KEIR STARMER has set out Labour’s scheme for a revised system of government and is pledged to abolish the Lords and ban most second jobs for MPs.
It appears that the referendum on leaving the European Union brought home to Gordon Brown the necessity for an overhaul of Britain’s constitutional set-up and pushed him into thinking through the problems that attend the underlying political crisis over the governance of Britain.
The unspoken contours of Brown’s thinking chime with Starmer’s present stance, that he understands why people backed Brexit and why Britain will remain outside the EU.
Brown makes the question absolutely clear: “I couldn’t disagree with the basic case that many Leave voters made to me. They wanted democratic control over their lives so they could provide opportunities for the next generation, build communities they felt proud of, and public services they could rely on.”
It is perhaps too much to expect politicians who found themselves outwitted by the British people to openly accept that it was the issue of popular sovereignty — an idea which in the minds of many expressed their sense of powerlessness and alienation — that compelled people to conceive the Brexit vote as a real chance to translate their wishes into concrete acts.
Labour's devolution plan — announced yesterday — bears the marks of compromise but also a recognition that the governance of a highly developed capitalist state like our substantially (dis) United Kingdom requires an overhaul of its constitutional structures.
There is a strong case for a single, more democratic, chamber, elected on a proportional — basis but Brown and Starmer stood together to present these plans, so this is what we must deal with.
Decentralisation and a more robust devolution is in, regional investment and industrial development are favoured.
Much of this will find approval, although some Scottish and Welsh nationalists will see, in more devolved powers, a strategic setback for their goal of independence. This will be offset by the many who see little sense in the barely coherent idea that independence can coexist with membership of the EU, sterling and the constitutional supremacy of the monarchy.
But there is some substance to the proposals largely drafted by Brown.
The proposal, indefinitely delayed in Starmer’s mental universe and more urgently conceived in Brown’s, to abolish the ridiculously constituted Lords and replace it with a chamber of the nations and regions — is the foundation of a real attempt to reform our peculiar form of bourgeois democracy.
We need to be clear about terms. No manner of democratic reforms can tackle the material basis of the dictatorship of capital unless they address the issue of ownership.
We can effect all manner of changes, set up regional banks, direct capital investment by tax concessions and incentives, invest regional government with extra powers and each of these things can help shape a more responsive and effective system of governance. But unless the power of the City, the banks, the bosses and the bureaucrats who direct the state and the economy is challenged then there are limits to what can be done.
That, given the nature of the new second chamber, is a key issue. There are inevitable problems that attend any second and revising chamber. Banning second jobs could help reshape the class composition of Parliament and one elected on a proportional basis — the only way in which it could adequately represent the full spectrum of opinion — would have stronger democratic credentials than a Commons elected on first-past-the-post and could compound the constitutional conundrum.
The devil is in the detail, and in the delay that accompanies any real reform.
