Slugger O'Toole

alias, This is a gloriously tridentine view but just a shade too dogmatic I feel. Poltiics with a small p atill applies. The resignation of Cardinal Law applies mutatis mutandis.

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As you know I’ve been thinking along similar lines. A fundamental question:, are we fated to be governed by our past or can we break out of its constraints? Do we actually want to or are our pasts our real comfort zone?

The theme struck me as I was listening to a rather unsatisfactory discussion on Radio 4’s Start The Week on China this morning, which reflected a fundamental dichotomy of outlook in analysing societies. Marxist revisionist Martin Jacques believed the Chinese industrial revolution showed a dramatic ability to break out of the past; the more cautious Jonathan Fenby thought China had still to confront many of the past’s legacies, like fear of breakup if the centre releases its grip. Both of them were partly right and yet neither was able to offer clear pointers to the future. Who can blame them?

What happens when change lacks clear definition and eludes familiar ideology? Institutions of all kinds are under great pressure – call it the age old hunger for personal freedom, greater absolute prosperity, better education, the internet, whatever. These phenomena present huge challenges to what passes for our own public intellectuals, even in our little parishes, where our people are still corralled in badged identities which are defining them less completely than before.

Today, many would agree that it’s futile for the Church to keep going through the motions of exercising an authority which has seriously eroded. It’s entirely fair for beleaguered churchmen to ask, what then would you put in authority’s place, though such a retort is hardly a complete answer. The same question applies to the critics of the “managed sectarianism” of enforced powersharing. We know your critique. But what would you put in its place?

Public intellectuals surely need to ask themselves more open, less loaded questions. For instance: can we use history to avoid becoming its prisoners? The reappraisals of 1912 etc are interesting as they prompt the counterfactual, what might have happened if the recourse to physical force or the threat of it had not finally triumphed in that generation, leaving it to later generations to fight it all over again with a not dissimilar outcome? Are we really going to be different this time?Do not historicist analyses of the past ( i.e.analyses holding that events were inevitable and were not amenable to a different outcome) reinforce the past’s charactertistics?

Do we really the idea of a past put to rights before we can achieve a reconciling future? Is such an idea doomed to failure before direct experience of the Troubles finally recedes into history like the 3rd Cork brigade of the 1920s?

Other more contemporary questions occur to encourage breakout. Is the vision of a non-sectarian future robust enough to bring it about, however gradually?

Might it be better to work with the grain of sectarian division rather than oppose it head-on?

Do human rights laws require an agreed moral basis before they command general consent?

Up to now, the academy has had it easy in a way; the reactionaries were so bloody awful. But what happens now that the reactionaries are not quite so bad and are apparently securely in charge, sort of?

This is taking some getting used to and is presenting big challenges to think afresh.

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Gladys, I hope my post wasn’t too hard to interpret. Remote from the action, I’ve simply been noting a reduction in the energy of sectarian point scoring in political rhetoric and a swing towards the rhetoric of reconciliation. What that amounts to remains to be seen. Nor am I quite sure what a policy of reconciliation amounts to. It seems to me so far to be a benign ideology in search of a political programme.Good luck in the search, What I’m quite sure of is that communal politics can’t easily be replaced.

What do people want? Peace and personal security? Blunting the impact of austerity? Consumerism? All of the above. VIgorous social scientific investigations beyond the Life and Times surveys might tell us more. Political discourse based on analysis of the factual information buried within the organs of government would help. But for the most part I haven’t noticed that politics has matured to that point.

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nevin and others., I wasn’t actually suggesting that the nirvana of delivery had actually arrived, just hoping for progress!

While MLAs and councillors may do a god job here, there’s a touch of phoniness about a role in which local reps claim to deliver what are actually entitlments to constituents.Now I’m not naive, I know the constiuency role has been an expanding universal trend for decades but – just to put it on the record – it is not what legislataors are supposed to be mainly about.

Some of it is displacement activity – what else would they do? Some of it may have benign politcal effects, like Paisley’s famous boasting about delIvering for Catholics. That’s one good thing that can be said about it.

But beware the clientelist trap that has so damaged the south’s political system.

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In my own quiet way I’ve pointed out the advantages of an (80%?) elected Lords to the SDLP. But don’t let’s hold our breath on it actually happening or any swift change in the persistent attractions of abstention for SF after contesting seats. The problem of en elected Lords coming to rival the Commons seems a near insurmountable obstacle. Good to see they’re keeping the bishops though albeit in reduced numbers.Whatever you might say against them they’re not corrupt.. The Lords is a good place for traditions, even for inventing new ones.

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Don’t forget image. Are party leaders elected in opposition since 1994 all look alikes? Remember the odd question of John Humphrys, even for him, quoting a confidence of the late Robin Cook. Was Ed Miliband too ugly to succeed?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/9004332/Ed-Miliband-too-ugly-to-be-prime-minister.html

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Mick, surely to draw firm conclusions at this stage is to write off a unionist campaign that’s only just forming, and therefore premature. They surely have to do better than this against an SNP target that is not as hard to hit as it thinks.

There’ll be much, much more on this. Campaigners will be found if their case is based on real choices that strike a chord with the public – or should I say publics.

Much debate will be new and lively, (not just about identity which is more like preaching than rational argument) . It will about tax and spend liberated from the dry technicalites of Barnett or even Calman,

Are the Scots prepared to fund almost all their own spending and hang their case on “Scotland’s Oil”?

Will the English continue to be prepared to subsidise them even on the declining Barnett curve? .These are real world questions. I think the answer is no to the first and yes – just – to the second, provided something can be swung for poorer English regions where all three UK parties compete for votes.

Doug, , A mistake to be too dogmatic about this although you’re right to draw attention to the English dimension, as I have already.

Finally, much will depend on how much the English political class want to keep the UK united. Whatever the polls show, my feeling is that they would see Scottish independence as a calamitous defeat, just as they were not prepared to quit NI under IRA duress. (Another example of pride of the political class is the reluctance to give up the nuclear deterrent.)

National pride has a deep but unacknowledged place at the core of all the main UK parties, well beyond purely rational politics. For them this is where identity politics comes in. To their surprise they are having to explain the Union over again, not only to their public but also to themselves.

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Not sure what equality means in such an asymmetrical uniion of only four such different parts.See this extract from a Scotsman article by my colleague Alan Trench.on the McKay commisssion appearing in Monitor on the Constitution Unit’s website.

Sorting out the West Lothian question is easier said than done, though. There are three basic solutions to the problem. One is an English Parliament, within a federal structure for the United Kingdom. However, that is problematic if the goal is to maintain the Union, as so unbalanced a union (England is 85 per cent of the UK’s population) would not be stable and would probably not be sustainable. No similarly unbalanced federal system has lasted more than a few years.

The second option is the “Stormont discount” – reducing the number of MPs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as happened for Northern Ireland between 1922 and 1972. The problem with that is that it means Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have a reduced say on matters like health in England – but their say on non-devolved matters like defence or foreign affairs is also reduced. The Stormont discount is a blunt instrument to solve complex problems.

The third option is “English votes for English laws” or EVEL, as promoted by the Conservatives. This is an “in and out” solution; MPs would be eligible to take part in some votes but not others, depending on the constituency they represent. It creates serious problems too; it would be very hard to implement, and creates problems of “governability” if the party with an overall majority at Westminster doesn’t also have a majority of English seats. That is a problem for Labour but not the Conservatives – Labour might be in a position to form a UK government without a majority of English seats, but the Conservatives would not.

The practicalities of EVEL are pretty daunting too. Westminster legislation commonly touches on a variety of parts of the UK; some clauses in a typical bill will relate only to England, others to England and Wales, or Great Britain, or England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Sorting out which provisions only affect England will be quite a challenge for those in charge of drafting legislation, forcing Whitehall to change deeply-ingrained habits.

Moreover, some legislation on devolved matters needs – under the Sewel convention – to be considered at Westminster too, so MPs from devolved governments should be entitled to vote on that. It will also be a challenge for those responsible for legislation in Parliament, who will have to make sure that the right clauses are flagged in the right way, and only those MPs eligible vote or speak on them
.
Although EVEL is fraught with problems, there is little reason to believe that it is an answer to the problem with wider appeal. Even if it is the first step, it will not be the last. Data from the Institute for Public Policy Research, , suggest a growing number of English voters are concerned about the “unfairness” of the present arrangements and want something more than a limited change at Westminster. What solution they might want – or how that might work – is less clear.

Altering Westminster procedures may be popular among Tory MPs, and appears to have much wider public support, but it does not provide a positive solution to the problems of representing England in a devolved and increasingly decentralised UK.

However, the McKay Commission is weighted toward finding technical solutions to a narrowly defined problem. The commission’s remit limits it to looking at how the House of Commons deals with legislation.
Moreover, the commission has been set up as a body of independent experts to advise about solutions, not to redefine the problem.

The key decisions remain to be taken by politicians after the commission has reported. As its report is due in the next Westminster session (before May 2013), that probably means we reach decision time at some point in 2013-14. Given growing concerns in England, though, this is unlikely to be able to tackle the issues that now need to be addressed.

Alan Trench is an Honorary Senior Research Associate at the Constitution Unit, University College London

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caseydog, what I’ve seen is a dialogue of the deaf with a few tactical feints and positioning. So whats the big idea?
General agreement on choice at 14 to replace selection at 11?

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Toby, Apologies for the name blindness, now corrected but the post is asking the straighforward question, why did you decline to appear to the apparent surprise of the tribunal? To me the Larkin piece suggests you might have been gullible, a claim I wouldn’t expect you to agree with but again, a fair question to ask, to which I’m sure you have an answer. .Will you appear at a later date as the chairman seems to hope?

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