Marching with Ghosts

This year marks the bicentennial of the Peterloo Massacre. On Monday August 16th, 1819, a crowd of over 60,000 people gathered peacefully at St. Peters Field in Manchester to hear speeches in favour of parliamentary reform. They gathered to demand fairer representation in parliament for the industrial North and the extension of the vote to more working-class men. The peaceful protest turned to horror when the 15th Hussars Cavalry were ordered to disperse the crowd. What followed was a barbaric cavalry charge on unarmed civilians, resulting in 18 deaths and over 400 injuries, amongst the dead was two-year-old William Fildes, who was knocked from his mother's arms and trampled by oncoming horses. The tragic day was dubbed ‘Peterloo’ in mock reference to the Battle of Waterloo, which was fought five years earlier. Peterloo was to become the catalyst for political reform in the early 19th century. It paved the way for the Great Reform Act of 1832, which heralded the partial extension of the vote, the creation of new MPs to represent the booming—yet neglected—industrial Northern towns and cities and laid the foundations upon which a century of struggle for democracy, fair votes and universal suffrage could be fought.

For Manchester—a city with a long memory and a radical heart—Peterloo holds a special significance. The events at St. Peters Field set in motion a sequence of events which saw the city of Manchester gain its first voices in Parliament since the aftermath of the English Civil War and for everyone from John Bright to Emmeline Pankhurst and all who have followed them, the ghosts of Peterloo inspired generations of political reformers to carry on the struggle for fairer votes.

The event will be marked by a commemorative ‘March for Democracy’ event, organised by Make Votes Matter, on Sunday 18th August. This event is an important opportunity to commemorate a pivotal moment in our nations’ history, but it should not simply be treated as a march of remembrance. In Britain today, power is still overly concentrated in the South East, we still have an unelected House of Lords and every election time, millions of votes still go to waste because of an outdated and unrepresentative electoral system. 200 years on from Peterloo, Britain is still a democracy in progress.

The core of the problem is that British politics simply doesn’t reflect the views we express at election time. We operate under a ‘First Past the Post’ electoral system. This means that when we vote for our local MPs, the candidate with the highest number of votes wins the seat. Every vote cast for every other candidate or party is therefore discounted. This leads to huge differences between the percentage of votes a party receives in an election and the percentage of seats they win as a result. Take Scotland for example. In 2015 the Scottish National Party received half of the total number of votes cast in Scotland, yet they took 56 out of the 59 Scottish seats, leaving the remaining 50 percent of Scottish voters to be represented by just three MPs (one each for Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives). That is demonstrably unfair.

Clearer yet, look at the Green Party, whose one million plus votes in 2015 was only good enough for one seat in Westminster. Contrast that with the average of 33,000 votes it took to elect one Conservative MP in the same election.

If you still aren’t convinced look at UKIP who took just under four million votes and gained just a single MP. There are countless examples of similar outrages from every General Election fought since 1950. Our voting system is not fit for modern, multi-party politics. But it needn’t be this way.

By shifting to a proportional voting system—one where the percentage of votes cast for a party represents the percentage of seats awarded—we can deliver election results which fairly reflect the views of the nation. Proportional Representation is widely used in democracies across the world, including countries such as Australia, Ireland, Germany, Holland, Italy, Sweden, Spain and many more besides. These countries benefit from truly representative, multi-party politics. Opponents of electoral reform will say that proportional systems fail to deliver decisive results, often resulting coalition governments or more complex ‘confidence and supply’ arrangements, but its worth remembering that our own system has failed to deliver single party majority government at two out of the last three General Elections. Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish voters are already used to using proportional systems to elect their respective local and devolved Governments, the next step is to expand into English local elections, paving the way for UK wide elections to follow. There are more viable options for British voters at the ballot box than ever before, we should encourage plurality and compromise in our politics and we should call for a voting system which encourages us to vote positively—for the party or person we most want to represent us—rather than negatively, as is so often the case in FPTP elections, for the candidate we think has the best chance of keeping our least favourites out of office.

A core tenant of any democracy is the idea that those who make the laws should be freely elected and readily accountable. Yet Britain is one of only two countries in the world—the other being Lesotho—with an upper parliamentary chamber which is entirely unelected and which instead, selects it members based on party political cronyism and birth right. The House of Lords is an institution which offers jobs for life, it is an institution that purports to serve the entire of the United Kingdom yet draws most of its members from London and the South East and it is an institution which has no democratic mandate whatsoever. Yet the House of Lords has considerable influence, it can initiate, shape and block legislation. In these post Brexit times there is often much said in anger about democracy and the will of the people, how can it be that this relic of an institution remains at the heart of our Government?

Not only should the party-political makeup of House of Lords be elected but terms of service should be capped at 10 or perhaps 15 years, ending the jobs for life culture of the upper chamber. A fixed percentage of cross bench—or non-party-political—members should be agreed and those members should be appointed by a politically balanced committee from 'pools of excellence' within key fields such as the emergency services, business, civil servants, and teachers. Modern Britain should be reflected by slimming down the number of appointed bishops which currently stands at 28, a fair legislature should represent all religions, or it should represent none.

Restoring faith in politics will require more than just changing the way we elect councillors, MPs, and peers. We need to clean up a system which still affords far too much leniency to elected officials. It should not be the case that our elected representatives are held to a lower civic standard than that of the people they represent, but this is still the case in 2019. Since the General Election in 2017 we have seen MPs found guilty of criminal acts, fraudulent expense claims, shameful attendance records, and dubious staffing appointments. None of these offenses constitute the immediate dismissal of an MP yet any of them could easily and quite rightly result in dismissal from any other workplace. Only in the world of politics is so little scrutiny applied to employees. Alongside reform of our electoral systems and our democratic institutions, we must also strengthen the means by which we hold our representatives to account.

200 years ago, the horror of Peterloo lent fire and fury to a cause that still burns every bit as relevant in modern Britain. We still face a powerfully entrenched and invested establishment. They may no longer be able to send in the cavalry, but they will resist reform every step of the way. The roadmap of history shows us how to fight and how to win. There will be defeats, setbacks and injustices but there is no more an intrinsically British pursuit than that of fairer, more representative governance.

So we will keep marching.