Elections mean nothing without wider accountability
- Source: Global Times
- [21:49 March 18 2010]
- Comments
By James Palmer
Five years after the last election, the British are going to the polls in May to pick their gov-ernment. The choice is hardly appealing.
On the one side you have Gordon Brown, a dour Scottish bully who promised an end to the "cycle of boom and bust," only to go on to preside over UK's worst recession in decades.
On the other you have David Cameron, a slick public-school prat who was on hand at the Treasury during the last great British financial disaster, 1992's "Black Wednesday," when 3.4 billion pounds ($5.17 billion) was thrown away trying to prop up the falling value of sterling.
The parties aren't much better. Labour are a tired, pettily authoritarian government who've repudiated much of the social justice they once stood for.
The Tories, meanwhile, have spent the last year trying to disassociate themselves from the city bankers they spent the last few years sucking up to.
No wonder the country looks on course for a "hung parliament," where neither main party wins enough seats to give it an overall majority. This leaves the Liberal Democrats, the small third party, as kingmakers.
Unfortunately, the Lib Dem leader, Nick Clegg, is so forgettable that he – I'm sorry, who was I talking about? Whoever wins is left facing a financial wreck that will take years to mend, and severely limit their policy choices anyway.
So, the upcoming election hardly offers a picture-perfect image of democracy. But, honestly, that doesn't really matter. A lot of fuss is made about elections, and sometimes rightly so, as anyone who remembers, say, South Africa's first free elections of 1995 will know.
Yet elections are only the cherry on top of the cake of a democratic system.
Elections are important because they're the ultimate form of government accountability; you can always get rid of the people you don't trust. Unless that accountability pervades the whole system, though, it hardly means a thing.
In fact, sometimes elections actively work against accountability. In both India and Italy, for instance, parliamentary privilege protects Members of Parliament (MPs) from criminal prosecutions, which might account for the fact that 150 (out of 543) Indian MPs were facing criminal charges, ranging from bribery to murder, when they were elected.
The Americans made a big fuss about the Iraqi elections of 2005, but they meant very little to most Iraqis' daily lives. They were a band-aid slapped on a country where religious and ethnic cleansing was still killing dozens of people a day.
Last year's Afghan elections, like many in developing countries, were a welter of bribes and rigged votes. In terms of decent government, they were nothing but lipstick on a pig.
In India, a peasant farmer can vote – probably for somebody whose family has been influential in the region for generations, and who has more money than the farmer will ever see. Over 300 Indian MPs are crorepatis, meaning their net worth is over 10 million rupees ($220,240), a hundred times more than the average Indian.
And while there's many fine and honest Indian MPs, many are also caught up in networks of ethnicity, religion, and caste that may exclude, or even persecute, said farmer.
But still, the Indian peasant can, theoretically, help kick out his MP. If he's beaten by a lo-cal policeman, however, or local officials extort illegal bribes from him, the mechanisms for holding them accountable are, in many parts of the country, weak or non-existent. In fact, trying to do so may only lead to more persecution.
In contrast, Britain is thick with ways to holding people and officials to account. They don't always work as well as they could; witness the toothlessness of the current Chilcot inquiry into Iraq, or the exoneration of the Metropolitan Police after murdering an innocent Brazilian. But on an everyday level, they're powerful tools.
If I'm persecuted in the UK, I have numerous ways to make my voice heard: a functioning legal system, easy access to my MP, a vigorous and contentious press, even the backup of European human rights legislation. Elections help keep all this going, but it's establishing them that takes hard work to begin with.
Nascent democracies should look to setting up systems that put politicians in regular contact with voters, such as the UK's relatively small constituencies, where each MP represents only around 74,000 voters, and regular "surgeries" where MPs meet every week with ordinary members of the public who need help.
You also need a press willing and able to work to expose scandals, and a sense that the behavior of powerful institutions needs to be strongly regulated.
Without accountability throughout society, elections are just meaningless shifts in the people at the top.
The author is a copy editor with the Global Times. jamespalmer@ globaltimes.com.cn
