Is Nick Clegg taking lessons from the Tea Party? With the so-called Charity Gagging Bill it's starting to look a bit like it. Do Liberal Democrat voters want charities gagged in the run up to the next elections?
A recent poll has revealed that Texans and Oklahomans, including Okies from Muskogee and beyond, are all yogurt-weaving hippies. Or eco-nazis. Or possibly just hopeless dupes taken in by the Great Global Warming Hoax (copyright James Inhofe, Senior Senator for Oklahoma). Anyway, they believe in climate change, think it’s man-made, and want the government to cut emissions. By a large majority.
The rest of America agrees, but Texas and Oklahoma are the ultimate Republican strongholds, with heavily fossil fuel dependent economies, and Inhofe is the most important and vocal climate denier on the US political scene. So the fact that even Texans and Okies accept the science is the headline news.
A major cause for celebration, you might think. Even Texas. Even Inhofe’s home state of Oklahoma. Finally, perhaps, the US can actually do something other than block global treaties.
But you’d be wrong, because whilst a majority of voters in every state, even the most Republican ones, support action on climate change, the majority of congressmen don’t.
What electoral recklessness is this? Well, actually, it’s all about getting elected. Senate and congress candidates are chosen in a complicated system of primaries, which are dominated by the most enthusiastic party activists. In the Republican Party, recent successful gerrymandering of the constituency borders means there are a lot of very safe Republican congressional seats, where the real challenge is not to beat your Democratic opponent, which is all but guaranteed, but to be selected ahead of your Republican rivals in the first place.
This means Republican congressmen are effectively chosen by the far-right ‘Tea Party’ tendency, for whom denial of climate change is a totemic, core value, like being pro-life on abortion and pro-death on gun control. If, as a Republican candidate in a primary, you want to go against the Tea Party line on climate change, you need to motivate a lot of mainstream republicans to get politically active, which takes a lot of money. And where might this money come from? Well, the biggest source of funding for Republicans in Oklahoma is the oil and gas industry. Followed closely by the mining industry. Cheque. Mate.
Until the renewables industry can summon up the same sort of bribes, or the climate issue becomes important enough to a large number of mainstream Republican voters that they will switch party allegiance over it, their views on the issue won’t be represented in the American political process. Or at least not by their preferred party.
Representative democracy has this problem all over the world. You’re very unlikely to find a party or candidate whose position you share on every issue, and so the compromises we make mean we vote against our beliefs on many issues. It’s unavoidable in this sort of system. But there is a counterbalance in the form of civil society. We don’t cease to have opinions in the years between elections, and if our society’s commitment to democracy goes beyond a ritualised pretence twice a decade, it’s vital that the public debate on any important issue is not restricted to professional politicians and their funders.
And so the charity gagging bill, which allegedly originated in the office of Nick Clegg, is both illiberal and anti-democratic. Do LibDem voters want charities gagged in the run-up to elections? It seems unlikely. Will enough of them change their vote over this issue to make Clegg regret it? Possibly, if the charities the bill is trying to gag decide to make a big fuss about it. But if the bill makes that too costly, which is exactly what it is designed to do, then it will have succeeded in diminishing the UK citizen’s allocation of democracy even further, taking power from the almost powerless and giving it to the most powerful.
In case you’re not aware of the implications of the bill, it severely limits charities and other organisations from doing any work which could conceivably impact on a general election during the year before it occurs. That means once an extremely restrictive annual spending limit has been reached, which would take all of two weeks for Greenpeace, or about nine hours for Oxfam, criticising a government policy becomes illegal, or engaging in any debate where there is a difference in policy between the major parties. For example, now that Cameron appears to have caved in to his back-benchers and decided to remove all the ‘green crap’ from his party’s policies, presumably Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the WWF or any vaguely ‘green’ group won’t be able to campaign on any of their various causes without it being a political attack on the Conservatives, and so illegal.
If your idea of perfect democracy is choosing between two or three very similar parties once every five years, and, in the interim, sitting back and let corporate lobbyists and the Daily Mail dictate Britain’s political agenda, then you’ll be pleased to see the tiresome interjections from do-gooders and busy-bodies being curtailed. But is that really the stance of the Liberal Democrats’ supporters? And if not, isn’t the charity gagging bill undemocratic both in its intent, and in the supposed mandate of the politicians introducing it?
In case you were wondering, Greenpeace will be studiously ignoring the bill and hoping to be the first to be prosecuted under it. To be honest, it’s a bit of a gift for us, giving us a rather attractive platform in an arena where we feel very much at home. But a charity with direct day-to-day responsibility for vulnerable people, animals or landscapes may not feel as able to take the same risks, or as confident of winning a fight with central government.
If you support such a charity, or are just happy that they exist to amplify the voices of the vulnerable, you might want to let people know whose side you’re on over this. MPs, maybe. Lib Dem MPs, perhaps. Nick Clegg, for example.
