who expresses that concern and makes those statements…"

 ¹ What follows are notes for a lecture given at the Hong Kong Club on 21 December 2009 to the Hong Kong Democratic Foundation. While the text of the lecture is intended as a coherent narrative and argument, it draws, in many parts, word for word from the texts by Oborne and also Williams (see below). The authority of the paper rests on the quality of the political analysis afforded by Oborne and Williams. The oral presentation also provided background on the very centralized constitutional structure left in place in Britain since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which concentrated virtually absolute power in the Prime Minister, as a head of the majority party in Parliament, i.e. the doctrine of the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament. This constitutional framework contributes to the seriousness of the situation which Osborne and Williams describe.

 ² What follows on the history of functional constituencies in Hong Kong draws directly from various articles and working papers by Simon Young, especially the paper he did with Anthony Law, A Critical Introduction to Hong Kong's Functional Constituencies, a working paper for the Civic Exchange. It is not an original history of functional constituencies.

The above does not necessarily represent the views of the Foundation.
Reproduction of the article requires written permission from the author.

 by Tony Carty