that the situation in Zimbabwe will only change through international intervention. But in a country of 91 per cent unemployment, where people are barely surviving, how long can they or should they have to wait? Referring to the economic wasteland cre- ated by the Government, Fr B highlights how the regime exploits people’s desperation, say- ing: “The Government knows people are poor and they use that, telling them: ‘If you want to get some money – come to us.’” This is code for the payments the government makes for carrying out orchestrated beatings of its oppo- nents. The terms of the GPA call for a new con- stitution and new elections. But as negotiations on these are ongoing between Zanu-PF and the MDC, an early election would stymie the formulation of a new con- stitution and its approval by a referendum. It would also ensure that the electoral roll would not be overhauled in time for the vote. According to historian and writer R.W.
Johnson, in “Preventing Electoral Fraud in Zimbabwe” – a report written for the South African Institute for Race Relations, the ear- liest date for elections following a referendum on a new constitution would be 14 June 2012. But Johnson suggests that hopes for free and fair elections are threatened by the manipu- lation of Zimbabwe’s electoral rolls. He shows that 360,500 new voters have been added to the register in just two years, despite docu- mented mass emigration from Zimbabwe.
sure indicator that something is amiss is the presence on the roll of hundreds of young people under the age of 17, some small children. At the other end of the scale he documents thousands of people over the age of 100! There are 16,033 new voters over the age of 70 years, of whom 1,488 of these are over the age of 100 – some as old as 109 years of age. (According to the World Health Organisation, life expectancy in Zimbabwe, at 43 for men and 44 for women, is one of the lowest in the world.) In his estimation there are as many as 2.5 million “phantom voters” currently on the register. Johnson’s quotation from Joseph Stalin at the beginning of his report from is a telling reminder of the importance of an impartial electoral process: “The people who vote decide nothing! The people who count the votes decide everything!” In Johnson’s view, only a completely new electoral roll drawn up by an independent body would make the next elec- tion credible. His report concludes that the current roll is not only “a wholly incredible document but an extremely dangerous one, which lends itself to all manner of electoral manipulation or ballot-stuffing. It is more or less guaranteed to produce disputed results”. As Zimbabwean human-rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa, like the Catholic bishops, acknowledges in the foreword to Johnson’s report, a road map to free and fair elections under a new and democratic constitution is the holy grail for Zimbabwe.
A ■Sarah Mac Donald is a freelance journalist.
CLIFFORD LONGLEY
‘If an MP is elected to apply his conscience, we are entitled to know what his values are’
The Government’s surrender to its critics over the reform of the National Health Service was a striking demonstration of the “new politics” in action. But not quite the way the phrase was first intended. It was used by Liberal Democrats at the time of the formation of the Coalition Government more than a year ago to describe the way that the very principle of coalition meant that policy would emerge from a negotiation between different interests, rather than the progressive application of a programme endorsed by the electorate. But in the NHS case the most significant negotiation was not between the parties inside the Government – who had both signed up to the reforms in advance – but between it and outside bodies, mainlymedical professionals. A similar pattern applies to other government policy reversals we have seen, such as the selling-off of publicly owned forestry. Thus media talk of government U-turns, as if any adjustment of policy were a sign of weakness, fails to understand the way the nature of British politics has shifted. If the Government is in continuous negotiation with the public at large, U-turns will be expected. But what is this “public at large” which finds itself invited to the top table of policy formation? It is none other than civil society, all those intermediate institutions which are neither public- nor private-sector but which operate in the space between them. The implications of this new form
of politics are immense. The intriguing issue is what it does for the official Opposition. This, too, has to be in continuous negotiation with the public at large, the better to express the voice of civil society (including trade unions) to the Government. This fundamental political development also undermines the recent complaint by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who said that the Coalition Government had embarked on “radical, long-term policies for which no one voted”. The archbishop’s anxiety about what democracy means in such a context is simply answered by
reference to the great eighteenth- century parliamentarian Edmund Burke, who set out in his Address to the Electors of Bristol the proposition that an MP owes his constituents not obedience to their demands but the honest judgement of his conscience. So the new politics of coalition is, in fact, a reversion to a much older form of politics, when elections were – in theory at least – about the character and moral values of the candidates rather than the pre-election promises made by their parties. MPs have to listen to the voice of their constituents, especially those that have organised themselves into the “little platoons” that make up a diverse society. But then they are at liberty to disagree. If the voters don’t like it, they can throw their MPs out at the next opportunity. One could just as well apply the archbishop’s rebuke about “policies for which no one voted” to the last time that Britain was governed by a coalition, from 1940 to 1945. In 1935, the last pre-war election, nobody had voted for the “radical, long-term” total war to which Winston Churchill was to commit himself and his new, all-party Government five years later. It was deemed the right thing to do by the majority of MPs, supported by public opinion, acting just as Burke said they should. Indeed, one could apply this to the 1944 Education Act, the alleged dismantling of which was one of two arguably undemocratic projects (the other being NHS reform) to which Dr Williams most objected. The act pre-eminently was the result of a dialogue between Government and civil society, with Churches to the fore. But it was in nobody’s 1935 manifesto. There is one other consequence of
this return to a more Burkean theory of parliamentary democracy. It elevates to the front rank questions of personal moral behaviour and character. If a male MP votes with his party, it matters little whether he is faithful to his wife; but if he is elected to apply his conscience informed by his values, his electors are entitled to know what his values are and how well he lives up to them. Is he sincere and upstanding, or a duplicitous hypocrite? Is he religious or an atheist – in either way? Is he a pragmatist, a utilitarian or an absolutist? The walls between private and public will not long withstand such an investigation, whatever the MP’s gender. But equally obsolete will be talk of banishing religion from the public square. All MPs believe in something, and we are entitled to know, before we vote for them, what that is.
25 June 2011 | THE TABLET | 5
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