THE MOST important manifesto published so far in the general election is surely that of the British Toilet Association. It campaigns for legislation compelling local authorities, schools and even operators of mobile cafés to provide public lavatories. By a fortunate coincidence, these facilities are provided commercially by the Association’s members, who include Armitage Shanks, Enviro-Fresh Ltd and JMG Toilet Solutions Ltd.
The British Motorcyclists’ Federation’s Vision for the Future of Motorcycling also merits study. It calls for “better fiscal incentives (ie, paying people) to use motorcycles”. Meanwhile, the National Farmers’ Union declares that “the next government must seek an increase in the (EU) budget for rural development”, and the British Retail Consortium opposes “ unmanageable increases in (retailers’) rates bills”.
Heaven forbid that among these scrupulous assessments of public welfare I overlook the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists’ recommendation that the next government “prioritise the retention and recruitment of physiotherapists” in the NHS.
Such absurdly self-serving demands have their counterparts among pensioners’ groups, consumers’ associations, environmentalists, trade unions and numerous other voluntary organisations. Collectively these bodies are known as pressure groups, or by the euphemism “non-governmental organisations”. While diverse in objectives, they have an overriding common characteristic. They want government to provide a benefit and they want someone else to pick up the bill.
Freedom of association is a democratic right, and a free society needs its intermediate institutions. But things become murkier when those institutions shape public policy while being publicly unaccountable. Only 30 years ago economic policy under governments of both parties was conducted on that principle. It was called corporatism. The theory was that employers’ organisations and trade unions would have certain privileges in policymaking, and in return would serve the public interest by restraining increases in prices and wages. In practice they failed to deliver the benefits. The system disintegrated amid high inflation and trade union militancy.
Politicians these days disclaim any belief in corporatism. But they are curiously partial to such buzzwords as “consultation” and “inclusiveness” — especially when they are on the defensive. After their election disaster of 1997, the Tories announced a “Listening to Britain” programme. “We will learn about people’s aspirations and the challenges our country will face,” declared Peter Lilley, who was then the Shadow Chancellor, labelling it “an election-winning strategy” (it wasn’t). In his speech to the 2003 Labour Party conference, the Prime Minister, buffeted by controversy over Iraq, promised “the biggest policy consultation ever to have taken place in this country”. (The exercise proved as ephemeral as such earlier leitmotifs of Blairism as the Stakeholder Economy and the Giving Age.)
Yet if the results of “public consultations” are trifling, the effect on our political culture is insidious. Forums intended to elicit the insights of civil society are an ideal arrangement for the loudest and best-organised pressure groups to pre-empt the political process by dressing up partial causes in the raiment of social concern. Deliberative democracy is continually menaced by what James Madison, in his Federalist Paper 51, termed “the mischief of faction”. There is a strong democratic case for insulating political decisions from factional pressures.
The single best domestic decision — which no party wishes to reverse — taken by the present Government was giving the Bank of England control of interest rates. The policy separates a political judgment — what the target for inflation should be — from the technical issue of how to realise it. Interest rates are set according to a disinterested assessment of inflationary conditions, not the demands of trade union or business lobbies for favours to exporters or manufacturers. The Chancellor’s “Golden Rule” (government borrowing only to invest and not for current spending) is likewise a rules-based approach. Both measures protect the public interest by restraining governments from stimulating the economy without regard for inflationary consequences.
There is an allied principle to the notion of rules rather than discretionary intervention. Good government is not about securing the things we like, but about what we trade off in order to have more of one thing relative to another. This way of thinking is central to democratic politics, and alien to the reasoning of pressure groups.
Campaigners for the cancellation of Third World debt invariably emphasise the benefits to poor countries of no longer paying debt service costs; they rarely dwell on the consequences for developing countries that have endeavoured to build up good credit ratings by responsible borrowing. Campaigners for higher state benefits avoid specifying what areas of public spending should be cut to allow them (other than the deus ex machina of nuclear weapons, which are a comparatively inexpensive form of defence).
What is wrong with these campaigns is not that their policies are necessarily bad, but that they lack any conception of how to reconcile competing claims to scarce resources. The weakness at the heart of pressure-group politics is that, as Isaiah Berlin observed, “the very idea of the perfect world in which all good things are realised is incomprehensible, is in fact conceptually incoherent”.
The party leaders could assist the health of our democracy by asserting collectively that the election manifestos of pressure groups will not be read, let alone heeded. So far from being an act of arrogance, it would indicate genuine humility: an awareness that politics is a second-order activity, with inherent limits on what it can deliver.
