Fiscal Rectitude

Fiscal Rectitude

by Keith Sutherland

A recurring criticism of my book, A People’s Parliament, is that it fails to flesh out how government ministers could be appointed without the aid of party politics (Lord Mandelson may not have been elected but, as one of the architects of New Labour, he is a consummate party-political operator.) In the book I point out that three out of five civil servants already work for government agencies headed by unelected chief executives, but Next Steps agencies like the prison service are ultimately part of the Home Office, headed by an elected minister.

So what would it mean for government ministers to be appointed purely on merit and without reference to the political process? As an example of how this might be possible one need look no further than the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. Prior to 1997, the setting of interest rates was viewed as one of the prime responsibilities of elected politicians. Monetary policy was a key instrument in the transformation of the economy during the 1980s, but the flip side has always been that many Chancellors chose to inflate their way out of their accumulated debt and to meddle with interest rates when an election was in the offing. This has always ended in tears so Gordon Brown’s decision to leave the setting of interest rates in the hands of a committee that was appointed purely on merit led to a decade of stable economic growth. The maintenance of low inflation is now accepted as an important priority right across the political spectrum and it is now inconceivable that monetary policy could be returned to elected politicians.

But if this is the case with monetary policy then why not fiscal policy? Gordon Brown used to pride himself in sticking to his “golden rule” for public borrowing – that the government’s books should balance over a single economic cycle –so why not contract out this commitment to an all-appointed Treasury “Fiscal Policy Committee” (FPC) in a similar manner to the mandate given to the Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee (MPC).

Of course Brown didn’t create an FPC because he suffers from political bi-polar disorder: while one of his personalities (Prudence) was all for fiscal rectitude, his other personality (Providence) was trying to build the New Jerusalem, and the latter project is a very expensive one. Our children and our children’s children will be paying off the mortgage, and will have little to show for Brown’s “investment” as most of it has gone on interest payments, public-sector wages, consultants, refurbishment, fancy computer systems and long-term PFI commitments.

Although the Governor of the Bank of England and the members of the MPC are appointed by the government, no-one would suggest that this is in any way political. The mandate was carefully specified and of a technical nature, so a shortlist could have been drawn up by headhunters, with the final appointment made by the appropriate parliamentary committee. Exactly the same principle could be applied to a Treasury “Fiscal Policy Committee” and its head, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The appointment of the Chancellor would be for the duration of an average economic cycle (typically a decade or so). If the books balanced over this period then the retiring Chancellor would be well rewarded, or might even renew his contract; if the books didn’t balance then he would retire under a shadow and on severely diminished means. “Successful” Chancellors might expect to have a say in the appointment of their successor, who would probably rise from the ranks of the FPC.

It might well be argued that such a model is inherently conservative and that the role of the Chancellor is akin to that of a company auditor (or finance director). This is undoubtedly the case, but bear in mind the flip side – the model constitution outlined in A People’s Parliament presupposes a legislature appointed by lot and guided by Advocates who are largely unconstrained by the need for fiscal rectitude. Every legislative proposal would be costed and referred to the FPC who would then point out the fiscal consequences. It would then be for parliament to decide its priorities (modify taxes, adjust some other area of spending etc.) It would also be the case that the decisions of the FPC would be subject to exacting scrutiny by the media and other independent bodies (the Institute for Fiscal Studies would in all likelihood assume an analogous role to the IEA Shadow Monetary Policy Committee). Removing fiscal affairs from party politics would not mean a lack of scrutiny – in fact the opposite, given Vince Cable’s recent complaint that the vast majority of members of parliament have no influence at all over government expenditure.

If this model works for the Treasury then how about other departments of state? The employment contract for an education minister might uncontroversially stipulate improvement targets for numeracy/literacy and GCSE and A-level grades (leaving it to the minister to decide how best to achieve these targets, without being constrained by dogma or party prejudice). Similar principles would apply to the Department of Health. Energy secretaries would be contractually required to ensure long-term interrupted supply and price stability, and this requirement could easily be operationalised. Given the emerging consensus on anthropocentric global warming, environment secretaries might well be charged with medium-and long-term carbon emission targets.

Of course this is where it all starts to get interesting, as the remit of the energy secretary and the environment secretary would be diametrically opposed. Reduced carbon emissions will lead to higher energy costs and heavy industry decamping to a country that is less concerned about global warming. But at least the debate would be honest – the two ministries could slug it out in public without the need to maintain the appearance of cabinet unity. The ultimate decision (do you want cheap electricity and budget foreign holidays or do you want to reduce global warming?) would be referred back to parliament, without mendacious politicians claiming that you can have your cake and eat it.

In all the resulting choices and conflict (which we usually refer to as “politics”), the Treasury would assume a central role in preserving the equilibrium of taxation and spending over the economic cycle. For this reason the Chancellor of the Exchequer would be the default chair of inter-departmental meetings. Indeed the first “prime” minister was Robert Walpole, who assumed the role of First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1721. The two roles diverged largely because the “prime” minister’s principal job was winning elections on behalf of the political party that sponsoered him. For, as Denis Healey put it, Labour [or any other] governments can’t abolish the inconvenient laws of arithmetic, hence the need for the Chancellor to disappear back into the shadows and to be replaced by a charismatic front man with an engaging smile (as in the Blair-Brown partnership).

In the post-party-political age there will be no further need for this sort of duplicity. Needless to say the appointment of government ministers by the apolitical mechanisms outlined in this paper presupposes a consensus on fundamental matters such as the maintenance of low inflation, fiscal responsibility, an important role for the private sector etc. It would not work in an era of clear ideological disagreements or rigid social stratification.

But given the claims of New Labour to be the party of business (“seriously relaxed” about wealth) and the Conservatives to be the progressive party committed to social justice it would appear that politics has now entered a truly postmodern period of transient and shifting identities in which party identities no longer play any meaningful role. This provides an ideal opportunity to engage with the proposals outlined in A People’s Parliament, but I’m not holding my breath as the turkeys are unlikely to be voting for Christmas any time soon. All the talk of fundamental reform in the wake of the expenses crisis seems to have led to nothing of substance (except the implicit acknowledgement that elected MPs are not to be trusted with regulating their own petty cash claims, let alone running the country). How long we are prepared to put up with such a dysfunctional system -- whereby the electorate is a willing accomplice in its own deception -- remains to be seen. One can only hope that serious structural change comes about before the more likely alternative -- the call for the strong leader with the remit to clean up the system.

Three Concepts of Representation
By Keith Sutherland

The parliamentary expenses scandal has led some people to conclude that our MPs are a bunch of petty criminals. But what about their much larger 'crime' – standing by while their colleagues in government squandered billions of pounds of our children’s money on dodgy PFI loans, Mesopotamian adventures and bailing out profligate bankers? Unfortunately the sums of money involved are so huge as to be unimaginable, but we can all relate to the price of a bath plug or a plasma TV.

The privileging of the trivial is not just a modern phenomenon, here’s an excerpt from Sidney Low’s (1904) Government of England:

A minister may have cost the country thousands of lives and millions of pounds, but his defeat may eventually be brought about because his colleagues have decided – perhaps even in opposition to his own wishes – to put an unpopular tax on bread or beer.

Maybe it’s all been a long time coming and the expenses scandal was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Parliamentary government requires that we trust, respect and defer to our representatives and we no longer live in a deferential age. But before coming up with a package of knee-jerk reforms we really need to unpack the concept of ‘representation’ so that we better understand the problem.

I would like to outline three concepts of representation:

1. deliberative representation
2. delegate representation
3. descriptive representation

and argue that, over time, we have moved from 1) to 2) and are now entering 3), the age of descriptive representation.

Deliberative Representation

Edmund Burke defined parliament as ‘the deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole’. To understand Burke’s view we need to go back to parliament's medieval origins:

The origins of Parliament go back to the 12th century, when King’s councils were held involving barons and archbishops. They discussed politics and were involved in taxation and judgments. Over time, these councils took a more formal role and saw knights representing each county. This was the beginning of a Commons element in Parliament. The word ‘Parliament’ was used to describe these meetings by the early 13th century. www.parliament.uk/about/history/institution.cfm

Note the aristocratic provenance of the body that was set up to deliberate with the king and his ministers – even the ‘Commons’ were represented by knights of the shires.

Deliberative representation is defined by Edmund Burke in his 1774 Speech to the Electors of Bristol:

Authoritative instructions, mandates issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote and to argue for . . . these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land and which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our constitution.

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole.

Burke is here suggesting that MPs are a cut above the rest of us, in that they are capable of pursuing the common good through disinterested debate. Needless to say the independence of mind that such noble creatures possessed was underwritten by independence of means and it would not have occurred to Burke that he and his colleagues were simply representing the interests of a privileged social class (although Burke was by no means a wealthy man).

Machine Politics and Delegate Representation

Whether or not Burke’s vision of parliament as a vehicle for government by conversation bore any resemblance to eighteenth-century practice, it did not survive the social and intellectual upheavals of the late nineteenth century. The organised mass political party was a direct result of the Second Reform Act (1867) which dramatically increased the size of the urban electorate. This marked the end of parliament as a deliberative assembly, as MPs had to align themselves with one or other of the two major parties in order to get elected; and their independence was drastically reduced. It remained possible to cross the floor of the Commons without committing political suicide (Churchill being the obvious example), but from then on MPs simply transferred their allegiance from one corporate body to another.

Although the first example of ‘machine’ politics – where the honourable members were told by the whips that they owed their seats purely to the colour of the rosette pinned to their lapel – is usually taken to be Attlee’s 1945 administration, a liberal traditionalist observed it as early on as Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham caucus during the 1880s:

a great revolution had been suddenly and silently wrought . . . the control of the Liberal party had passed out of the hands of its old leaders into those of the men who managed the new ‘machine’.

To Disraeli the political party represented ‘organised opinion’ – a bit rich coming from him of all people, as Disraeli was an opportunist, who changed his opinions along with changes in the weather. In any event he was wrong – adversarial politics long pre-dated the age of ideology. Marx was closer to the mark when he noted that party ideology merely reflected the material interests of the social class that the party represented. Both analyses pointed to delegate representation, the difference being that when ideology is emphasised then the MP is a delegate from the party to the electorate; when the representation of interests is emphasised then the MP is a delegate of the electorate to the legislature. But it matters little whether one privileges ideology or material infrastructure, the salient point being that Burke’s notion of Parliament as a deliberative assembly ‘of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole’ had been banished to Platonic heaven.

If Marxian sociology provides the best tool for understanding the era of delegate representation it also helps us to understand the breakdown that it has been undergoing over the last two decades. Delegate representation is usually a binary creature – Liberal/Tory; Socialist/Capitalist; Labour/Conservative etc. No doubt this was a reflection of the class structure, as voting behaviour used to be inherited along with the family silver (or lack therof).

But these simple binaries all started to fall apart when the Berlin Wall collapsed. Fukuyama proclaimed the end of ideology and prime minister John Major informed us that we now inhabit a classless society. Major’s observation prompted his successor Tony Blair’s hubristic claim that New Labour aspired to the political representation of the entire British people.

Such a proposition might make sense in a one-party state, but what on earth could it mean in a liberal democracy? The concept of liberal democracy itself, like so many lexical compounds, is oxymoronic. Liberalism is essentially a doctrine of individual choice; however, as demonstrated by public choice theorist Kenneth Arrow as early as 1951, there is no general, acceptable way to aggregate individual preferences at the level of the collective demos. This is particularly problematic in our ‘post-ideological’ and increasingly classless society when attitudes on social issues no longer have any significant correlation with attitudes on economic issues. In such an atomized age political labels tend increasingly to represent the persona of the party leader, making it impossible for voters to make sensible choices based on policy issues. Political psychologists have discovered that the face shape, height, accent or haircut of the party leader is more likely to lead to failure or success in the ballot box.

Descriptive Representation

This is part and parcel of an overall shift from delegate to descriptive representation as we now expect our representatives to be more like us (rather than just representing our views and/or material interests). Descriptive representation requires that the representative ‘mirror’ his constituents. In the era of delegate representation, it was less important who the delegate was, so long as he voted in the right way. Whereas previously economic, educational, occupational and social class factors might have mattered, it is now considered necessary to include gender equality (via all-female candidate lists) and increased representation for racial minority groups. A parliament with a 50-50 gender balance and racial minority MPs proportionate to the overall population is now be felt to be more representative than one comprised of largely white males.

However this modern ‘descriptive’ form of representation is better achieved by sampling techniques than by the election of parliamentary representatives. Just as delegate politics could be achieved by a machine (or by driving a herd of sheep through the division lobbies), descriptive representation is best achieved by random selection. Any reasonably-sized sample would automatically achieve the balance of gender and ethnicity and would also, incidentally, achieve a much better representation of the occupational diversity of the nation. In the words of two advocates of random selection for the US Congress:

About a quarter of the body would be blue-collar workers, some of them accustomed to the rigors of debate in community meetings and union halls. You might try to pick out, scattered around the chamber, the ten percent who had been unemployed when their number came up: laid-off laborers, seamstresses, cooks, teamsters, seamen, secretaries, clerks. You might find it easier to spot the two doctors or dentists, the one school administrator, the two accountants, and the one real estate agent whom chance would bring to the body most years. There would also be several dozen managers and administrators dressed in upper-middle-class style. Few would be expensively groomed. Most would have the kind of faces you see in jury boxes. (Callenbach and Phillips, 2008)

The only way to achieve US founding father John Adams’ ideal for a legislative assembly as ‘an exact portrait of the population in miniature’ is via random selection by lot (as is the case with jury trials). Preference elections used to return ‘notables’ (including, of course, Mr Adams and his friends) rather than seamstresses and clerks. Nowadays elections return mostly lawyers, policy wonks and party activists with Oxbridge PPEs. No amount of tinkering with the electoral system will fulfil the goal of descriptive representation.

The jury analogy is an important one, for randomly-selected trial jurers are not expected to have legal expertise or oratorical skills. Their job is simply to listen to the arguments of competing advocates and then vote on the outcome.

If this works in jury trials then why not the High Court of Parliament? Pursuing the legal analogy there would be a need for Advocates for and against the parliamentary bill that was being ‘tried’. Given that the only chamber of our existing parliament that conducts intelligent debates is the House of Lords, then the Lords would be a useful starting point for a chamber of Advocates. Note: as in a jury trial, the Advocates would debate, but only the randomly-selected jury of the Commons would vote on the outcome.

The Separation of Powers

The other prerequisite for a parliamentary system based on descriptive representation would be the formal separation of executive and legislative powers (as is, nominally, the case in the US). Socrates was right to point out that electing most of the magistrates of state ‘by beans’ was as foolish as using the lot to choose a pilot, an architect or a flute-player. If this was true for a small Greek city-state then how much more for the government of a complex twenty-first-century state?

The ‘fused’ nature of the British constitution – whereby the executive is formed out of the largest party in parliament – was an unintended consequence of the Act of Settlement, which ensured that the Royal succession would go to a foreign prince with a poor grasp of the English language and little interest in the government of his new principality. The original Act stipulated that no ‘placeman of the Crown’ should sit in parliament, but this was overturned when the Whig group in parliament seized control of the government.

But there is no reason why this act of happenstance should retain hallowed status, especially in the post-ideological age when citizens view the task of government as ensuring that the trains run on time rather than constructing the New Jerusalem. Government ministers should be appointed on merit alone and held to account by the new bicameral parliament of Advocates and randomly-selected Commons.

The Representation of Interests

Advocates of the sort of descriptive representation that can be furnished by citizens’ juries tend to assume that this is quite sufficient. But Hannah Pitkin famously pointed out the fundamental difference between descriptive representation and the representation of interests. Citizen juries could vote on the passage of legislation but who should propose the bills? Most bills would, in practice, be initiated by government ministers – even Rousseau and other classical advocates of direct democracy restricted the introduction of legislative proposals to the magistracy. But such a conservative arrangement would generate howls of outrage in a post-Marxian world of conflicting interests. The binary interests that characterised the age of delegate representation may have splintered into a thousand flowers in our postmodern multicultural society, nevertheless it would take a braver man than the present author to argue that we have returned to the Burkian world of ‘one interest, that of the whole’.

The only way of providing for the representation of competing interests is via preference elections, so the political party (or coalition of parties) that secured the most votes would be able to introduce legislative proposals based on manifesto commitments. But all parliamentary bills would still need to win the arguments and secure the assent of the randomly-selected Commons. No longer would it be possible for the largest political party to steamroller a bill through parliament just because it was hidden in a manifesto which nobody bothered to read.

The full details of this constitutional blueprint are contained in my book A People’s Parliament www.imprint-academic.com/pp

Time For Some Democracy!

by Ivo Mosley

Not many people know that what we call ‘democracy’ was regarded as anything but democratic for most of history. Before 1800, electoral representation was reckoned to be an aristocratic, or oligarchic, form of government; in other words, it was thought to be directly opposed to democracy. This was the accepted opinion from Plato and Aristotle right through to Locke, Rousseau and Madison.

In other words, if - like most people - you feel our system isn’t very democratic, you have two and a half thousand years of tradition on your side.

So: before 1800, what did the word ‘democracy’ mean? It meant that political assemblies and political officials were chosen by lot from among citizens, much as juries are chosen today. Government in a democracy consisted of citizens taken out of their everyday lives for fixed periods to do their duty - just like jury service, except that they decided on law and policy too.

The difference between democracy and electoral representation is huge. Electoral representation brings with it professional politicians and political parties, whose interests and objectives are bound to be partial. Democracy meant that government was conducted directly by the people in their common interests.

This suggests a question: How did it happen that around 1800 people began to think that electoral representation was a form of democracy, when for two thousand years everyone had been thinking it was the opposite? Again, it’s a simple story, but so little-known that it’s almost a secret history.

My story begins with the revolutionaries who liberated the United States from British rule: Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton and Jefferson to name the most prominent. Having won the war of independence, they designed a self-consciously elitist system of government. This government, incidentally, effectively entrusted power to themselves; four of those five names became president and the fifth was killed in a duel.

The Founding Fathers made no bones about it: they did not think ordinary people should be given power. They were very rude about democracy - which, like everyone else, they understood to mean assemblies chosen by lot.

Here are some samples from their published writings:

Madison (1787):
‘Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention… and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.’

Hamilton (1787):
‘The ancient democracies, in which the people themselves deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very nature was tyranny.’

John Adams (1814):
‘Democracy wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.’

Washington (1798) (with a distinct lack of political correctness):
‘you could as soon scrub a blackamoor white as change the principles of a profest democrat; and that he will leave nothing unattempted to overturn the government of this country’.

Jefferson (1816):
thought democracy was ‘impracticable beyond the limits of a town.’

Benjamin Franklin is credited - perhaps wrongly, though it’s not out of character - with the sentence: ‘Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what’s for dinner.’

The system the founding fathers wanted was republican. In Jefferson’s words, power would be entrusted to a ‘natural aristocracy’ of the most talented and virtuous, replacing the old ‘artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth’. Elections would give people the right to choose who those ‘natural aristocrats’ should be. In Madison’s words, public opinion would be ‘refined and enlarged’ by passing it ‘through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country.’

The constitution was accepted by a majority of voters in the United States as the best that could be thought of at the time. To the disappointment of many, however, within ten years of the constitution being ratified, politics was dominated not so much by superior individuals as by strong political parties, representing not the shared interests of citizens but powerful embedded interests. The fault lines were already apparent that would result in the Civil War: one party represented the industrial North, the other represented the agricultural and slave-owning South.

The significant crisis during which ‘democracy’ changed from being a dirty word to a badge worn with pride came after the 1800 presidential election. The electoral college was in deadlock over who would be the next president. Rival state militias (Virginia and Pennsylvania vs Massachusetts) were ready to march on Washington to take control of the government for the party they supported. Jefferson, the Republican candidate, had the largest share of the popular vote (counting, ironically, slaves voted for by their masters at three-fifths of a vote each). His supporters claimed that the will of the people should prevail. Jefferson became president, and civil war was averted.

It had become apparent that there was a strong, potentially overwhelming demand among Americans for ‘democracy’ not as a political system, but as a feeling - that ‘the people’ would be in charge of their own destiny. Only the most educated individuals were aware that democracy had a tradition of its own in direct opposition to electoral representation. The majority of people looked to elections to satisfy their need for democracy.

Jefferson referred to his victory as ‘the revolution of 1800’. In his words, ‘the nation declared its will by dismissing functionaries of one principle and electing those of another’. Jefferson’s party changed its name from ‘Republican’ to ‘Democratic-Republican’. A new enthusiasm for ‘democracy’ swept the nation. In 1809 Elias Smith proclaimed, ‘My friends, let us never be ashamed of democracy!’

In this way, the re-invention of electoral representation as a form of democracy took place not in theory, but in the sphere of practical politics. For the few who held real power, it was a windfall: they could carry on dominating the political scene by joining the pretence that politics was democratic - the exact opposite of what they understood it to be. In the words of historian Joanne Freeman, ‘The period’s cultural shift from deference to democracy’ occurred as ‘politicians adjusted their assumptions and expectations to the situation in hand, struggling to accommodate their ideals and their actions.’ Or as Burckhardt put in 1867: ‘The experience of revolution was that public opinion forms and transforms the world. The traditional powers, too weak to prevent it, began making deals with individual currents in the stream of public opinion.’

And that, as Rudyard Kipling might say, is how democracy came to mean its opposite: as if by shaving a dog and feeding it oats, you could believe it was a horse.

This new and powerful reality has never been justfied in theory, for one simple reason: it is impossible. To argue that rule by elected party officials is a form of democracy, when there is a perfectly good democracy of participation at hand, is a non-starter. The political historian Bernard Manin writes that the best anyone has done is to summon up the old aristocratic theory of consent, and maintain that by voting every few years the people signifies its consent to be so governed.

True democracy, of course, needs no such theory: citizens are rulers one day, and ruled over by their fellow-citizens the next.

To all this, you might say - so what? - Today, when we say democracy we mean electoral representation - the history is irrelevant. But I think it is important to recover the old way of thinking, and to recognise that electoral representation is essentially anti-democratic. For two reasons:

Firstly, it helps us understand the world we live in today. It explains how power is unaccountable. It explains how elected governments in Africa and Europe have instituted programs of genocide. It explains why western governments pursue policies that are destroying the planet. It explains how governments can destroy home industries and give bankers free rein to bankrupt their nations. It explains why ‘welfare’ is deflected away from the truly needy towards those who might vote. We can understand why Hamas may lob rockets into Israel in the name of citizens who would never, if asked, give their consent. We can understand why Israel, most of whose citizens are cosmopolitan and humane, is ruled by religious and racial extremists. In other words, it explains how things get transformed into the opposite of what they should be.

But secondly, it gives us hope for the future. Democracy is an untried adventure. How many people in Britain know that democracy worked in a variety of ways and at different levels, often alongside electoral representation, in Athens, in Florence and in Venice? Or that for four hundred years it worked in local government in our own Great Yarmouth.

For two centuries we have treated government as a problem to be solved by a single formula: majority vote. All other creative possibilities were discarded.

Oligarchy and Oncocracy

Many people among our elite today agree with the founding fathers that real democracy would be a bad idea. In moments of honesty they say: ordinary people are stupid, ill-educated and incompetent: to put them in government is the worst idea in the world. And many citizens would rather do without the onerous burden of true democracy, of having to contribute to the political debate responsibly and in person. So we might say true democracy is an unpopular non-starter. But I would argue it is time we ordinary people take responsibility and participate. Our oligarchies have led us to where the opportunities for global self-destruction are so multifarious, it will be a miracle if we escape them all.


Professional politicians, as Plato said and many have repeated, make the worst rulers, because their ambition and lust for power lead us all into trouble. Ordinary people, however, are on balance guided by morality, not by ambition and power.

If we accept that we in the West live not in democracies but in oligarchies, the question arises, ‘What is the nature of these oligarchies?’

An oligarchy is defined as ‘the few who have power over the many.’ So many people have power over us now, this term seems rather stretched.

Until about thirty years ago, our oligarchy consisted of competing factions; there were old landed and agricultural interests, industrial interests, and the power-base of organised socialism: even the church and the professions held a certain sway. When several powers compete with each other, each acts to restrain the power of the others; furthermore, each power has to behave with a modicum of good behaviour in order to retain public approval. But when one power comes out on top, that is the death knoll for freedom.

What makes the power of our oligarchy so alarming today is that most of these competing interests have dropped out. We are left with globalised corporate capitalism and with government acting as its poodle, co-conspirator and apologist. As we witnessed recently on television, these people are not devils; rather, they inhabit a strange culture of self-delusion. Like a pre-historic tribe who believes that the sun only rises every day because they ask it to, these oligarchs believe that without them the rest of us would flounder.

Membership of the new oligarchy is tenuous: you must conform and play by the rules, or you are out. And this is true both of the corporate world and of politics.

The power of corporations and governments has immense and varied implications for our freedom. Daily encroachments of our freedoms are a major theme of this conference. For instance, embedded in a largely benign bill called the ‘Coroners’ Bill’ there is a clause designed to ensure that if the government kills someone it will be able to conduct its own inquest in secret: a clause so odious to democracy, freedom, and all other civilized virtues it is hard to contemplate.

But there is another, less noticed freedom which has been the lifeblood of the human species, and that is moral freedom: the freedom, in Acton’s words, to act according to the dictates of conscience, against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.

The most valuable freedom to those who called themselves ‘democrats’ for two thousand years was the freedom to be a politically involved citizen and exercise free moral agency in that capacity. They had a single word for that - ‘politikos’. We don’t have a word for it because it is unfamiliar to us. Citizens exercising free moral agency inside politics are a rarity. If you go into politics, you join a party. No point complaining that politicians are duplicitous and obfuscatory; to stay in politics you must trim your conscience to the demands of the party.

Moral freedom is rather unglamorous to citizens conditioned as we are today, so I’ll quote an authority who is usually dug up and dusted off in the cause of selfishness: Charles Darwin. According to Darwin, the moral sense - which he also calls conscience or duty - is the most important quality in the survival and evolution of the human species. When Darwin came to consider human beings in relation to Natural Selection, he wrote that ‘of all the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.’

Moral freedom is the ability to choose for ourselves what we believe is right. To what extent have corporations and governments limited this freedom?

Corporations are legally bound by their obligation to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. In other words, they are obliged to ignore morality. In reality they go further, avoiding legal obligations too by such practices such as ‘creative accountancy’. They also seek to have laws made in their favour - in other words, to corrupt law itself by making it an interested party to their ambitions. In this way, moral agency has retreated in the great public endeavour of the workplace. It was frequently said in Victorian times, while the corporation was bit-by-bit achieving its legal entity, ‘a corporation has neither body to imprison nor soul to damn.’

As for governments, they undertake to transform our lives for the better, and to this end they adopt more power. The corollary of power is always degradation: power, as Burckhardt observed, is insatiable. Governments now control areas that were previously a matter for society. There are still many who believe the state can make a heaven-on-earth - in spite of its achievements in the opposite direction.

Government is imposed upon us willy-nilly and lives off us. In that sense it is parasitical. But by taking over health, education, welfare, responsibility for business, and a host of other functions that used to be a matter for society, government has become something worse. It has invaded the organs of society, swelling them into huge state apparatuses and making it harder and harder for professionals to carry out their duties. Guidelines, constant supervision, form-filling, quota- and target-meeting etcetera, mean that administrators, consultants and state employees make good livings while people’s needs are not met. In this way, government has become not a parasite but a cancer. It might be said we live in an oncocracy, if that were not such an unlikely word.

We citizens of this oncocracy have lived for many years on the drip feed of industrial mass-production and on exploitation of poorer countries. It seems now that perhaps the chickens are coming home to roost.

What should we do? John Locke, that quintessentially respectable philosopher, wrote the following:

Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty, will be born by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going; it is not to be wondered, that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavour to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected; and without which, ancient names, and specious forms, are so far from being better, that they are much worse, than the state of nature, or pure anarchy; the inconveniences being all as great and as near, but the remedy farther off and more difficult.

Democracy and freedom are candles in our political darkness. If we recover the true meanings of these words, we can begin to recover their practice. True, participatory democracy is possible at all levels. The creative possibilities of democracy in the modern world are as various as the informed imagination can suggest. It is not my purpose here to suggest a political program - God forbid, we have had enough of those! - but to plea that an awareness of true democracy, and a debate about its inclusion, become part of the political conversation.

Athenian Democracy on the BBC World Service

The MPs expenses crisis is probably not the most pressing reason for the introduction of sortition into the political process, nevertheless a proposal for Athenian-style democracy was a major feature on the BBC World Service weekly Politics UK programme:

Power to the people promise the political classes, in response to public anger over their expenses. But do they mean it? And who wants to be a politician now? Are celebrities really the answer to Westminster's troubles? Reform is in the air and perhaps the route back to respectability in politics could lie as far back as ancient Greece. Politics UK is presented by Norman Smith.

Listen on the BBC I player at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003545b