Industry | 2010.03.29
Parliament's wash-up's a stitch-up | Martin Bell
Due democratic process is lost in the pre-election horse-trading to decide which bills will survive
The season of the wash-up is upon us. This unfortunately has nothing to do with cleansing parliament from its many stains of corruption – more necessary now than ever. It is the term used to describe the negotiations between the parties to decide which bills will survive at the end of the parliamentary session and which will not. It is a secretive process, the modern equivalent of the smoke-filled room. Those taking part are the parties\' whips and business managers, plus officials from various government departments. Those excluded are the rank and file of MPs, together with independents and crossbenchers in the Lords. The wash-up is a stitch-up devised by and for the main political parties.
Eighteen bills are going into the wash-up in the few remaining weeks of a discredited parliament. At this point the votes that got them this far, in both houses, will count for nothing. Horse-trading takes over from due process. Many bills will fall at this final hurdle.
And those which cross the finishing line may well be those with powerful interests behind them. One of these is the digital economy bill , which would serve the purposes of the recording industry and may end up on the statute book with insufficient scrutiny. In the wash-up compromise is king: you give me a concession on this bill and I will give you one on that. In the present parliamentary climate the activities of lobbyists seem more suspect and sinister than ever, yet they may emerge as the winners. What timing!
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.
But the wash-up is not on TV. It will be the enabler of some bills and the executioner of others. These are measures which will affect the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Yet we will have no idea why one was nodded through and another was blocked; which party made which compromises and why; and whether the public interest was served or simply traded away.It would be clearly served by a voting system that was not as undemocratic as the one which we will be using in a few weeks\' time. Let this be the beginning of the end for first past the post. And if reform is killed, we have a right to know whose hands were on the dagger.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]election-parliamentary-wash-up
