The Wardman Wire

The Wardman Wire has seen some very good articles over the past week on the subject of MPs and the money they claim, both as salary and expenses. It’s not my intention to weigh in on that debate, but use the opportunity to examine the role of MPs in our democracy.

Why do we have MPs? What is their point?

Britain - and all of the democratic world - uses the representative form of democracy. We elect representatives, in our case Members of Parliament (MPs), to represent us on the national level. They are supposed to be our “voices” and to work out the best things to do and laws to pass for us.

However, they are not delegates, like Edmund Burke pointed out. They are not elected to repeat the findings of polls and the like verbatim. They are elected to use their brains. We expect them to look deeper into the issues and examine them closely and make decisions from the basis of that. We have them to do that because we the people don’t have the time or inclination to do so. And certainly not for every little thing. They are charged with the responsibility of acting in the interests of the people and given the power to do this - between elections, when the power is returned to the people for a short period while they decide on the next set of representatives.

But why not just vote of things ourselves?

Democracy isn’t, of course, necessarily reliant in principle of the use of representatives. Direct democracy, sometimes referred to as “pure democracy” is the idea that we the people should vote directly on everything. This simply does not exist in the real world on a national level [Switzerland is the closest, but still a long way off], however, due to the simple practical difficulties impossibilities of making it work.

It is possible to work when there are tiny electorates, such as Rousseau’s idea of a town meeting under a tree to discuss policies, but when an electorate increases beyond a number able to meet together easily, this becomes impractical. Until technology advances enough to make e-voting a real possibility, direct democracy is nothing more than a pipe-dream.

Corruption in Parliament

One downside of representative democracy is that it can far too easily lead to corruption. This is something which cannot be “solved” no matter what is done. No amount of checks, restrictions etc can ever make corruption impossible. All it can possibly do is make it hard and possibly just not worth it. Despite the recent furore in the papers, the Palace of Westminster is pretty corruption free - certainly in comparison with most other countries.

Corruption by a few doesn’t mean that representative democracy is bad or that all, or many, MPs have their snouts in the trough. Almost all will go into parliament intending to do good by the country and constituency that has deemed to elect them.

Wrapping Up

All in all, MPs represent us rather well. And despite the problems that we all have with individuals or groups of MPs, they do rather a good job. Whilst they do, and inevitably have to, keep a close eye on the polls, at least the two main parties don’t jump on bandwagons just because and don’t try to act like delegates but the representatives that they are. And even the Lib Dems have started doing so less after ditching Charles Kennedy.

Whilst MPs are not essential to democracy as a theory, they are as a practice. No citizen can ever have enough time to read deeply into every issue that comes up. Indeed, many [or even most] MPs probably don’t either. But they can get know enough to make [hopefully] intelligent choices. And without MPs, we would be relying on the voice and decision-making abilities of everyone, almost all of whom will not have had the times or inclination to read up on it.