What About The Workers?

Job-share MPs, indeed! What, on half-pay? No, I didn’t think so. Who cares what sex an MP is? That is the answer to entirely the wrong question, although job-sharing is the wrong answer even to that question. Meanwhile, what Sir Michael Wilshaw means is that rustics and hoi polloi do not produce anyone capable of being school governors, so that their communities need instead to be treated to the attentions of professionalised central appointees. We all know who and what those would be.

The recent death of Ronald Dworkin more or less coincides with these pernicious proposals, and also with attacks on trial by jury following the collapse of the first Vicky Price trial, as well as with the muttering about Catholics providing a large minority of the Conservative votes against same-sex “marriage”, the huge majority of Labour votes against, large proportions of the Labour and Lib Dem abstentions, and at least half of the Lib Dem votes against. Is Gordon Birtwistle a Catholic? At any rate, there will be no shortage of Catholics in Burnley, so that he would probably have faced a significant Labour challenger from that quarter if he had supported this Bill, as the practising Catholic Sarah Teather would have done from within the black churches in Brent Central.

Personally, I should love to be tried by stalwarts of the black churches such as the Daily Mail almost explicitly, and Sir Simon Jenkins absolutely explicitly, found so hilariously unsuitable. Sir Simon holds a view on juries and on jurors which is wildly out of keeping with his position of many other issues, such as the importance of municipal institutions.

If not the profoundly religious and immaculately turned out African lady whom Sir Simon thought ought not have been there, then who, exactly? And why, exactly? The is only one Sir Simon Jenkins. There are not 12 of him. Nor could even he possibly hear ever case in the land. Parliament, school governing bodies, juries: we come as we are, as who and what we are. That is the point. That is the purpose.

School governing bodies are what I know most about among bodies of that kind: hospital boards and so forth. The absence from them of the working classes, even broadly defined, is really very frightening. In eight years on that of a primary school serving the very mixed country town where I live, and in eight on that of a comprehensive school which happens to be here but which serves a much larger and overwhelmingly C2DE catchment area, I was privileged to serve with very many first-rate people.

But the fact remains that, apart from the then County Councillor at a push, and the odd parent governor, the composition was of the unassailable, mostly AB middle-classness that can only be pulled off with a straight face by the Labour Party and by the churches, Anglican in the primary case, Catholic in the secondary case. I should take a very great deal of persuading that things were any different in relation to the ostensibly public accountability of health, social services, housing, policing, or anything else.

The powers of local government demand to be restored as far as possible to the form that they took in 1978. Each local authority should comprise an equal number of Councillors and Aldermen. Councillors would continue to be elected on a Ward basis, with each Ward electing two Councillors, each voter voting for one candidate, and the top two getting in. Two Aldermen would be elected by and from among each designated Area’s voters in social groups A and B, two by and from among each Ward’s voters in social groups C1 and C2, and two by and from among each Ward’s voters in social groups D and E. Again, each voter would vote for one candidate by means of an X, with the two highest scorers declared elected at the end. Each Area would cover three Wards.

A proper committee system should be restored, as Eric Pickles has permitted but which ought to be required, with each committee containing an equal number of Councillors and Aldermen, and an equal number of Aldermen from each of the three categories. Committee Chairmanships and Vice-Chairmanships by similar means. The number of a local authority’s nominees to any body dealing with education (including any school’s governing body), health, transport, housing, policing or any other matter should be three or a multiple of three, with mandatory equal representation for the social groups A and B, the social groups C1 and C2, and the social groups D and E.

We need to guarantee equal numbers of AB, C1C2, and DE people on each jury and on each bench of magistrates unless the defendant exercised a statutory right to insist on an all-AB, an all-C1C2, or an all-DE jury or bench. This would involve abolishing stipendiary magistrates sitting alone, as should be done anyway. And it would be entirely compatible with restoring some sort of minimum qualification for jurors, since, contrary to what the upper middle classes tend to think, their incomes and lifestyle are not the norm, they are not the only people who pay tax, and they are not the only people who are householders.

I have long advocated the use of trade union money, not to fund New Labour, but instead, at least in part, to develop and deliver a recognised qualification for “non-graduates” with life and work experience who aspire to become MPs. If that could be done in partnership with local government, then so much the better. Certainly, central government’s withdrawal of funding from many institutions and courses provides a perfect opportunity for local government to step into the breach and reassert its historic role in tertiary education.

 

The whole idea of the EU is founded on that of an elite culture excluding the heirs of the pitmen poets and pitmen painters, the brass and silver bands, the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, the Workers’ Educational Association, and all the rest of that civilised and civilising world destroyed by the most philistine Prime Minister until Tony Blair. The EU’s institutions range from the sham-democratic to those overtly expressive of contempt for the popular will.

Anything tending to downplay Britishness in favour of any of its constituent parts always increases yet further the wealth and power of those best able to present themselves as embodying the soul of one part or another: the public schools, Oxbridge, the English Bar, and the upper echelons of the Church of England; the Scottish Bar and academocracy, which latter includes the upper echelons of the Church of Scotland; the Welsh-speaking elite; Ian Paisley or Martin Maguiness; and indeed the Irish-speaking elite within the professions in the Irish Republic. At the very least, the Parliament of the United Kingdom must routinely enact legislation across all policy areas applicable throughout the United Kingdom, as the devolution legislation presupposes.

And any erosion of the status of the monarchy would be, and is, greatly to the detriment of the working class. Whether on the Franco-American executive or the far more common ceremonial model, the office of an elected Head of State would invariably be occupied by a member of the metropolitan upper middle class, and the creation of that office would constitute that class’s supreme triumph over all others. In practice, those wishing to usurp either the residual powers or the ceremonial functions of the monarchy always come from that quarter.

Furthermore, working-class people are more likely to have family connections to those Commonwealth countries retaining the monarchy, especially to Australia and New Zealand; to Canada in, above all, the case of the Scots; and to those in the Caribbean. Whereas the partial or, potentially, total subversion of the Crown would and does express the Chiantishire and Cape Cod crowd’s closer affinity with rich and ruling-class Continental Europe, and the rich and ruling-class United States.