You may recognise the double-edged review: “Well, it started badly, tailed off a little in the middle, and the less said about the end, the better. But, apart from that, excellent.”
It was Captain Blackadder’s appraisal of Private Baldrick’s second most famous war poem – not ‘Boom, boom’, but ‘Hear the words I sing, war’s a horrid thing’ – in the final and famous ‘Goodbyeee’ episode of Blackadder Goes Forth.
But it also captures perfectly the wretched saga of the Coalition Government’s pledge to give voters the power through petition and election to recall/remove MPs and other public officials before the end of their term of office.
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The saga’s largely unlamented end was announced recently, and the less said about it probably is for the better. Still, there has to be something.
It came through David Cameron deciding that – with two incumbent Tory MPs already deselected and Culture Secretary, Maria Miller, expected to escape any significant punishment for claiming over £90,000 in allowances for a second home for her parents – it was time to kill the whole expenses-prompted recall issue by dropping the anyway ineffectual Bill from May’s Queen’s Speech.
However, MPs’ recall is really only my secondary concern here. My main moan is the Coalition’s total neglect of the ‘other public officials’ part of its recall pledge – that should by now be in place and applying to at least directly elected mayors and Police and Crime Commissioners, both of which offices would surely have proved more appealing to a suspicious electorate, had a recall provision been part of the package.
Recall, like referendums and citizens’ petitions, is an instrument of direct democracy for holding elected politicians to account. Put simply, ‘fully participatory recall’ means that the voters who elect someone to public office have the right, between scheduled elections and for any reason, to initiate and vote for their removal.
It sounds a fine principle – possibly even meriting a Blackadder ‘excellent’ – but not just a principle, for that’s essentially how it operates in, for example, around 30 American states, parts of Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and British Columbia.
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Necessarily, it generates public interest. Take last November’s recall of Mayor Deedy Slaughter (female, if you were wondering) by voters in the smallish Louisiana town of Port Allen.
The mayor had upset residents by, among other allegations, hiring her brother-in-law as chief-of-staff, attempting to fire the Chief Finance Officer without city council approval, and charging to taxpayers her Washington trip for President Obama’s Inauguration.
A recall petition was launched, and signed by well over the required one-third of registered voters; 57 per cent of the 63 per cent turnout in the ensuing election voted for recall, and the Mayor was ousted from office by the same people who had voted her in.
It’s undeniably democracy, but clearly the very idea scares the pants off many of our MPs, who, even in the wreckage of their collective expenses scandal, were never going to vote for that much of it.
But nor, more seriously, despite what some idealistic reformers imagined, was there ever any real chance of their being asked to. For, like Baldrick’s poem, our whole approach to recall started badly, in two distinct ways: one unfortunate but understandable, the other just depressing.
The unfortunate one was not taking advantage of the fact that the politicians whose accountability the recall procedure is best suited to secure are those exercising personal executive powers – like the elected mayors and Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) that were being promoted elsewhere in the Coalition Agreement.
Both these imported posts would always have been hard to sell to a disengaged and disenchanted electorate – even supposing the Government had bothered to mount serious information campaigns.
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But, judging from my own limited involvement with both issues, I feel some of people’s genuine worries about the accountability and removability of these new powerful office holders could have been mollified by the existence of credible and participatory recall mechanisms.
Given how the whole concern with recall had arisen out of the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal, it was inevitable that recall of MPs would get legislative priority. But it would not have been difficult to publicise the Government’s intention that elected mayors and PCCs would be subject to similar recall accountability.
Certainly it would not have been difficult, having opted to legislate for MPs’ recall first, to make a better fist of it. Indeed, as we’ll see, one Commons committee’s view was that it would have been preferable to have produced nothing at all. That’s how depressing it was.
Much was made of all three main parties’ 2010 manifestos supporting a right of recall; much less of the accompanying qualifications. For Labour it would apply only to MPs found guilty of financial misconduct (undefined); for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, it would be for proven ‘serious wrongdoing’ (also undefined).
From the outset, therefore, it was clear we would be offered at most ‘mixed recall’, with voters’ involvement having to be triggered by someone else defining and proving the misconduct, wrongdoing, or whatever.
And – surprise, surprise! – the ‘someone elses’ would be the accused’s fellow MPs. The intended purpose of recall – empowering voters to hold MPs to account – would be turned virtually upside down.
Public confidence in our shamed parliamentarians was to be restored not through ‘fully participatory recall’, but what at best amounted to ‘late-in-the-day participatory recall’.
As the Coalition Agreement put it, voters would be allowed “to force a by-election where an MP is found to have engaged in serious wrongdoing and having had a petition calling for a by-election signed by 10 per cent of his or her constituents.”
This unpromising start was followed by the ‘tailing off a little in the middle’, or the utterly misguided draft Bill. It started by viewing recall as an instrument of discipline rather than of democracy.
Then, without ever attempting to define ‘serious wrongdoing’, it treated it as more concerned with prison sentences than with the behaviours that really outraged ordinary voters: abuse of position, breach of parliamentary privilege, nepotism, racism, cheating, lying and indolence.
Its chief virtue was to offer a target for pre-legislative scrutiny, some of which was pleasingly robust, like that of the Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee.
“Under the Government’s proposals, constituents themselves would not be able to initiate a recall petition. The circumstances that would trigger a petition – if an MP received a custodial sentence of 12 months or less, or if the Commons resolved that there [had been] “serious wrongdoing” – are so narrow that petitions would seldom, if ever, take place.
“We are not convinced these proposals will increase public confidence in politics. Indeed, we fear that the restricted form of recall proposed could even reduce confidence by creating expectations that are not fulfilled.”
So misconceived and irredeemable was the Bill considered by some genuine reformers that they have been almost pleased to see it killed off. As would I, were it not for my concern that any prospects of proper participatory recall for elected mayors, councillors, and Police and Crime Commissioners may have been indefinitely postponed too.
* Chris Game is from the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham