‘One of the most encouraging developments in the emergent intellectual space [...] has been a new willingness to advocate the Necessary rather than the merely Practical.’ – Mike Davis, Who will build the ark? New Left Review 61 (January/February 2010)

Political events since mid-2009, especially the parliamentary expenses scandal, accentuated long-standing symptoms in the British body politic, eliciting predictions of doom (in the form of further voter disengagement, among others) and calls for reform. Among these, many an opinion poll suggested the possibility of a hung Parliament, and many a campaign group called for a referendum on reforming the electoral system of first-past-the-post (FPTP). Peter Tatchell outlined the case for electoral reform in the inaugural issue of this Review. Beyond this, the wide Left ought also to think a few more steps ahead.

Politics may be the art of the possible, full of contingencies and often driven by chronological events. In contrast, statesmanship requires identifying turning points, grasping the kairos moment, and making the seemingly-impossible happen. ‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste’, as Rahm Emanuel said. Rather than simply being pushed by the waves of political events, it is advisable for those of us on the progressive side of the political spectrum – who still believe in the power of politics, both to hold our society together and for positive change – to plan and prepare for the consequences of a possible hung Parliament and a referendum on electoral reform.

Hung Parliament

To start, we need to recognize that, as Vernon Bogdanor pointed out in a recent talk in Oxford, that the House of Lords is now permanently ‘hung’. A new constitutional convention for Britain is emerging where no party enjoys majority in that chamber of Parliament. Electoral arithmetic – in a variety of systems – has so far produced similar results in the devolved assemblies and the Scottish Parliament. A ‘hung’ Parliament – in truth, a newly-‘hung’ House of Commons in addition to the other place – may present itself after the next general election. In this section, I will deal with the immediate consequences of this. (This will accentuate the issues with FPTP and electoral system reform; that I will treat in the next section.)

A possible scenario is a Tory (plus Liberal Democrat?) plurality a few seats short of a majority. The Liberal Democrats, or (an)other smaller party(ies), may be in a position to be the kingmaker. For simplicity of argument, I will take an unlikely scenario where the Conservatives are one seat short of majority and – in the hope of forming a coalition Government – offering a Cabinet post to a Green; more complicated exercises are left for the reader – especially Liberal Democrats, who need to think through this carefully – but the point to be made is the same.

The Tories – in this unlikely scenario – then offer a Cabinet post to Caroline Lucas (winning Brighton Pavilion) with portfolio for the environment (or energy and climate change). Hedging against this, the Tories say the alternative is a post for Nick Griffin (also winning in his Barking constituency) with a portfolio for home affairs. What is this new Green MP to do? Relinquishing this offer means the British National Party will have control over the policing, the state databases, and migration – not an attractive prospect. But if the Cabinet post is worth taking, what would be the red line be in the negotiation? That is to say, under what undesirable circumstances are you willing threaten to leave Government and/or withdraw supply and confidence?

The Irish Greens recently learnt this lesson the hard way. Their holding (and holding on to) the environment portfolio meant having to endorse new motorways over ecologically-sensitive sites, a decision made under another portfolio but held by Cabinet collective resposibility rules, unless the Greens are open to the prospect of leaving Government and returning the Opposition benches. Reluctant to do this, Greens there are at risk of becoming the ‘Mudguard of the Republic’, an unenviable office of State last held by the Irish Labour Party, whose electoral fortunes took a full decade to recover.

There is a feasible workaround to the problem of Westminster-style Cabinet collective responsibility in a coalition Government context. In New Zealand, after the upheaval of electoral reform (see below), the politicians arrived at an arrangement of ‘confidence and supply’, including the possibility of Cabinet posts for minor parties without share in collective responsibility, but rather with direct reporting to the Prime Minister.

A similar arrangement has been common practice in Germany, with the portfolio of foreign affairs given to the junior partner in Government, held variously by the Greens, the Socialists, and now the Liberals. Still, such an arrangement is not necessarily easy for the junior partner in Government: recall one of the turning point in post-Second World War German history was Joschka Fischer having to defend his military deployment in Yugoslavia in front of a rowdy conference of his own party.

These German, Irish, and Kiwi experiences should be object lessons for us in Britain: What is the Liberal Democrat foreign policy? It may become the British foreign policy, perhaps even as soon as this summer. And if one is in the position of the junior partner: What would the red line be in the negotiations? Are the electorate and party members at large entitled to know beforehand? How well-prepared do we want to be when this happens?

Electoral reform and party realignment

In April 2009, many were worried that the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa would get 67 % of parliamentary seats, thus wielding unchallenged constitution-amending powers. But in Britain, one-party state is not a far-fetched threat but the status quo. Since there is no entrenched, codified constitution, the governing party – even one elected by a minority of the popular vote – can ram through any legislation, even those of constitutional importance, through Parliament without consensus from any other party.

Had the ANC won its constitution-amending powers, it would have garnered two-thirds of the popular vote. Not so in Britain: the pathological FPTP electoral system, rather than encouraging consensus, facilitates a minority imposing its unchecked will over the majority with the impunity of a steamroller. (For example, in May 2009, we saw the retention of innocent people’s DNA data, pushed through the Commons, would have been judicially ruled unconstitutional had a written constitution so provided.)

This is the root of the toxic climate of political alienation and apathy now prevailing in Britain. Despite this sort of hurdles, political breakthrough has come from surprising quarters. The United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) emerged as the second-largest British party in the European Parliament election last June, garnering 16.5 % of the popular vote, second only to the Tories at 27.7 % and ahead of Labour’s 15.7 %.

Regardless of whether we agree with Ukip, it is a political innovator. To start, it revived and sharpened the traditional Tory–imperial rhetoric, offering an ersatz alliance of the interests of the parochial, jingoistic petty bourgeoisie and lumpenproletariat on one part, with those of the globalized, Anglospheric élite on the other. More important, Ukip broke away from its Conservative ideological cousin, despite the constraints of the FPTP system for the Westminster elections which has dominated national politics. It took advantage of the more-proportional electoral system offered by the elections at the European level, though paradoxically it aimed to dismantle this.

Again, the experience in New Zealand offers an object lesson of what may come in British politics after electoral reform. In 1996, the electoral system for the House of Representatives (the only chamber in the Kiwi parliament) changed from FPTP to an additional-member system (there named ‘Mixed Member Proportional’). After some initial partisan discomfort, new alignments emerged with smaller parties which have more ideological clarity.

This process of party realignment, though transiently painful, is ultimately healthy for the body politic. There are two or three ‘parties of conviction’ within each of the larger existent parties in Britain, waiting for the right time to break out. A realignment similar to that experienced by New Zealand may happen here with small parties of conviction breaking out of existing ones, favouring consensus (internal and external to each party) rather than electoral expediency. Ideological clarity, in a system with fewer ‘wasted votes’, offers the best prospect of re-engaging the voters and boosting turnout.

In preparation for this process after the upcoming electoral system reform, generous statesmen and stateswomen would do well to start identifying friends across party lines. People we can do business with in other parties – either in a hung Parliament scenario, in the upheaval of partisan realignment; or in the subsequent consensual, coalition Government (or Opposition). Party-internal groups such as Compass, Green Left, the Beveridge Group, Green Liberal Democrats, and the Co-operative Party will play important roles in this scheme. It would be good to seize the opportunity and sketch out some plans for it … behold: on the other side of the political spectrum, they seem to be doing this already (e.g. Ukip).

Consensus Parliament with power-sharing

Partisan realignment does not occur without labour pains. Loyalty to one’s own party, in the right measure, ensures strategic coherence and is often admirable. But, as I hope I have sketched out, a time may come when the greater goal of national and societal Common Good calls for – and warrants – the sacrifice of such loyalty for a time.

The current partisan configuration in Britain is not divinely ordained, but an ecology that developed within the existent electoral systems. Likewise, the actual fissures within each existent parties during the realignment process, while not random but with deep ideological roots, are still to be determined. These are to be called by the most astute stateswomen and statesmen with foresight in each party, if they are not barely to be driven by haphazard events. Take my own political tradition – the Greens – as an example: the ideological differences between Realo and Fundi, or (vulgo) ‘spikes’ and ‘fluffs’, has more than one time rend Green parties apart: in Germany, in the Netherlands, in Mexico, and now (lo!) in Ireland.

Such ideological undercurrents are not absent in other parties; taking the other two from the wide Left: The oft-heard accusations of Liberal Democrat ‘fence-sitting’ may come from the ideological dialectic between internal factions: one with neoliberal/libertarian instincts, the other social-democrat. Within the Labour Party, various configuration are possible: New and Old, Third Way versus Civil Republican, Mainstream against Militant; this dynamically-changing landscape awaits able and adroit hands to mould and then to hold.

The realignment may be a scary prospect for partisans, but the outcome for the whole of Britain can be better than the status quo. The adversarial nature of the Westminster Parliament, stemming from the incidental architectural heritage of Saint Stephen’s Chapel and reinforced by the FPTP electoral system, has sometimes become a gratuitous two-sided shouting match, caricatured as a Punch and Judy show. This contrasts (as Norman Davies explained in an appendix of his work of haute vulgarisation, Europe: A History) with the European continental political culture of the Hemicycle, expressed (again) architecturally in the layout of the debating chamber of the European Parliament – and in these isles, the Dáil and the Scottish Parliament.

As the Peace Process in Northern Ireland rolled on, the new U-shaped chamber in Stormont prophesied a move away from sectarian two-sidedness. An otherwise-unlikely but constitutionally-mandated permanent coalition Government, holding two parties from the extrema of the political spectrum, projects the peculiar effect of holding the society together. Britain can borrow from this culture of consensus and power-sharing in the neighbouring island. The new-format Westminster Hall debates in Parliament herald such a move, both architectually and politically, to a more hemicyclical arrangement.

This is what a constitution ought to do: to hold the society together, no matter who is in Government. A hung Parliament would give us an opening to consider – with due care – not only the designs of our electoral system, but also the wider scheme for this constitutional telos. Imagine a more generous, more vibrant politics in Britain. More diversity of opinions with smaller, coherent parties; accompanied with ideological conviction on the one hand, and consensus-building on the other. In all, much less partisan bickering and decisions driven by triangulation and crude expediency. A Britain where a ‘Government of All Talents’ is no longer a contrived piece of rhetoric, but naturally unfolds from the healthy constitution of the body politic. For the good of our country, let’s prepare for it. Let’s work towards it.

Here are some of the things I’m planning to read and watch. No real curriculum here, just what’s on one man’s shelf.

• The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky (also planning to read the recent thesis “The Sister Karamazov: Dorothy Day’s Encounter with Dostoevsky’s Novel” by Michael H. Hebbeler)
• Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by Hume
• The Gospel of Luke
• News reports on the Catholic church’s German child-rape scandals
• The Last Temptation of Christ (have not seen this, though I signed a petition against it when it came out, something I’ve some to regret)
• Jesus of Montreal (have not seen this in years, and have mixed memories)
• The Gospel According to St. Matthew (have not seen this)

If anything else comes in handy I’ll add comments or maybe a second post. Probably 2001 (my favorite movie) and Breaking the Waves (my favorite religious film, though not for everybody–I freaked out a friend yesterday just explaining the plot) will find their way onto my screen.

From one o’clock to three in the afternoon, I attended the Green group of councillors to discuss budget proposals for Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council, and election strategies.

From seven to about nine o’clock in the evening, I was glad to be at the launch of the inaugural issue of the Oxford Left Review. There I talked with three journalists (among other radical right-on comrades), from Aamulehti of Tampere, Corriere della Sera of Italy, and Samoa’s Environment Weekly. Very nice people they were.

Here is the table of contents for the inaugural issue of the Oxford Left Review (Issue 1, February 2010):

• Samual Burt: Equality and Republican Ideals
• Peter Tatchell: Voter Reform and the Left
• Stuart White: An End to Labourism
• Cailean Gallagher: Call to Scottish Labour
• Matthew Kennedy: The Putney Debates
• Jeremy Cliffe: A Fourth Way for Labour?
• Brian Melican: Germany’s Fragmented Left
• Christopher Jackson: The Return of Keynes
• George Irvin: Time for a Tobin Tax
• Kaihsu Tai: The Science of Copenhagen
• Sophie Lewis: COP15 – Activist’s Perspective
• Matthew Kennedy: Žižek review
• Roberta Klimt: Bennett review
• Noel Hatch: Today’s Lost Generation

Pace Radford, it was typeset in Palatino, to good effect dare I so say. All references to non-L——r party affiliation were cautiously scrubbed, for which I am (to be frank) a bit miffed. Despite that, it was an excellent effort by the editorial team in setting off this worthy initiative.

Near midnight, I refined my letter to the Oxford Times about public ownership of assets, after email-shots to follow up all the interesting discussions I had for the last 24 hours of politicking.

It is amazing that I am not getting paid to do any of this, but certainly it has been more fun than staring at molecules on the computer. Citizenship is a full-time job, and the work of a citizen is never done….

Whoever destroys anything that could be useful to others breaks the law of bal tashchit, “Do not waste.” – Babylonian Talmud, Kodashim 32a (second or third century), quoted in ‘Teachings on Creation through the Ages’, edited by J. Matthew Sleeth M.D., in The Green Bible (2008) San Francisco: HarperOne. ISBN 978-0-06-162799-6.

This week, I talk to Brendan Melican. Topics include inaccurate predictions, the Telegram & Gazette’s website troubles, and WPI making non-tax payments to the city.

If you’d like to leave a comment for next week’s show, the number is 508-471-3897.

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Here are some highlights from each the speakers, with links to their texts for the gentle readers’ perusal over Christmastime:

Grand Mufti of Syria:

So, let us build a new generation that believes that the civilisation of mankind is a common work and that the most noble of all is mankind and freedom – after God, of course. If we would like to see peace in the world, let us start from the land of peace: Palestine and Israel. So we can tell people, as the Pope said years ago, rather than building the wall, let us build the bridges of peace, because Palestine is the land of peace. Considering how much it costs to build that wall, we could actually allow Christian, Jewish and Muslim children to attend the same school and to live as brothers and sisters in a school of peace.

Dr Asma Jahangir:

In my opinion it is important to start at an early age with getting acquainted with the approaches of your neighbours or of other religions. This would not necessarily need to involve long-distance travel, but, for example, could be organised by setting foot and meeting people at your local church, mosque, synagogue, temple or other places of worship. The size of the groups – especially for grass-root interfaith meetings – should not be too big, in order to give the interlocutors an opportunity to speak and to get to know each other personally.

The Ecumenical Patriarch:

For Orthodox Christians, the icon, or image, stands not only as an acme of human aesthetic accomplishment, but as a tangible reminder of the perennial truth. As in every painting – religious or not, and notwithstanding the talent of the artist – the object presents as two-dimensional. Yet, for Orthodox Christians, an icon is no mere religious painting – and it is not, by definition, a religious object. Indeed, it is a subject with which the viewer, the worshipper, enters into wordless dialogue through the sense of sight. For an Orthodox Christian, the encounter with the icon is an act of communion with the person represented in the icon. How much more should our encounters with living icons – persons made in the image and likeness of God – be acts of communion!

The Chief Rabbi:

What is a covenant? A covenant is not a contract. A contract is made for a limited period, for a specific purpose, between two or more parties, each seeking their own benefit. A covenant is made open-endedly by two or more parties who come together in a bond of loyalty and trust to achieve together what none can achieve alone. A contract is like a deal; a covenant is like a marriage. Contracts belong to the market and to the state, to economics and politics, both of which are arenas of competition. Covenants belong to families, communities, charities, which are arenas of cooperation. A contract is between me and you – separate selves – but a covenant is about us – collective belonging. A contract is about interests; a covenant is about identity. And hence the vital distinction, not made clearly enough in European politics, between a social contract and a social covenant: a social contract creates a state; a social covenant creates a society.

The Dalai Lama:

As a human being I believe – and for a number of years, many of my friends have agreed with my views and feelings – that in modern times there is too much emphasis on the importance of material values. We have somehow neglected our inner values. That is why, in spite of materially being highly developed, I have noticed there are still a lot of people – even billionaires – who are very rich but are an unhappy on a personal level. So one of the most important factors for happiness or joyfulness is very much to do with peace of mind, a calm mind. Too much stress, too much suspicion, too much ambition and greed I also think are factors which destroy our inner peace. So therefore, if we wish to achieve a happy life, there is no point in neglecting our inner values. These inner values are not necessarily what we bring from religious teaching, but I feel they are a biological factor we are already equipped with: warm-heartedness or a sense of responsibility, a sense of community.

By the way, the latest issue of New Left Review (number 54, November/December 2008) has a symposium on Robert Brenner’s book The Economics of Global Turbulence, also mentioned here earlier.

(John Calvin was wrong. The Purgatory does exist. I have seen it with my own eyes, at the Redbridge recycling station.)

God our Creator, in your mercy:
Help us to learn how to live in Paradise, where nothing is wasted,
where we walk or cycle with you as you intended.
Bless the workers who sort our recycling,
who, as befit people created in your image, re-create order out of chaos.

Κύριε ἐλέησον.

Christ our Saviour, in your mercy:
Remove us from the flashy sports cars and the 4×4s (SUVs)
which only speed us to the incinerating Armageddon.
Remind us of your crown, when we see the thornbushes growing over the landfill.
Remind us of your Cross, whenever we see smokestacks or wind turbines on the hill.
Remind us of your Passion and your Resurrection.

Χριστὲ ἐλέησον.

Holy Spirit our Advocate and Comforter, in your mercy:
Guard us on our bus route for the recycling centre.
Purge us of our sins of pride and greed.
Blow your wind on us and drive us in your dynamic,
as on the wind turbines, and as on Pentecost.
Bless with your wordless prayer
everything that has a recycling symbol.

Κύριε ἐλέησον.

Amen.

(By the way, Chris Goodall’s second book is out: Ten Technologies to Save the Planet.)

I have been reading Saint Paulo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and not before time! It is steeped in Gospel (though without annoying prooftexts) and in every turn corroborating with the insights of Herman Dooyeweerd. He articulated about “praxis” better than I did in my muddle about shopping as prayer. And it remains relevant: to start, it is a devastating predictive analysis of the British phenomenon called New Labour.

Are you in communion with this church? Iglesia Cristiana Reformada Paraíso, Barahona, República Dominica:

Verso published earlier this month a collection of Toussaint Louverture’s writings, introduced by Jean-Bertrand Aristide. That’s the next book on my reading list.

I saw there fellow blogger Jim Jepps of The Daily (Maybe), who (gentle readers will recall) not only mentioned this blog in the Guide to Political Blogging in the UK last year, but also said that we were “extra-respectable”. (Thanks, Jim!) This year we were not mentioned in the text, but remain in the listing of political blogs.

In other news, thanks to the efforts of Jim and other Green blogging-activists, a Green Party bloggers home was launched at the conference! My little bit of contribution was to buy the domain name….

Non-political news: If our gentle western-Atlantic readers ever visit our humble town of Oxford, be sure to visit the café Vaults and Gardens next to the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin, run by local entrepreneur Will Pouget of French aristocratic stock. Most of the food there is local, organic, and/or Fairtrade, and there will always be a vegetarian/vegan option. His newest venture is a healthy “kebab van”, which has already been reported locally in the Oxford Times and nationally in the Daily Telegraph.

What is Christian Non-Resistance? It is that original peculiar kind of non-resistance, which was enjoined and exemplified by Jesus Christ, according to the Scriptures of the New Testament. Are there other kinds of non-resistance? Yes.

1. Philosophical non-resistance of various hue, which sets at nought divine revelation, disregards the authority of Jesus Christ as a divine teacher, excludes all strictly religious considerations, and deduces its conclusions from the light of nature, the supposed fitness of things and the expediency of consequences.
2. Sentimental non-resistance, also of various hue; which is held to be the spontaneous dictate of man’s higher sentiments in the advanced stages of their development, transcending all special divine revelations, positive instructions, ratiocination and considerations of expediency.
3. Necessitous non-resistance, commonly expressed in the phrase “passive obedience and non-resistance,” imperiously preached by despots to their subjects, as their indispensable duty and highest virtue; also recommended by worldly prudence to the victims of oppression when unable to offer successful resistance to their injurers.

With this last mentioned kind Christian Non-Resistance has nothing in common. With philosophical and sentimental non-resistance it holds much in common; being, in fact the divine original of which they are human adulterations, and embracing all the good of both without the evils of either. This treatise is an illustration and defense of Christian Non-Violence, properly so designated.