IS THE UK’S POLITICAL BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT NOW A CLASSIC “CARTEL DEMOCRACY”?
A few
weeks ago I was reading an article by the Conservative MEP, Daniel Hannan’s, in
the Sunday Telegraph called in the print edition “Coalition politics has turned
European democracy into a beige dictatorship”.
Here is a link to the original article >>> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/21/coalition-politics-has-turned-european-democracy-beige-dictatorship/
In that
article he says:-
“Several
Western European countries have had German-style traditions of permanent
coalition. In some of them, favoured parties were more or less permanently in
office. These became known as the “cartel democracies”, because the ruling
parties used legal and financial barriers to prevent newcomers from breaking
through. Austria, Belgium and Italy were textbook cartel democracies for most
of the post-war era.”…
You can
always spot the symptoms. The public sector grows as the various coalition
partners scrabble to find sinecures for their supporters. In Austria during the
Christian Democrat/Social Democrat duopoly, every position, from the headmaster
of a village school to the director of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, might
be allocated according to party membership card. These membership cards, by the
way, were actual physical things: the Italian versions, beribboned and
bemedalled, were especially magnificent, signifying, as they did, a precious
IOU.
Cartel
politicians, being unchallenged, could award themselves handsome perks, such as
legal immunities and high salaries. When I was first elected to the European Parliament,
MEPs were paid at the same rate as a national parliamentarian in their home
country. The Austrians, Italians and Germans earned twice as much as anyone
else. The cartel parties were quite flagrant in their attempts to stop
newcomers from posing a challenge. In Belgium, for example, restrictions on
private donations made parties dependent on state funding – which was then
withdrawn from the Flemish separatists following a parliamentary vote by their
rivals.
Secure in
office, the old parties were able to ignore public demands for tax cuts,
immigration controls, powers back from Brussels or anything else they could
fastidiously dismiss as “populist”. Because leaders from a previous generation
generally decided who could stand on their party lists, politics remained stuck
in a Fifties corporatist consensus.
Only in
the Nineties did the system start to break down. Fed up with the complacency
and sleaze of their semi-permanent rulers, voters began to grope around for
battering rams to smash open the old system. In Italy, they found a
Trumpian avant la lettre – Silvio Berlusconi, who made a point of issuing
no party membership cards. In Austria, they turned to Jörg Haider’s
anti-immigration Freedom Party. In Belgium, they elected the Flemish
nationalists. Only in Germany has the old partitocracy remained intact – at
least until now.
Last
year, Germany’s Christian Democrats suffered their worst result since 1949. The
Social Democrats suffered their worst result since 1933. How will it look if
the two losers get together to form a government based on all the things that
had characterised the old racket – more immigration, deeper European
integration, little economic reform, and the dismissal of all opposition as
unconscionable populism?”
These comments chimed strongly with my experiences of the way in which
Labour and the Conservatives have embedded themselves within the State, in such
a way that for years now it has seemed to matter little which party was
technically in power. The classic “LibLabCon”
even when the other party is in power many of the key people within what is
supposed to be its rival still have plum political patronage jobs.
So I looked further and found the BBC’s Home Editor, Mark Easton, had written
an article which was published on the
12th June 2017. Which asked:-
“Has British democracy let its
people down?”
Mark Easton’s reply is:-
“Parliamentary democracy is one of the British
values that English schools are now required, by statute, to promote during
lessons - not debate, not discuss, promote.
If some
teachers interpret their new role as propagandists for this kingdom's existing
system of governance, that would be a shame, because right now there are
questions about how well our form of democracy is serving the UK.
Far from
providing the stability and legitimacy it promises, one could argue that our
democratic system has served to expose and deepen social divides.
Some
would say it has even contrived to leave our country vulnerable at a critical
moment in its history.
Rather
than seeking to close down critical challenge of our form of democracy, do we
need a serious and urgent conversation about how we can improve matters?...
Our two
main political parties were founded and evolved to deal with the social and
economic challenges of the industrial revolution.
Conservative
and Labour, Left and Right, capitalism and socialism - these ideological
movements were a response to the economic and cultural challenges of power
moving from the field to the factory.
But power
is moving again, from the national to the multinational.
How
citizens think we should respond to that shift is the new divide in our
politics.
It is
less about left v right and more about nationalism v globalism….
…Old-fashioned
political tribalism is actually on the wane…
And the
diminution of local government in England, the weakening of the trade union
movement, the impotence of political protest movements, the increasing
centralisation of overarching authority to one house in Downing Street - these
add to the sense that the "demos" (people) are increasingly excluded
from the "kratos" (power).”
I think
that much of what Mark Easton had to say here is right, particularly in his
analysis of what the division now is; not left and right, rather globalist/
internationalist as against nationalist/patriotic.
It was
said by many of the more astute commentators, including Professor Matthew
Goodwin of Kent University, that the appeal of Euroscepticism and of Brexit to
English nationalists anxious to “get our country back” and to “take back
control” was, when focussed solely on the EU, somewhat misconceived.
Professor
Goodwin in particular was saying that for people who identified themselves as
being English, that their desire to get back control was a confused response
because the problem wasn’t the EU, it was the British Political Establishment
which is seeking to break England up and to change English society and English
communities in ways that English people don’t want.
Its
support of the EU was a system of this attitude so the real struggle ought to
be focussed on England and on the English taking back control. The British State and British Political
Establishment not only no longer cares about them or about what they think
about things, but also actively works against English interests. Its default position is internationalist or
globalist.
I thought therefore I ought to look at what academics have written about
“Cartel Parties” and see whether that is a concept which helps to explain the
problems of power that we have currently got in England. So a quick search of the internet showed me
the article you find here>>> https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/77c01c49-8fe0-4c5f-a83e-c64362debb30.pdf
This
article actually found that the UK was not a Cartel democracy but that is
because the article was written in 2001 and not in 2018! For the last 20 years we have lived in the
sort of political environment which is all too clearly explained in this
paper. The key points of the article are
here:-
“Cartel parties in Western Europe?
Changes in organizational structures, political
functions and competitive behaviour among the major parties in Denmark,
Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
By Klaus
Detterbeck
University
of Göttingen
Introduction
Among the various attempts to pinpoint the changes
in West European political parties which have been going on over the last
decades, the cartel party model (Katz & Mair 1995) has been one of the most
provocative of… In their article Katz
& Mair (1995) are constructing an evolution of party types from the late
19th century onwards to show how parties have changed from being party of
society (mass parties) to being part of the state apparatus. The provocation,
the cartel party model entails, lies in its claim that the established parties
in Western Europe have adapted themselves to declining levels of participation
and involvement in party activities by not only turning to resources provided
by the state but by doing so in a collusive manner. The inter-penetration of
party and state, so the argument goes, has been achieved through co-operation
between the major parties - most obviously by unanimously introducing and
expanding public subsidies to themselves. The former opponents now run a party
cartel which excludes new and smaller parties. These changes on the level of
party competition are associated with decisive changes in the internal balance
of power among the individual cartel parties, their relationship to society and
the quality of the democratic process in Western democracies per se. Thus, Katz
& Mair (1995) are depicting a fundamental change of party democracy in
Western Europe since the 1970s. Precisely because the consequences of the
alleged cartellization would be so dramatic - a self-referential political
class unremovable from power dominating politics and determining their own
infrastructure- it is necessary to empirically review the central hypotheses of
the cartel party model.
Three
dimensions of party change
Analytically there are three dimensions on which
Katz & Mair (1995) are describing party change since the 1960s and on which
they are conceptualizing the cartel type. I will look at them in turn:
·
Political role: representative vs. governmental
functions
·
Party competition: cartellization and exclusion
·
Organizational structures: parlamentarization and
stratarchy
The political role of parties concerns their
position between the sphere of society and the sphere of the state. The cartel
party model postulates that West European parties have increasingly lost their capacity
and their eagerness to fulfil their representative functions for society
(interest articulation and -aggregation, goal formulation, political
mobilisation), whereas they became more strongly involved in executing governmental
functions (elite recruitment, government formation, policy making). The
professional party leaders thus became more concerned with the demands of the
parliamentary arena than with interpreting party manifestos or discussing
politics on party congresses. The near exclusive dominance of parliaments and
governments enabled parties to rely on a new source for financing and staffing
their organizations which made them relatively independent from party members
or donors. Cartel party are therefore characterized by a weak involvement of
party members and historically related interest groups (classe gardée) in party
activities on the one hand, and by an emphasis on governmental functions and
state resources on the other hand.
Turning to the level of party competition,
the mutually shared need for securing the flow of state resources has changed
the relationships of the political opponents towards each other. In a process
of social learning - facilitated through the daily interaction of professional
politicians from different parties in parliament - the party actors realized
that there are common interests among the „political class“ which laid the
basis for collective action (von Beyme 1996; Borchert 2001). The process of
cartel formation has two facets: cartellization aims at reducing the
consequences of electoral competition, basically through granting the losers,
the established opposition a certain share of state subventions or patronage
appointments. Exclusion aims at securing the position of the established
parties against newly mobilized challengers. This can be achieved through
setting up certain barriers for newcomers in the electoral competition (e.g.
thresholds), excluding them from access to public subventions or media
campaigns, or excluding them from access to executive office by declaring them
unacceptable coalition partners („pariahs“). However, a cartel doesn’t have to
be closed completely. The co-optation of new parties which are willing to play
according to the established rules of the game may strengthen the viability of
a party cartel. Katz & Mair (1995) argue that the formation of a party
cartel poses a fundamental problem for the West European party democracies as
it denies the voters the possibility of choosing a political alternative – “none
of the major parties is ever definitively out“ (ebd.: 22) -, and gives
munitions to the rhetorics of neo-populist parties on the political right. In
the long run, cartellization will widen the gulf between voters and politicians
and make it increasingly difficult to legitimize political decisions.
The organisational dimension is concerned
with the balance of power inside the parties. The “mechanics” of internal
decision-making are determined by the structural and material resources of the
various “faces” within the organisation. Cartel party are characterised by a
further strengthening of the “party in public office” which can be explained by
their direct access to political decisions in parliaments and governments,
their access to the mass media as well as by their better access to state
resources (e.g. parliamentary staff). The dominance of party executive organs
through parliamentarians, the marginalisation of party activists (e.g. through
member ballots) or the professionalization of election campaigns are
organizational indicators of the cartel type. The second organizational feature
of cartel parties consists in the vertical autonomy of different party levels.
Whereas the national (parliamentarian) party elite tries to free itself from
the demands of regional and local party leaders as far as political and
strategic questions on the national level are concerned, the lower strata
insist upon their autonomy in their own domains, e.g. the selection of
candidates or local politics: Each side
is therefore encouraged to allow the other a free hand. The result is
stratarchy“ (ebd.: 21).
Although the causal relationships between these
three dimensions are not clearly spelled out by Katz & Mair (1995), it
seems to be the logic of the argument that the increase of vulnerability (less party
members, more volatile voters) caused party change. Vulnerability brought about
a declining capacity of parties to fulfil their representative functions (e.g.
interest articulation) which led them
a.) to concentrate on their governmental functions (e.g.
selecting leaders, seeking parliamentary majorities, passing laws) and,
b.) to collude with their established opponents in
order to secure the required resources for organisational maintenance.
The freedom of manoeuvre which party leaders needed
to do both led to internal party reforms which strengthened the “party in
public office”. As a result of these changes, the linkages between the
professionalized party organisations and the citizenry further eroded, which in
turn intensified the trend towards the sphere of the state and towards
inter-party collusion (see Young 1998)…
The core element of the cartel party type can be
seen in the self-interested co-operation between the major parties which aims
at securing organizational resources (public subsidies, patronage) and career
stability (income, reelection, alternative political jobs) for the individual
politician.
