British Politics

Alan Renwick

The parliamentary select committee that has been examining the government’s proposals for reform of the House of Lords will be publishing its report in a couple of weeks’ time.  Rumour has it that they want an electoral system different from the one proposed by the government.  Nick Clegg and colleagues argue that the Single Transferable Vote (STV) form of proportional representation should be used.  But the committee has been interested in finding a system that will give voters a choice between voting for individual candidates and for a single party ticket (see the transcript of their oral evidence session last December, when the quizzed Iain McLean and me on this subject).  According to the Guardian, the committee is going to recommend the form of STV used in many Australian elections, where voters can vote ‘above the line’ for a party or ‘below the line’ for individual candidates.

The Electoral Reform Society is crying foul over this.  Calling the proposals a ‘dog’s breakfast’, they say that STV with above-the-line voting will return power to the parties, rather than allowing voters to determine who gets elected.

What should dispassionate observers make of this?  I think three questions need to be considered.  First, how much power would the inclusion of a party voting option give to parties and to voters?  Second, how much power should parties and voters have in determining which candidates are elected?  Third, are there any other considerations that we should take into account before deciding whether we think that possibility of above-the-line voting should be welcomed?  Most of this rather lengthy (sorry) post will focus on the first of these questions; I’ll say a little about the other two at the end.

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Alan Renwick

The UK government has launched a consultation on the framework for a referendum on Scottish independence.  Unfortunately, this is a consultation where the government apparently thinks it already knows most of the answers.  Worse still, the answers it has reached are the wrong ones.  They would deny the people of Scotland the chance to make an informed and considered decision.

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Richard Wood, who graduated with first-class honours in Politics and International Relations from Reading last summer, is now working as a research assistant on Alan Renwick’s project looking at changing patterns of debate over political reform.  In this post, he reflects on some striking findings regarding the rise of talk about human rights in British political discourse.

“Human rights” is a term we hear often when listening to our politicians. It’s now used when discussing almost any political subject: international relations, immigration, crime, healthcare and the legal system, to name just a few. The Human Rights Act, in force since 2000, is now a cornerstone of our legal system, though some would like to abolish or replace it.

But new research shows the extent to which this level of debate is a fairly recent phenomenon. As part of Alan Renwick’s wider research project into changing patterns of debate about political reform in the UK, I have been looking through Hansard records of parliamentary debates since the Second World War.  From analysis of all bills, debates, questions and statements in the House of Commons and the House of Lords from 1945 to 2005, a remarkably clear and consistent trend towards talk about human rights emerges. In the 1940s, the terms “human right” and “human rights” were used in Parliament around 15–40 times every year. As the graph below shows, by the 2000s, this had increased to 400–600 times – a huge change.

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Alan Renwick

With the publication yesterday of the Scottish Boundary Commission’s proposals for Scotland’s 52 new Westminster constituencies, we have had a fresh round of speculation as to who is in and who is out, and which sitting MPs will need to fight against each other for their party’s nomination.  This adds to all the similar talk that followed publication of the English Boundary Commission’s initial recommendations last month.

Such tittle-tattle is all very interesting for MPs and the gossips of the Westminster village, but it hides two much more fundamental points.

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The riots of recent days in London and elsewhere have wrecked many lives and shocked the nation.  They have reignited the long-standing debate over whether the actions of rioters such as these should straightforwardly be “condemned” or whether our primary task is to engage with their underlying causes.  In this personal reflection, Ben Whitham, one of our PhD students, makes the case for the latter.  The views he expresses are his own, and many – including at the University of Reading – will disagree with them.  But he offers a perspective that should play an important part in the coming debates.

Earlier this year I delivered a paper at the ‘Taking Control’ conference at SOAS in which I discussed the need to understand, explain and indeed justify the student riot at Millbank as a meaningful political act. Against those elements of the liberal media who would have us understand such violence as illegitimate – the hijacking of a ‘peaceful protest’ by a ‘small violent minority’ – I argued that we should view the Millbank Riot as a counterpunch: an outburst of ‘direct’ violence which erupted as a result of the deeper ‘structural’ or ‘systemic’ violence to which we are subjected by the neo-liberal state. Read the rest of this entry »

Alan Renwick

Peter Hain, the Shadow Welsh Secretary, has proposed today that the electoral system for the Welsh Assembly should be changed from the current proportional system to a plurality system using two-member constituencies.  This comes in the wake of rumours over the weekend that the government at Westminster would like to move in the other direction, making the current system more proportional.

So what are the options being discussed, and what are the issues we should be considering? Read the rest of this entry »

Alan Renwick

The Political Studies Association’s new briefing paper on House of Lords Reform, which I have written, was published on the Association’s website this morning.  Like the previous briefing paper on the Alternative Vote electoral system, it seeks dispassionately to set out evidence that can ground serious debate on the government’s reform proposals.

The need for evidence is one of the paper’s key themes.  As I argued in more detail in my previous post on this blog, both sides in the debate so far have been making grand claims without offering any serious evidence to support them.  That’s not entirely their fault: the House of Lords is a unique institution and predicting with perfect accuracy how it would react to reforms is impossible.  But there is much evidence out there that helps us make good progress in working out what expectations are more or less plausible. Read the rest of this entry »

Alan Renwick

My new briefing paper on House of Lords reform will be published by the Political Studies Association on Monday.  I will be writing here shortly after that on some of its core conclusions.  But for now I’d like to say why such a paper is necessary.  In short, it’s because the standard of debate about reform of the second chamber is currently far too low.

The main problem is that all sorts of claims are made without any evidence to back them up.  Take the two-day debate on the government’s reform proposals held in the House of Lords last month.  The former Commons Speaker, Baroness Boothroyd, made a barnstorming and widely cheered speech in which she declared: Read the rest of this entry »

The government recently announced plans to revise its Prevent strategy, one of the core strands of its counter-terrorism policy.  In this post, Nadya Ali, a PhD student in the School of Politics and International Relations, casts a critical eye over the proposals. Nadya’s thesis looks at the impact of government policies on UK Muslims.

The coalition government’s newly revised Prevent strategy is as much a reflection of the state of the public finances as of the continued dangers of terrorism. The ‘Big Society’, spending cuts, and criticisms of the previous Labour government’s handle on the public purse have all helped to shape this re-think of Prevent.

But critics are already pointing out the contradictions which exist in the policy, including the contradiction between the stated goal of greater localism and the reality of the increasing involvement of central government agencies. Read the rest of this entry »

Alan Renwick

Now that my student and wunderkind research assistant Michael Lamb has finished his exams, he is hard at work analysing the newspaper coverage of the AV referendum debates.  The full results of his labours won’t be available for a while, but we thought we would give you a glimpse of early findings on how the volume of coverage changed over time.

Figure 1, below, shows the number of articles per month in British national newspapers relating to any aspect of electoral reform.  In order to calculate this, we used the Factiva database to search for material in eight newspapers, ranging from the Sun to the Financial Times.  You’ll find the full search string in our previous article, on the impact of the MPs’ expenses scandal, which came out in the March issue of the Political Quarterly.  (Readers of that article might note that the numbers in Figure 1 for the period from 2008 to 2010 are slightly different from those we reported earlier: we’ve just slightly tweaked our methodology.)

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