Dennis Skinner - thought to be sceptical about consensus politics. (Pic: Riana Dzasta)

It’s an interesting twist to the question I’ve been asking, on and off, over the past few weeks: What kind of representatives do we want?

So far, the options have included jurors, rogues and public paragons of virtue. But over on Spiked Online, Brendan O’Neill suggests a somewhat alarming possibility: Maybe we need people who are locked in a partisan struggle – people who will die in a ditch to defend the interests of a social class or ideological clique. Maybe we need (shock … horror) politicians to represent us?

In short, he suggests that the whole expenses scandal is the product of a regrettable retreat from politics – a move to make Parliament meet the petty demands of it’s rivals, and a refusal to prioritise and accommodate political conflict:

“New Labour has discovered that transparency begets, not trust, but further suspicion – the more politicians make their personal purity into their major selling point, and the more they imply that parliament is a potentially corrupt and sleazy place, the more they invite scrutiny of their every foible and Kit Kat purchase.”

He goes on…

“Between 1997 and 2001, the Commons’ Modernisation Committee – also known, Orwellian-style, as ModComm – published numerous substantive reports. Only two of them proposed strengthening democratic debate in the Commons; the rest proposed making it more ‘efficient’. One change, which ‘further limited parliamentary scrutiny’, was the introduction of ‘programming motions’, which effectively brought the guillotine down on debates about new legislation in the interests of ‘saving time.”

The whole article is worth a read, begging the question: Do we really want our laws to be made by someone whose prime concern is to demonstrate that they’ve come up with a cost-effective means of arriving at legislative decisions? Surely O’Neill is right to argue that MPs expenses will not be the end of the story, and that some more trivial aspect of the way politics is conducted will take over where the Daily Telegraph‘s revelations leave off?

And do we want to see more political cut-and-thrust in public life? While the conventional wisdom is that partisan politics ‘turns people off’, is it the case that a tooth-and-nail system of adversarial politics is what we really need to get democracy working again? Do we need more politicians like Enoch Powell, Dennis Skinner, Mrs Thatcher, Tony Benn and Barbara Castle?

Ding Dong! An argument can draw crowds. But can it solve anything?

Here’s a good post from an Australian blogger on the question: Is adversarial politics damaging to our democracy? (It’s actually an update on a previous post with that title). Here the adversarialism is opposed by a more attractive ‘deliberative’ model of the kind advocated here. The flipside of this argument is put very well by Peter Levine here:

“As I told the Christian Science Monitor in 2006, “Polarization tends to be a mobilizing factor in getting out the vote.” At CIRCLE, we helped to organize randomized experiments of voter outreach with the goal that the parties would learn new techniques and compete more effectively for our target population (youth). I believe we and our colleagues had some influence on the parties and thereby helped boost turnout. We also funded a study that found that parties were under-investing in their young members. Again, our goal was to persuade them to become more effective.”

There is, of course, the adversarial politics of Parliament and the media that we are all familiar with. These arguments are fairly well played out, though they are always worth revisiting. The obvious conclusion, for me is a somewhat muddy preference for a bit-of-both.

However, there is the often-overlooked challenge of ‘adversarial legalism’ towards a supposedly ‘elite-dominated’ form of representative democracy in which various minority groups seek to take a role in the political process using courts to secure rights that protect individuals and minorities.

The difference between the UK and the US is noticeable in this respect – in the past, if you want to get on in the lobbying industry in the UK, a good address book, a record in student politics, a spell as a Westminster bag-carrier and – ideally – a period as a ministerial special adviser were often the key requisites.

In the US, a legal background has always been much more useful.

However, this has changed somewhat in recent years in the UK with an increase in the degree to which independence has been preferred over the traditional ministerial discretionary powers that used to dominate public life (Sir Humphrey permitting, of course….). In the UK, now, the Westminster background is beginning to be less useful than a spell running an NGO or a charity, peppered with periods at a management consultancy, a regulator of some kind, or a period working as a civil servant.

Anyway, here are – for me – the big questions: How far is this preference for independence in intitutions that have some governance roles, combined with a demand for greater transparency from politicans (to counteract the discretion that they have often enjoyed in the past)anti-political? And is anti-political the same as anti-democratic?

Is the preference for independence in control of interest rates, the regulation of industry, and even the regulation of politics (by everyone from The Standards Board for England to the Sergeant-at-Arms in Westminster) a threat to representative democracy – or a safety net for it? And does the neutrality of regulated news organisations also provide an unflattering contrast to elected and partisan politicians?

Are these phenomena ones that have been invented to postpone a collapse in the perceived legitimacy of politicians? Or are they becoming every bit the rival to elected representatives in the UK to the lawyered-up pressure groups that dominate so much of US politics?

This appears to me to be a very important question – and one that was picked up in a recent review of the year by Guardian leader-writer Julian Glover here (you will need to scroll down to find it). My prejudices are very much in favour of politicians being able to exercise some discretion and being required to answer for it at election time.

What are your prejudices in this regard?

Update: Here’s Kevin Harris on UK government guidelines on Meaningful Social Interaction (MSI!). To my mind, the question of how civil engagement between the non-elected should be conducted is a no-brainer. Adversarial conversations in this area are rarely worth eavesdropping upon if you are an elected representative.