 Can I just start by saying that I love being the president of SUAS. You're going to have to prize me out of SUAS and I suspect that next year might have to be it because I think probably ten years might be about as much as anyone really ought to spend being in this very wonderful privileged role. And it is a privilege because SUAS is such a spectacularly wonderful place. It is the most diverse university in the world. I mean that really is the fact of the matter. And our students are the most lively, most vivid, most combative, but also the most compassionate of student bodies. And I love being involved with them. Now this was, this lecture has, you know, this is its second year. And last year I spoke about human rights. And this year I've moved on to talk about the whole issue of power, but they're not unrelated because I think in any democracy these issues are very interlinked. So this lecture, I mean there was actually a fourth thing. Who runs Britain the White House, the banks, Rupert Murdoch, or Downing Street. But Downing Street for some reason has dropped off. It may say something about the mindset when we were working this out that somehow that bit disappeared off the edge. Maybe it was some sort of minks within the system. But it really is a lecture about power. It's about who has power in contemporary societies. The history of democracy is the history of power being redistributed. It's about taking power away from kings with the kind of start of a sort of process. It moved on to the taking of power away from the classes who thought they were born to rule. And ultimately we've seen democracies evolve out of revolt against despots and dictators. The taking away of power from colonizers and occupiers. And the problem that I wanted to really seek to address tonight and to tackle was the problem concerned with contemporary democracies, modern democracies. And the way in which power is much more nuanced, much more complex, but no less an important thing to examine, to understand some of the problems in our contemporary democracy. And I think to understand the crisis that we're currently going through. Britain's recent history highlights the difficulties that there are around modern democracy. And I only have to look at the last period of government in which I've been able to see it at close quarters. We saw how Tony Blair was, I think, humiliatingly obeisant to George Bush on neoconservative foreign policy. And then we had that extraordinary sort of abject sycophancy of government to Rupert Murdoch. We also had a sort of disregard of Tony Blair in government for the cabinet. We've seen it in these recent hearings around the issue of the war. The disdain for parliament, where parliament has had its power greatly reduced, not just by this government, the preceding government had a hand in all of that too, but we've been seeing a decline of the power of parliament. We've seen also a sort of dismissiveness of Prime Minister's own political parties. We've started off in the days of Thatcher, but it's really been climaxing more recently with the marginalizing of the political party. We've seen the sort of craven fealty to the bankers, to the rich, to the very well-off political opportunists who tend to people the courts of Prime Ministers. We've seen a surrender of policymaking often to the editors of tabloid newspapers, particularly on law and order and on immigration and asylum. We've seen a dependency on public relations maestros and spinmeisters and polling gurus to find new initiatives that could catch the headlines. But although we could parcel this up and make it an attack on Tony Blair, it really is only fair to say that he is, I think, a product of this age. Locating the purveyors of power and influence in contemporary Britain, or probably in any modern democracy, could keep us all entertained well into the night, and I know that you haven't got the time. But there are real issues which people often raise, which are about national sovereignty, but the extent to which any nation is a power unto itself, because the notion of national sovereignty is more and more mythical. Any real map of political power in a modern democracy has to include, as we've just seen with the recent recession, the credit crunch, the power of bankers, the power of money markets, the power of international corporations. And then, of course, we also have the power of supranational bodies, the United Nations, the World Bank, the WTO. We have clearly to see that power in a global economy is diffuse. National sovereignty has been reduced sometimes to positive ends in order to create communities of mutual interest beyond borders, either joining economic blocks like we have done with the EEC and which other economic blocks do around the world, or signing up to international treaties, much of which I am very supportive of, on nuclear proliferation, environmental issues, human rights, torture, the statutes on refugees, the consensus on money laundering. All of this involves a certain amount of inhibition on our national ability to act without constraint. And for the most part, those treaties are to good ends. Signing up to international conventions on human rights has brought, however, with it, a concomitant increase in the power of the judiciary, because it means that in order to restrain actions of governments, we expect the judges, either in international courts or at our own supreme court levels, to restrain the power of politicians when they may abuse those standards that we have set for ourselves by signing up to international treaties. And of course, that means that you end up having the politicians in a clash of power with the judges when you have a running up together of their respective roles. This has happened in Britain recently, as we've seen around the issue of who strikes the balance between security and liberty. Our judges, as you all know, ruled not very long ago against the government's introduction of detention without trial for non-citizens suspected of terrorism. Our judges also ruled against the acceptance of evidence from other countries, which may be based on torture, which may have been the product of torture. So newspapers today and yesterday, you saw the suggestion of serious collusion and, if you like, a co-option and a use of material produced by torture in other places. In both instances, our judges have invoked international human rights standards in their reasoning and have been profoundly critical of governments. And of course, the governments don't like it. Power is moving into different places. And the questions raised by all of this that I'm describing are about how can we make such power transparent and accountable? If power is being exercised by big companies, if power is being exercised by the security services, if power is being exercised, how can we make sure it's being exercised in ways that we would find acceptable? Experience has taught us a number of important lessons about power, particularly political power. In the words of Lord Acton, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I think it's now more subtle. And I always say, power is delightful and absolute power is absolutely delightful. Power has to be controlled. It was this truth that led to the creation of the rule of law. No person, however powerful, even the king could be above the law. It all started with Magna Cotta. And this has, over the centuries since, this has been translated into a near universal contemporary acknowledgement that prime ministers, presidents, ministers of state, and all the employees of the state, policemen, immigration officers, prison officers, all wielders of power are subject to law and human rights standards. We've enriched the idea of the rule of law today to mean an inclusion of human rights standards. And that's why when China says, we also abide by the rule of law, we pass laws and everybody has to abide by them, it's not quite what we have in mind here because we have said human rights and respect for human rights has to be part of that. The potential for corruption in states takes much subtler form when you're dealing with a mature democracy like the United Kingdom. In fact, we avoid calling it corruption, but it is behavior which is embarked upon with an ensouciance which leaves the public with a very bad taste in their mouths. We've had it with the recent exposure of members of parliament fiddling their expenses and now there are being prosecutions of some of them, but many of them not being prosecuted, but still we want senses that some standards of ethics that we would have expected of politicians has been failed. None of it is large scale corruption as we would think of it and as part happens in many other parts of the world. But to a public facing the recession and pulling in their own belts, there's something profoundly distressing about the idea that people are using their tax pounds in abusive ways. Polling suggests that only 15% of the public trust their politicians. Even journalists, even journalists are now above politicians in the popularity polls. Lawyers, we're just marginally about the same place I think as politicians. But the public in Britain are also suspicious of other aspects of if you like this kind of softish corruption. Suspicious of ministers and senior advisers leaving office and very quickly taking up jobs in businesses linked to the very departments in which they worked and related to policies. It's all related to policies of privatization. And let me assure you it's happened not just in this government but in the previous government of John Major and Margaret Thatcher that was well documented. Of people moving into companies where they at one stage were on one side of the table and now they're on the other side of the table acting for the very people they got to know in their previous job. None of this is new of course. The privatization of public utilities during the Thatcher years led to very similar questionable directureships and consultancies of former politicians and their advisers. And it's a soft corruption in the scheme of things but it's probably part of every political system around the world I'm sure. And it goes beyond personal gain because the sort of corruption I'm talking about involves the fudging of statistics. The failing to tell the truth about material you're using to persuade the public of a particular position. We saw it just now in the whole business of crime statistics being used this time by the conservatives but it's done across the political board. The cherry picking of research to support sometimes quite fleaky contentions. It means of course and we've had it now and this is my view but the manufacturing of that dodgy dossier on intelligence has happened in the run up to the Iraq war. It's about alluring of standards in my view which makes people feel very unhappy with with the political system. It creates high levels of distrust. It means as well that we have these public consultation exercises which are purely cosmetic and where the outcomes have actually been decided in advance. And the public knew it. They smell a rat. They always do and complain of the way in which this is done. At the last election more people abstained than voted for the government. The total turnout at general elections now hovers at around 60%. 34% of voters at the last election voted Labour and yet this still gave the government a huge majority of 60 seats. And I sometimes have a pie chart which I show to people when I'm giving a talk about how it pans out in our first past the post system. That in fact you can end up having very few people actually voting, end up with a huge majority. And yet at the same time if you were to do a head count the distribution of votes would be very different. And so you understand why it is that the Liberal Democrats complain so vocally about the unfairness of the system. Where they end up with so few seats but in fact on a head count many more of the population voted for them. What's interesting is that the landslide of 1997 huge landslides 120 majority to Tony Blair. But what was interesting was it was on a smaller vote than that which secured the previous very marginal victory of John Major in 1992. More people actually voted and went out significantly more than had voted in 97. But actually Major only one you'll remember by six seats and had to rely upon the Northern Ireland Unionists in order to get legislation through his parliament. Of all the young women who are currently voting eligible to vote some people call this the high heel vote. Only 33% of young women vote. In fact only 39% of young people under 24 bother to vote at all. And what is especially alarming about all this is that the old comforter that well people only will start voting once they have to pay tax themselves or once they have their own children. And they become solid citizens isn't actually any longer true. The habits of democracy if they're not embedded early on seem not to become embedded at all. And people in their 30s are now abstaining in increasing numbers. It's increasingly the old I'll include myself in this who vote twice as many people over 75 vote as under 20 as under 24. The voting electorate is old membership of parties is hemorrhaging 50 years ago one in 11 people belong to a political party. It's difficult to get statistics now because none of the parties want to be very clear about what the position is. But the last count which was in earlier in the 2000s it was about 2004 only one in 88 belong to a political party. It's now thought to be something like one in every 120. Now maybe I always believe that Oscar Wilde had it on the head when he said who wants to be a socialist means giving up too many evenings. And and and I think I think I think I think it's probably true that people feel about any political party you know who wants to have to give up all those evenings. And particularly who would want to give up all those evenings if you're not listened to and I'll turn to that in a minute. But actually what's interesting is more people belong to the National Trust and belong to all of the political parties put together and more people belong to the Royal Society for the protection of birds. Then belong to all the political parties put together. So contrary to what we're told by politicians and political insiders it's not because of apathy or affluence or contentment. I recently chaired I was back in after the 2005 election. The run tree trust asked me to chair a thing called the power inquiry. And it was to look at why democracy our democracy was was was sort of in decline. Why were people not voting? Why were people not joining political parties? And it was very interesting when we asked politicians and we would have seminars we would have events. We'd ask politicians to give evidence and many of them did leaders of the parties and so forth. And they would say people don't vote because they're happy. The electorate out there is very content. We're well off our affluent society. There's no reason most people don't see the point and and that's why they don't do it is because they're really content. It was before the recession of course it's true and things are probably not any different. But the reason that was given was a sort of contentment. Sometimes the argument was given that it was by ignorance that people were didn't know enough now about their democracy. But what what happened when we spoke to people as we traveled the country and it wasn't invited audiences. When you I know this from other work that I've done on commissions when you put an advert in the paper and invite people to come to a meeting. Those who will come on the whole are interested in the subject. So what we deliberately did on this commission was that we would turn up at residence associations when they were having their ordinary monthly or half yearly meeting. We turned up at community centers. We turned up at sports venues. We turned up at local colleges. We went to all sorts of venues not saying come to a meeting. But we would add ourselves to the agenda and say did you vote at the last election? Why didn't you vote? What do you think of our politicians? What do you think about the system? And everyone of the groupings that we approach we kept hearing the same thing came through. People said I didn't vote or I don't belong to a political party because I don't believe it makes a difference. I don't think my voice is heard. And it's not that they're not interested in politics and it's not that people are not socially concerned because they are. They're just completely alienated from political institutions and from formal democracy. Now these problems of low turnout and failing political parties are a feature common to all Western democracies. Irrespective of voting systems and I mean whether I mean proportional representation does seem to make some difference in places. And certainly you get a sort of better sense of people's engagement than you do with the first pass of the post system. But it doesn't on the whole deal with some of the aspects of criticism that we get here in Britain. It doesn't matter even if people have frequent referendums. People think sometimes having referendums all the time would cure everything. That doesn't seem to make a difference either. And it also doesn't matter whether you have a centralized or a federal system. So there's a reduction in voting turnout in most mature democracies. Now it's interesting that the last election in the United States saw a change in that. People felt they were voting for real change. Whether it would what will happen if when Obama goes to the polls after his four year term will be very interesting to see. But people were there was an upsurge and of course young people who never voted before and who might not have voted at all voted because they believed they were voting for some radical change. And they certainly got it in that there was the first first black president. But there was an upsurge in voting particularly by the young and by the black community. The crisis in American democracy now of course is around something else. And I hope that in questions we might be able to talk about the way in which certain issues can engage people and in quite populist and problematic ways. But what people are seeing in the Democratic Party is that the Democratic Party is perceived by many white people in America as being the Brown Party, a party that represents now black people that represents Latinos and that it has less interest in the white working class. And there are fears even there that many of the southern right wing Democrats are losing their hold over the populists that used to vote for them. So there are shifts taking place there which point to something that I want to talk about which is that basically our societies are changing. Our societies are changing and the people within our societies are changing. We have much more diverse societies. We have citizens who are better educated. We also have citizens who in many ways are more demanding and much more consumers. And so therefore what they want from democracy is different. Now our modern system of representative democracy dates back to the 19th century. And it is seriously creaking. Representative democracy depends on political parties. Mass political parties were invented as a direct result of extending the franchise. As the franchise was extending then so we saw the enrichment of the party system. Mass political parties were of course partly about a way of aggregating the concerns of particular groupings within society. We only have to look to the Labour Party for that which was aggregating the concerns of working people and who felt that they were not well represented by people whose interests might be very different from theirs. The public needed parties so that their individual voices took on more volume. That by being part of a bigger collection of people their voice, their claims, their desires, their vision of the better life took on more volume. And of course in protecting the interests of the landed classes, the money classes, it too had its party. And though parties individually sought to bring collective influence to bear on political policy, of course there was always leadership and there were always issues around leadership. But the political parties in an industrialized age were largely configured around class which made allegiances to party strongly tribal. Attachment to a party was retained by people for most of their lives and rarely changed. Even when their circumstances changed a bit they remained very loyal to their party. And what has happened is that society has profoundly changed and people have changed. The vision of the good life that my mother and father sought when I was growing up in the 50s, members of the Labour Party, was that there was a desire to have a home that had hot water and had a bathroom. They wanted to have education for their children. They wanted to have a steady income. My father as part of the trade union movement was anxious to make sure that there was some sort of security around his job and that you couldn't just be fired tomorrow and put onto the door. Many of these basic hopes have been fulfilled for most people, though we must not imagine that poverty has gone. The divide between rich and poor, as you know, is growing and all the evidence is that in fact has grown over the last 12, 15 years. But now a combining vision of the good life or the good society is much harder to sum it up. The vision thing is a problem because it's become much tougher for parties to imagine the good life in a way that will satisfy the many different ideas of the good life that individual people have within our society because those ideas are as individual and atomized as the people themselves. Politics had to change to accommodate changed lives and changed dreams. And one of the great shifts has been in the relationship between citizens and the state. People are clearly more conscious of themselves as rights bearing citizens. And the growth of consumerism means that people are in perpetual demand of faster and more efficient services, public services. And the desire to introduce market disciplines and private sector dynamism into the public sector has produced some very strange consequences. One of the things that has happened, of course, has been quangos, the creation of quangos and independent policy commissions. All of it favored over government doing certain kinds of things, which isn't to say that government hasn't become highly centralized, it has. Creation of more and more quangos, and although it's now the promise of conservatives making their bid for government, quangos started their lives back in the years of conservatives in government under market thatcher, that proliferation started then, but great proliferation during the Blair years. And one of the things about the creation of these independent, supposedly quasi-independent bodies, or arms length from government, was a way of somehow depoliticizing decision making in favor of supposedly neutral standards of economic and managerial efficiency. And it was always, as a result, this idea of taking politics out of politics. And what it does, of course, is that it creates problems around accountability, and democracy depends on accountability. Yet there is a chasm here between independence and depoliticization. I just want to explain what I mean by that. First, the public see that supposedly independent bodies are made to operate in frameworks which are set so tightly by ministers that the delivery of a favorable outcome is a foregone conclusion. So you set up your independent commission, but you make sure that either it's run by people who are handpicked to run them in a way that would be favorable to government, or one of the things that's also done is that you make the remit of that commission such that it can only ever be favorable to government. I mean, we saw it, for example, we've seen it around the Hutton Inquiry and the war inquiries that took place up until Chilcot, and we'll see whether Chilcot delivers. But making a remit, making it so that you can attempt to produce outcomes that are foregone conclusions. But secondly, while politicians and business lobbies may seek to insulate issues from public debate and engagement, the public rarely accepts that an issue is no longer political. And that happens, for example, with the closing down of a hospital, for example. They know that the politics cannot be taken out of politics. The public know that, but politicians keep trying to do it. And so what happens then is that the public see that what politicians are doing is that they're trying to pass the buck to someone else, or to somewhere else to make it so that the accountability that was part and parcel of representatives of democracy is no longer there. And it's why you very rarely see the resignation now of secretaries of state or ministers because of some feeling thing within their remit. It's a much rarer thing nowadays. And the public know that. They know that there's a way in which people are layering themselves against that possibility. But the other thing that's happening for the public, and they talk about this, is how complex everything seems, so that it's almost disorientating, that there are so many decision-making hierarchies and confolutions of relationships and partnerships and strategic partnerships that power and accessing and seeing where political power lies becomes impenetrable. Nobody appears to be able to answer the simple question, who's in charge? Where does the buck stop? Who resigns when something goes belly up? And the answer usually is no one. And while we the citizens are being lectured about rights and responsibilities, responsibility more often than not is shifted away from politicians. And the result is that citizens' confidence is further eroded. And when I travel to other places, I hear this described in other democracies too, it's something that's being learned. The parties, of course, the political parties, are trying to reinvent themselves. Changed electorate, let's change the way we do business. But they change not always in ways that are successful, and again, the public aren't fooled. One of the great shifts, and it's what I think is at the heart of the crisis in democracy, one of the great shifts is in communication. What has happened, of course, it means is that because of the way in which telecommunications now operate, the way in which communication is so much more immediate, it means that most ways of doing business have changed. But it actually drives us towards presidential styles of democracy. It drives us also towards presidential styles of campaigning. And if you are someone who can't cut it with the media, isn't photogenic, can't do the business on the Richard and Judy show, then you're in trouble. New technology has changed entirely the way of doing politics. And those were arts which were very much borrowed from the corporate world, like marketing, direct polling, focus groups, all of which were used by big business. And combining that with the new technologies of television and call centres and the internet and emailing, it's challenged the need for the mass party that was created in the 19th century. And if the mass party is about accessing huge numbers of voters and providing a channel for political interests, a channel from the people up to the politicians and from the politicians down towards communities and so on, well, the new technologies start creating a shortcut. And so political leaders, and particularly those who are good at it like Tony Blair, could speak to the people across the heads of their party. And they can do it on breakfast television. They can do it with Andrew Maher. If parties were in the business of competing for the votes of individuals, how was it different from competing for sales as retailers would do, competing for consumers? The commodity may be different, but how different was the selling of a politician or a party from the selling of soap powder? And the concept of the citizen became very confused and has become very confused with the concept of the consumer. And it has very serious consequences for our polity. The destabilising of our democracy is rooted in a number of social changes related to, as I've said, better educated people who are less deferential despite the fact that our politicians were able to create a culture of deference in the commons which meant that the people in the offices signed off all their allowances. By and large, people in the public are much less deferential than they were in the past. They don't think we've got to buy with our, you know, those people who know how to run the country. They're much more questioning of professionals. They do not feel prepared to just leave decision making to their betters. And we've also seen developments, real developments which have begun in the business world moving into all of this. And I've mentioned it already, but we've seen a new style of party leader emerging. And a lot of that started in the early Thatcher years. Lord Bell, who was Tim Bell, who was one of the great marketing men, tells a very engaging story about how he was brought in to give advice to the Iron Lady when she was running first for office and that she was highly skeptical of anything that he could offer her. And then he went off to the drawing boards and then eventually the satchie boys came up with that famous poster, Labour is not working. And remember the cues of people on the dole and this depressing vision of Britain of the time. And then she was quite turned on to the possibilities of how marketing could work. Now party leaders of all political hues want the best advertising folk at their elbow. And what do we then see is a sort of marginalizing of that cumbersome business of having to engage with party activists talking to, you know, dealing with party conferences where policy is formulated. We don't have to do that anymore. What the political clash realized is that nowadays you can cut the party out. You don't even need an active local party for canvassing when you can employ a call centre to chivey voters. And that's what the political parties are now doing. You get a large donor to give you the money and they foot the bill for a call centre to call you. And you can only test it by actually asking questions back to the person. If you ask a complicated, you know, ask a kind of little nitty gritty question back to the person and they're looking at a board in front of them. And unlike the poor person working in India who's having to answer questions you might ask about your phone service or your credit card, you'll suddenly find that the person at the end of the phone doesn't know very much actually about the particular political party. We learned a rather ghastly new way of doing politics from the United States. We learned the very damaging lessons of triangulation. Triangulation is democracy by mathematical formula. The formulation identified by the pollsters is that elections are won in marginal seats or in swing states in the United States. Constituencies with an established history of going one way, and this is one of the problems of the first pass of the post system, is that if a constituency always goes to Labour or always goes to the Conservatives or occasionally to the Liberal Democrats, those safe seats basically can be taken for granted. And all the effort is then centred around the seats which are capable of shifting. And then through focus groups and polling, you ask voters in the marginals what would make you vote for the other guy. And then they steal the other guy's clothes. And that colonising of the other party's policies is the secret of triangulation. But what it means is, and we're seeing it just now because both parties are having to look at each other's policies to see where the edge might be won. Who's going to be more tough on crime and law and order? Who is going to be more committed in their relationship to the United States and their support for whatever the United States is doing in Afghanistan? Who is going to be, and each party is looking to the other to see whether any edge can be won by going in a particular direction. And that colonising of each other's policies, that secret of triangulation actually hollows out democracy. Because it means politics without principle. It means politics without a belief system. And it does, the problem is it wins elections in a first-past-the-post system. Even if it drives down turnout. And it's very easy politicking. And as I say, all of our political parties are now playing it. The strategy works in the short term. But it destroys politics in the long term. Because what happens is that both parties are bound to offer pretty much the same policies. Despite the commitment to the mantra of consumer choice, there is very little choice being left in politics. And so instead of moving from a one-party state, which we actually in some ways had during the Thatcher years of 18 years of one party in power, you then move to the one doctrine state in which you have different parties but they all are actually offering pretty much the same thing. And it becomes about whose face you prefer. Who looks nicer? Are we sick of the crowd that have been around for too long? Shall we just have another set of faces? The press can make or break a leader's chances. Robert Murdoch has to be quoted. And he has to be quoted for fear of headlines in the run-up to the election. And in 1992, we all remember that the Sun newspaper carried that big front page which said the last person left in Britain turned out the lights if Labour wins. And the next day the Sun newspaper triumphantly said it's the Sun what won it because they were so convinced that they had actually made the difference. Now who knows whether they made the difference or not, but certainly the political parties think it matters. And so Robert Murdoch is quoted and gets to decide whether there's a referendum, for example, on the proposed European Convention. Do you remember when we were having a European Convention? A constitution, sorry. The European Constitution was going to be created and so the question was, you know, the call was being demanded from parts of our political firmament. We want a referendum and Blair said no way. Then Murdoch says he wants a referendum and Blair caved in. It didn't come to it because, as it turned out, other nations voted against the European Constitution but it was interesting to see where power lay. The press becomes the official opposition when, despite low turnout, elections are won by landslides because then you get a very powerful government that can force anything through Parliament and it has a compliant Parliament because it has lots and lots of its own MPs and so the government can get anything done. And so the people who then say we have to be in opposition because the opposition in Parliament isn't worth a candle, become the press, and they start taking on that role. They become the official opposition. And we've got to remember that when you have government with big majorities, even though it's a low turnout, you get incredible things. For example, all the Parliament seems to do is pass legislation and I can tell you that as someone who's in there. We've had 56 government bills in a year. You can't actually, that's really only eight months, you can't scrutinize bills when you're making them in that sort of number. We had from 1997 when Labour came into government we've had 3,000 new criminal offences created, 3,000. I mean the courts can't keep up with it. The judges are tearing their hair out. It's a good job that they've got wigs to wear. But there really is an issue around all of this and it's about legislating to show that you're doing something and often when legislation is unnecessary. How do they get all through and through Parliament so quickly? Well the government payroll is now the largest it has ever been. What do I mean by that? It means that the people inside, in this occasion we're talking about the Labour Party, inside the Labour government, the people who are actually on the payroll who've got jobs. And we now have in every department and more and more departments created, more and more government departments and inside those government departments you'll have six people with ministerial titles. You know lower ministers, junior ministers, upper ministers, down ministers, you know. And they create all of that because once you're on the payroll there's no way that you can vote against your collective responsibility. You can't vote or you're going to lose your job. You'll have to resign. And that supplements your income and it gets you a car and it gets you all kinds of good stuff. So you're not going to mess around with that. And so you can end up, you end up only having a comparatively small section of the party that's won, Labour in government, only a small number of people actually haven't got a job. And usually they're the ones who are being punished for having rebelled against the government in a vote because that's what the whips do. The whips have incredible power which says you want a minister to come and help you win the next election? I'm not going to let anybody go down and stand on your hustings when you're up for a re-election. You want to go on those nice trips to hear there in Yonder that we send parliamentarians on, you're not going to get on any of them. You want to go on a select committee, no way. And the whips can actually control people's whole career. So the government payroll, now the largest that I've said that it's ever been, guarantees votes for government. So even with rebellion, government can always get its business through. So no wonder the media sets itself up to hold government to account because nobody else seems able to do so. Occasionally we in the House of Lords can put a block on something, but it's an extraordinary business when it's the unelected house that ends up doing that. So what of course then the media also does is it introduces a whole business of the cult of personality and it seeks to do its business of opposing often by annihilating the character of the people who are in that political world. The search for scandal replaces analysis. Exhaustive and exhausting preoccupation with the sex lives of ministers, the bad fashion sense of their wives, the kind of drug habits of their children and so on. And the press spends so much of their time pursuing this. And so we get a press then in some ways as a product of a failing democracy. Now I've mentioned that the effect of triangulation is to hollow out our democracy and to have an impact on the quality of the party's offer. There's a great serenading of the idea that politics is no longer about ideology. People seem to think that's a good thing. They seem to have a thing that we've got now a delicious postmodern form of democracy which is I suppose like the postmodern novel that doesn't have a storyline or the postmodern film where the end is the beginning and the beginning somehow is somewhere further down the narrative. And so in the same way we're trying to sort of depoliticise democracy. And some sustenance for this idea of non-ideological politics came from Fukuyama who was an American theorist who put forward the idea that after the end of the Cold War the great collision of ideologies of communism versus capitalism was that it was the end of history. There was to be no great struggle of ideas anymore. It wasn't necessary liberal democracy had won. Well tell that to the jihadis that I'm now representing in court because they would certainly see it differently. But what we then have heard and we've heard it from senior politicians Jack Straw as an example where it all becomes part of what was being described as managing Britain PLC as though Britain was some great corporation and these guys were strutting around in the boardroom circuit. And Jack Straw spoke of a new era of executive democracy where the top management team delivers hot works. That's what the basis for policy was to be what works. But a politics devoid of a vision of the good society shorn of some sort of overarching philosophy is for me Blumange. It's like the sort of predigested pap that we feed to babies and that somehow is patronizing of a public. It leaves adult citizens with a hole in our guts and somehow a hunger for something more substantial. We know we are being shortchanged and it drives people away from formal politics and from participation. People question why they should belong to a political party when they have no role in policy formulation. And when political party conferences provide no opportunity no conduit for being heard because they're so stage managed and present corporate unity in some kind of false way. Within the parliamentary parties iron discipline by the whips is sought. And of course there was all that business you'll remember of talking about politicians having to be on message in the early Blair years where it was absolutely imperative that you carried around with you your thing telling you how to vote. I have to tell you that I never ever went to the office where you had to pick it up and I suppose maybe that can explain my terrible failures in the right way. But also that we got that whole business of politicians going on the radio and sounding like the radio clock and talking in that terrible rehearsed way. It's not surprising that we have in fact seen a certain amount of revolt by MPs because as they became clear that this was really so unsatisfactory we actually saw incrementally as it got closer towards as it's got closer towards now more and more rifts and divisions within the party because you can't hold that down forever. And those same rifts and divisions will inevitably happen in the Conservative Party when the Conservative Party I suspect will win its time in office but if it goes down the road of triangulation of trying to find a way of selling to the public something that most of their party are not really content with you will end up with having a discomfort at the heart of their political followers and so you end up having the very kind of problems that Labour is now seeing for itself. I want to make it clear that I'm not advocating a return to the politics of old. I don't think you go back. Parties do have to reinvent themselves. We do have to take account of the fact that technologies have changed that communication forms have changed those grainy images that we saw on television back when I was a child where politicians were very unfamiliar people we had very little knowledge of the private lives of people I don't think I even knew if Harold Wilson had children but it was interesting the way in which all of that has changed and will not go back but the answer to the problems with democracy is more democracy, I think despite being the oldest liberal democracy in the world the UK has never had a democratic revolution no great rising up of the people demanding the overthrow of the established order and of course that has meant that we haven't got a written constitution and people always when I speak about constitutional law in other countries always ask me about that and they always think it's very strange and we pride ourselves in the fact that we have had relatively peaceful transitions from aristocratic oligarchy to liberal democracy along a single yellow brick road from Magna Carta down through the Bill of Rights of 1689 until the universal franchise but it's always worth remembering that at the beginning of the 20th century I always have to go back to this it wasn't just my granny who didn't have the vote my grandfather didn't have the vote because my grandfather was not a property owner and it was only property owning men who had the vote and then it was the transition to universal suffrage which first of all then expanded it to include men over a certain age and then eventually to women so our history is one of incremental complex struggles for democracy and for the rule of law there hasn't been any great constitutional moment and it means that we don't have an easy set of symbols in the way that Americans do and if you speak to classrooms of American children they can put their hands on their heart and recite to you their Bill of Rights and aspects of their constitution we don't have that it's much more difficult but we do have a rich history of why we got to this particular place people like to say that we have a great flexible system and it's true we have got flexibility but some of the checks and balances some of the things that wear checks and balances relied upon a sort of honour code about people behaving like honourable gentlemen and somehow that doesn't work anymore and we have to think about ways in which we might pin some of this down so I believe that we may be looking at having to recreate even if we don't create a sort of absolute detailed written constitution that certainly aspects of our constitution should be written and made clear to establish a much fairer ground rules for play we always like to imagine that we in Britain have a sort of DNA within our system that we the British somehow believe in liberty and fair play and it's all encoded within us that we were made that way well let me assure you nobody's ever made that way they're not national characteristics that just come with being born here and the way that you produce those things are produced as national characteristics actually I believe come out of many of our experiences as a people and they exist as a product of our understanding of power and in Britain as law evolved and I say this as somebody who practices within the courts as a lawyer within the common law system is that at the heart of our system it's a skepticism about state power and we should cherish that skepticism it's a skepticism which says why do the police want to have that information why does the state want to have that information why is it that government wants that or this and that skepticism about state power is what I think has helped us resist fascism ever taking hold in this country because we've never just seen the state as something that is entitled to make demands of us now I know all this much more clearly because of my own battles with government over civil liberties issues liberty is something that is either sustained or diminished through the way that political systems and institutions manage power and the collective power that results from people acting in concert is what creates and sustains democratic institutions and you see the whole business of individual and individualism is that it's not enough you have to aggregate and get together in order to keep institutions good and democracies require really good institutions you have to have an independent judiciary that's not being attacked either by the Daily Mail or by Blunkett in office or whoever is sitting in the home office seat there's something in the drinking water at the home office that does something to people who take up that role you also have to have an independent civil service and we've seen great erosion of our wonderful independent civil service that was part of the British way with more and more people brought in because of an attempt to politicise and attempts to make people their mates who are the civil servants who are supposed to be impervious to that is he one of us and it didn't start just with Labour it was there before and it's a post second world war thing that we've seen these changes taking place the great sort of liberal consensus after the second world war around our democracy is being eroded and then of course you need to have for good democracy an independent media and therefore it means that we cannot allow great monopolies to develop run by any one family owning too much of our media and we see in Italy the problems of Berlusconi and the media control that he has there many of these different things a rich and lively civil society very important to keeping our democracy good and true those who have power never in the end want to give it away why would they nobody's going to vote for their own demise or a reduction in their power prime ministers, members of parliament will always only make arguments for the most minimalist of change and so even just now when clearly there is a need for a kind of cleaning out of the stables where we need to look at our institutions we need to look at our political system what's on offer is very, very marginal an alternative vote here says Gordon Brown a referendum if he was to return to which would not really be anything like the proportionate voting system that we really would need to have if we wanted some opening up of our politics the offer of some of the changes within parliament still not good enough to actually really give power back to parliament so that it can hold the executive to account a recreation of proper cabinet government and so all of these different things that really need to be done I happen to be someone who's in agreement with our former senior judge Lord Bingham that we really need to have a constitutional convention to look at the ways in which our democracy has to be made whole again so there's a whole constellation of forces that create real distrust and political disengagement within our parliamentary democracy and the recent crisis, financial crisis has actually in many ways only made matters worse because the one institution that should have been holding the city to account and so on in those years failed to do so because of just feeling to properly regulate and to contain that and it means that it's poor people it's ordinary people who end up paying the cost, taking the risks of that high risk banking that was going on well we're seeing the passing of the Blair era and the question is what's to come and I'm afraid not enough is on offer and what we have to look at is how do you create a democracy that's right for the 21st century I think that you have to it's one of the reasons why we have seen the development of human rights you have to protect majorities minorities because the real temptation is that when you move away from political parties and we're seeing them withering on the vine and if politicians are getting their views by taking soundings from polling and focus groups then what you end up with is a sort of populism and with that often there are scapegoats there are people in society who end up suffering and crude populism is something that we are going to have to guard against in this new form of politicking I've just come back from Columbia where the president there is about to having extended his terms as president is doing another thing of rather like Chavez rather like Mugabe did is now wanting to extend his term as president it's not anything like as as bad perhaps as in Zimbabwe but when I spoke with people there was a real concern because one of the things that Uribe the president does he's seeing what happens in America and he now has town hall meetings every weekend he's off and he goes to some part of the country and he has a town hall meeting and he says tell me what you want tell me what your problem is and somebody else put their hand up and say somebody's encroaching on my land and does such and such and he'll say what's your phone number and he'll say take his number sort out and people think it's all fantastic they go straight to the top guy but the problem of course is there are many people who don't get to those meetings and you end up also you have him making policy based on the people who turn up and there's a very real sense of again new methods because he can fly in his little airplane he's got technology at his disposal and he's able to speak to the people on television regularly and so there's a way in which he feels he's in touch with the people and the people give him their views but in fact many people's voices are never heard particularly the most poor and so what do we do? we've never had a democratic revolution but what we have seen are the transfers of power from aristocrats of old to gentlemenly capitalists in the Victorian era and now we've had a move to the technocratic professional politician politicians increasingly do not have a hinterland they do a degree in politics they decide to work as a researcher for a politician they go into a think tank that's working on policy to hand over to the senior leadership of a political party and they're all in their 20s and then decide that they want to become a politician and by their late 20s they're looking for a seat and those people do not come having been teachers having been run businesses having had lives out there doing other things and they become professional politicians and so it's a career where as a professional politician it's very worrying if you lose your seat and so it means that you'll end up doing almost anything to ensure that you don't lose your seat but it also means that you'll play a game within politics which in many ways might not be about serving the interests of the people and that again is a complaint that's made the world over now all I would say to you as I come to the end of this is that absolutely we have problems we have a globalised world where financial institutions can actually bring governments to their knees the crisis that's taking place now in Greece isn't just about any sort of mismanagement in Greece it's about the way in which a philosophy took hold which was that markets should be deregulated markets could deliver everything and that whole thing fed into the World Bank the IMF, it was the demands made in countries in Africa and so on and of course in the end there was a price to pay the way in which governments conduct themselves are influenced by money markets influenced by our relationships with other countries like the United States influenced by so many other things that are nothing to do with what might be in the interests of citizens here in the UK now that's the nature of our world but one of the things that is vital in all of this is to have openness and transparency because the only way that we can know and think of and evolve ways of creating new democratic processes is by knowing what's going on and that's why demanding openness is one of the things that we have to be doing in order to create an effect of modern democracy now the public want a voice they're tired of spin and sleaze they want honesty in politics they want politicians who are prepared to say that they've got it wrong that they've made mistakes the public are actually I think nauseated by short termism they really do want to think about where the country might go their children and for a future generation and they're certainly sick of all the business of having zars for this, zars for that blue sky thinkers all those things that were invented during the last period that we've seen and they're certainly tired of the business of eye catching initiatives and things that are done really in order to romance with the tabloid media they want to have politicians of substance they want to see people going into politics who come from a different kind of background they want to have variety and variation in those who represent them but they also want to have opportunities between elections to be heard and to be listened to and genuinely listened to I, having chaired the power inquiry we kept this going and we created a campaign in the run up to this election and it's not party political it's basically saying what kind of democracy do you want to the people out there and if you want to you can go on the internet and you'll see power 2010 as it's called it's asking for you to vote on certain kinds of changes and a sort of list of possibilities which could change your democracy and it's for you the public to say which of those you prefer and which of those you think could make a difference and they're about all the things that are sensible proportional representation I happen to think means that you would have a fairer system of votes that you actually might think of a better way of funding political parties so the rich do not have the power over the political parties that they currently have and we made suggestions in the power report of actually putting caps on I mean real caps on what people can spend and what people can give to political parties so they don't have excessive power we also should be looking at ways in which politicians themselves have alternative career roots within parliament that they can sit on select committees which should be empowered to actually do much more about examining the conduct of government and the kind of policies that are going through the kind of examination of legislation that can't take place inside the House of Commons itself but has to happen sort of parallel to it and questions about should it ever be possible for there to be a change of a party leader midterm without there being a requirement that that person goes to election within something like six months because it's interesting that when we spoke to the public in recent public meetings there was a strong sense that people felt that Gordon Brown should have within six months gone to the electorate and got a sort of legitimacy for his period in office that we actually should find other new ways of making democracy work more effectively and it might have been better actually for him if he had done but other ways that we can make our democracy better but more than anything it has to be about somehow encouraging participation it has to be about listening to our young spaces for participation which currently don't exist and many people from ordinary backgrounds who used to get involved in politics because they were in the trade union and it started there so that they represented their group of workers don't have those opportunities in the same way anymore people who went to workers education classes don't have those opportunities of getting on their feet and speaking and therefore are intimidated about actually getting up to the end of public meeting that people feel that they don't know how the system works and suddenly when it is explained to them often they see ways in which they could lobby or get the changes that they would like to see but it's all very opaque so I just wanted to say to all of you is that we deserve something better and we certainly should recognize that our children deserve something better but if we are different then we are going to have to look very carefully at the way in which our society has changed and how do we in response to those changes create a democracy that is fit for our times thank you