The Speaker’s Conference – which reported last week – has come up with some interesting ideas for improving engagement and participation in democracy. None of them are particularly new, and some of them have been doing the rounds for years, but this is perhaps the first occasion upon which they have all been brought together by a cross-party body with theoretical teeth.
The report begins with proposals about citizenship education, which, at the moment, is regarded very much as a poor relation in schools, and which people generally regard as unnecessary afterwards.
According to recent research, 55% of teachers responsible for citizenship education actually have no training in it, and headteachers are said not to view it as a priority when it’s set against all the other things that are. And pupils usually know when something doesn’t matter – when there’s no exam at the end of it, for example – and will treat it accordingly.
And although in theory politics GCSE and A level courses – which do have exams at the end of them – include modules about the UK political system, in practice one is driven to wonder how effectively these are taught. Certainly by the time students come to study politics at degree level there seems to be very little time for domestic political structures or events – to the point at which politics graduates taking up internships or posts at the Centre for Women & Democracy sometimes need a crash course in British political institutions (including elections) before they can start work.
Of course, what is local and known (e.g., how elections and structures in the UK work, how they interact one another and the public, and how they might be changed and developed in the future) has little allure compared with the politics of revolution in Mexico or Peru or of religion in the Middle East.
But surely what is local and known is what makes our own political system tick? And our own political system – for all its many faults – is what most people need to understand. It’s not quite in crisis yet, but it’s getting there. Lack of trust and lack of engagement are all too often underpinned by something else – a fundamental incomprehension about what politics are for, how they work, and what our involvement in them can and should be.
This doesn’t need to be the case. Good citizenship education, valued both at school and after it, funded properly and taught effectively would at least start people off with a grasp of the basics.
But there is another issue. The Speaker’s Conference was composed entirely of MPs, who, not surprisingly, start from the premise that although there are some problems with the existing political system, many of them could be put right if only other people were better educated. But the problem may actually be that, despite the lack of education, people understand it all too well, and don’t much care for it.
After all, despite some slow adjustments over the years, it is in many ways unchanged from the century before last. When Iris Robinson resigned her seat last week a statement was put out by the Treasury announcing that she had been appointed as the ‘Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds’. To most people, this is completely meaningless. Why can MPs not simply resign?
This is just a small example. The day-to-day business of politics often looks like a closed book because it seems so irrelevant. And since the day-to-day detail of politics was considered outside the remit of the Speaker’s Conference (which, to be fair, was about rectifying under-representation), it remains the subject of interesting experiments such as Power2010’s Deliberative Democracy day rather than initiatives arising from the political centre itself.
This is not a simple problem. If there was a single magic measure – or combination of measures – that could be taken to change levels of engagement, we’d have sorted it out long before now. Politics have always been viewed with suspicion, but since historically the majority of people have been excluded there has also been a view that getting in would somehow change things. Now we know how limited that change is. Our theoretically open democracy has some of the lowest turnout levels in history. We need to do more if we are to maintain levels of democratic credibility.
That said, improving political education, both in and out of schools, would be a good start. At least people would have less excuse for ignorance. It is scandalous that so many young people leave school with no idea of how decisions affecting their lives are taken and how they are paid for, and still less of how to influence them. But in itself, as the Speaker’s Conference recognises, it is not enough. Politics have to be changed fundamentally, not simplified or dumbed down. We need new political standards, new mechanisms and new communications, and we need structures and institutions which themselves reflect and value how the world works now, and what its drivers are, and recognise how far away that is from the lofty Victorian splendour of parliament, its buildings, its language and its procedures.
Then we might get close to politics that meet our aspirations.
