More democracy in a crisis, not less

Written by Andrew Duff MEP and published in Liberal Democrat News on Tue 17th Apr 2001

The decision to postpone the election was exasperating for all sorts of practical reasons. Candidates are the worst affected, and I feel for them in particular. Party campaigns and finances are stretched. National and local government officials are thrown. The media is bored. The British public, along with that small bit of the rest of the world that is interested in our politics, just have to be patient.

Yet the postponement is more than a nuisance. It is a political blunder and a constitutional outrage, and when I heard our Westminster leadership drift in behind the Tory and Labour parties to support the postponement, I was disappointed on several counts.

Mr Blair's excuse was that he himself wanted to concentrate on foot and mouth. This reveals that he can't trust anyone else in his government to manage the crisis. It also suggests that he thinks that the disease can be brought under control within just five weeks in a fairly clinical manner by deploying the massive power of the state machine. Anyone who knows anything about agriculture laughs at that proposition. "Isolate, cull, clear up!" may be convenient politico-military commands - but they are too simplistic for veterinary science and too crude for farmers for whom social, commercial, ecological and even ethical factors impinge. As the foot and mouth saga continues, indeed, the complexity of the crisis is becoming clearer: vacillation now, vaccination later.

The pretext that the county council elections would have impeded the state's campaign against the disease barely stands up to a moment's serious examination. In fact, we need strong shire councils during an agrarian crisis, not exhausted and often divided administrations with fading mandates. We need more democracy in a crisis, not less.

But my main cause of Easter gloom is the dictatorial powers we give our prime minister and the present incumbent's willingness to exercise them shamelessly for his own perceived advantage. Nowhere else in the democratic world is a leader unencumbered in the choice of date of a parliamentary election. Everywhere else there are constitutional constraints. In mainland Europe and in the US, the dissolution of parliament is one of the most fundamental civil liberties there is. Only in Britain is it not so. Only in Britain is the mandate of parliament and the autonomy of local government the plaything of the prime minister. Let us work to ensure that Mr BlairÕs premiership is shortened and the powers of his successor reduced.