With an election looming in the UK, the Labour government is making ready to abuse the obscure "wash-up" procedure to ram through great whacks of legislation without democratic scrutiny. In "wash-up," government is able to pass legislation without full parliamentary debate, moving the discussion to a smoke-filled room where party whips, business managers, and government officials hammer out the law. The proceedings are kept secret and are especially vulnerable to being manipulated by lobbyists (like the British Phonographic Institute, which is hoping to get the power to choose who is allowed to use the Internet, and which wrote a web-censorship law that it got inserted by the Lords).
And the losers? For those of us who believe that we cannot have a real democracy without electoral reform, the alarm bells are sounding far beyond Westminster. A possible casualty of the wash-up is the proposal to hold a referendum on the alternative vote – a system that allows the voters to list the candidates in order of preference, and reflects their choices much more fairly than first past the post. The amended constitutional renewal and governance bill, having received substantial support in both the Lords and the Commons, may yet be scuppered by the Conservatives in the smoke-filled room. Why the Tories favour a voting system that disadvantages them, especially in Scotland, is one of the abiding mysteries of politics. But they do. And AV is looking vulnerable.
Something that politicians tend to lose sight of is the old-fashioned notion that they are servants of the people. They enjoy their privileges but too easily forget that it isn't their parliament, it's ours. So we, their employers, have a right to know what they are up to, not only when jousting with each other in public, but in the deals that they make behind closed doors. We take for granted the presence of TV in the main debates and the select committees. We are sometimes appalled by what we see, but at least we see it. And we can draw our own conclusions from the empty benches which are such a conspicuous feature of the place, for most of the day, on the BBC's Parliament channel. In most of my time as an MP I rarely spoke to an audience of more than a dozen of the honourable members.
Parliament's wash-up's a stitch-up
(Thanks, Ian!)
(Image: His Station and Four Aces, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge/Wikimedia)
