Chaps or Citizens?

Before New Labour came to power, when reform of Britain's House of Lords was in the air, Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty separately came to the idea that the second chamber could be selected by lot. Together they wrote The Athenian Option which set out a case for creating a large jury, or juries, to scrutinise and assess legislation in the Lords.

Originally published in 1998 by Demos, the proposal managed to seriously offend almost the entire class of professional politicians in Britain. This new edition includes a withering critique of the Government's new proposals for Lords Reform and the authors' evidence to Tony Blair's Royal Commission on Lord's Reform

Chaps or Citizens?The White Paper of 2008 v The Athenian Option

We delayed completing this new edition of The Athenian Option in order to respond to a promised White Paper on the next stage of replacing the House of Lords which, we were reliably informed would announce how a new chamber would be elected.

Our original 1998 pamphlet, published thanks to Ian Christie at Demos, came out of the blue. It did not engage with actual policy proposals. To be sure it was encouraged by the promise of a new reforming government and a commitment to abolish hereditary peers. Talk about a full-scale replacement of the House of Lords was in the air; we joined it from ‘stage left’.

Then came the Royal Commission chaired by Lord Wakeham, and our experience of giving evidence before it, recorded here. This confirmed that our proposal was, while still beyond the pale, hovering within earshot of official discourse. (We were told that the Editor of the Daily Telegraph had flirted with proposing the recruitment of regular citizens by lottery into the House of Lords, but dropped it when he heard that this was being proposed by the likes of us.)

Despite the odds we would like our proposal to be taken seriously. We share the hope of many reformers (in this and other contexts), that each improvement will open the way for further change. We are not wedded to ‘making the best the enemy of the good’; we do not argue for sortition in an impossibilist spirit, confident that it will never happen, to show off our superior radicalism. Everyone is aware of how hard it is to actually democratise the central institutions of British power. So we looked forward to Parliament's plans for electing the Lords. Here would be a chance to test our proposals against a fully-fledged alternative that had emerged out of a major House of Commons battle. An alternative backed by the might of experience, official drafting, a large research budget and the accumulated wisdom of many months of cross-party discussion. Now that a definite plan is being presented to the country it will be possible to ask: which way forward is the more practical and would do more for the progress of democracy in the UK - elections or the Athenian option?

At the end of July 2008 the White Paper was finally published by the Ministry of Justice overseen by Jack Straw, its Secretary of State. Called An Elected Second Chamber: Further reform of the House of Lords, we will hereafter refer to it as the White Paper. It offers a great deal less than was promised, and what is does offer is often not wholly clear. Some forensic patience and careful probing into legerdemain is necessary to extract anything firm enough to compare and contrast to our own approach.

But our findings from our analysis of the White Paper, by contrast with the contents of the Paper itself, are straightforward enough. It seems to us that its approach is so uncompelling that it creates an opening for an altogether more refreshing solution. As we have mentioned in the introduction, sortition now has a considerable body of experience and analysis behind it. We know that it could work. We also know that a new upper chamber is going to be created in Westminster over the next few years. The chasm between the public and the political class is, to borrow a phrase, simultaneously deepening and widening. In terms of generating public interest, let alone allegiance, parliament needs to be rescued. Surely someone who has influence in one of the major parties has the imagination to consider ‘What if….’

Before assessing the White Paper itself there are two distinctive aspects to the process which led up to it that are worth noting: its history and its ‘all-party’ character.

A little history

The House of Commons voted to make the second chamber of the UK an elected assembly in March 2007. The vote came about after all three main UK parties had pledged some kind of Lords reform in their manifestos in the 2005 election. A year later, in June 2006, a cross-party group met and discussed reform regularly for eight months. A White Paper was then published and the Commons debate followed. Various options were presented to the House and MPs voted to endorse two of them: There was a majority of over 100 for a wholly elected second chamber, by 337 to 224. There was less support for the option of having an upper house that is 80 per cent elected and 20 per cent appointed, 305 to 267 – a majority of nearly 40. All other options were rejected.

David Marquand and Patrick Dunleavy of the LSE, among others, have emphasised the historic, watershed nature of this vote. Provided that Scotland does not shortly decide on independence in a referendum and the United Kingdom holds together, it really does seem likely that Britain will see a genuine replacement of the Lords by a second chamber that is either 80 or 100 per cent elected – a second chamber that will have to be called something new, a ‘Senate’ being the most favoured term.

True, history will grind slowly. By our calculation it will be around 2022 before all of the White Paper’s proposed elected members will be in place, sitting alongside the remaining life peers, because the newcomers will only be elected in three tranches, starting with the general election after next (i.e. around 2014). In addition, the White Paper has various options for excluding the present incumbents, and if the one apparently favoured by Jack Straw is adopted, it will take until at least 2040 before the last of the current life peers leaves the chamber to go on to the upper house in the sky (or warmer lodgings below).

Nonetheless, from within the Westminster bubble itself, in terms of British history and tradition, electing the second chamber seems like profound change. A sense of this can be gained by reading Robin Cook’s memoir The Point of Departure. It recounts his two years as Leader of the House: from June 2001, after Blair sacked him from being Foreign Secretary (the post he held for Labour’s first term of office) to March 2003 when Cook resigned from the cabinet to oppose the invasion of Iraq. Two themes dominate the book. The most important is the Iraq war, while the second is Cook’s protracted efforts to turn the Lords into an elected chamber. Reporting on his first meeting with the Prime Minister in his new role, on 3rd July 2001, Cook writes,

I put it to him that reform of the House of Lords will be his historic monument. He is playing for his place in history.1

What seems clear is that Cook regarded achieving an elected second chamber as being his ‘historic monument’. At first Blair managed to string Cook along: after all, Blair was a moderniser so he surely wanted reform. Gradually Cook realised that the Prime Minister wanted no such thing and had created the Wakeham Committee to perpetuate a wholly appointed chamber with all the advantages of leverage and patronage, not to speak of the funding opportunities that it afforded him (always provided, as Blair once put it, that they are not part of a single transaction). In fact by proposing some elected members Wakeham, according to Derry Irvine, the then Lord Chancellor, “let us all down”. Over the same dinner, Irvine went on to ask Cook (they had shared “two bottles of wine and a whisky apiece”),

But are there enough people of calibre out there to fill an elected House of Lords? 2

Cook does not hide his consternation. He ploughed on. He gets a commitment for the creation of a joint committee and a free vote of MPs. With the question of whether the committee should have a deadline for its recommendation top of the agenda, Cook went into a meeting with the Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor:

We all know, although never say, that the dividing line in the room is between those who see the new plan as a way of making progress and those who see it as a way of halting progress.3

This is a most apt warning. It should be pinned above all “new plans” for reform in Westminster and Whitehall.

Poor Robin Cook. He finally gets his debate, although the joint committee has come up with multiple options for parliament to consider, thus ensuring the debate would be as confusing as possible. At Prime Minister’s Questions six days before, Blair answers a planted question:

Tony slammed a big fat torpedo into our joint strategy on Lords Reform. He had an unerring aim and I was left sitting silently beside him for the rest of Question Time contemplating the wreck of democratic reform sinking beneath the horizon.

Cook describes how he had “begged” Blair not to express a preference. Instead, the PM told the House: “The key question of election is whether we want a revising chamber or a rival chamber. My view is we want a revising chamber”. Cook immediately understood that it was impossible to “square the spirit of the free vote” with a Prime Minister telling his party what outcome he wanted.

Blair’s intervention brilliantly positioned a democratic second chamber as a threat to the Commons rather than a challenge to the Executive…4

The result of the free vote on 4 February 2003 was that all options were rejected, a farcical conclusion.

It was doubtless satisfactory for the great moderniser himself. Blair could continue to accumulate his ‘Tony’s cronies’. All options rejected is an apt historic monument, a symbol of his approach to reforming the central British state.

Within a month, Iraq was invaded. However honourable, Cook’s career came to an utterly frustrated conclusion. In the published extracts from his diary of The Blair Years, Alastair Campbell does not even deign to include any references to the shabby fixing of Robin Cook over Lords reform. Yet contempt for democracy in Blair’s No 10 surely connects the Iraq decision to the crushing of Lords reform. Both widened the gap between parliament and the voters. As all Cook’s efforts unravelled in the ridiculous Commons vote, millions across the country were starting to prepare for the largest demonstration ever seen on the streets of Britain, on the 15 February. This time the mob proved to be wiser than its masters.5 It was a historic turning point in the balance of authority and legitimacy between Britain’s political leaders and those who vote. The UK’s ‘political class’ is still in denial about the implications. Its central directorate got it wrong. The public as a whole was wiser and more far-sighted in its judgement than parliament, not to speak of most of the press. Of course the media now wishes us all to forget that Michael Howard and David Cameron and Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and David Miliband were all wrong about a defining issue of going to war, when the thoughtful citizenry were right. But at a deeper level it remains a profound fact that has altered the balance of argument about introducing citizen participation into the scrutiny of legislation.

We emphasise this point because constitutional reform in the UK is all too often discussed either in technical terms abstracted from the actual political context or, by politicians with the “unctuous complacency” well described by Hugo Young in the article republished here. Public opinion is on the march. Robin Cook was a master parliamentarian and loved to occupy what he described as a “high office of state”. Nonetheless, he retained a Scottish democratic intelligence which gave him the capacity to perceive the larger realities outside the pomp and privileges of Whitehall. His conclusion is that British politics does not suffer from the “imaginary tussle between the Lords and the Commons for primacy” that Blair evoked. Rather, it faces two problems. First, in the “struggle” between the Executive and Parliament the latter ought to be a strong check on government but is not. Second, there is a “crumbling of public esteem” for both parliament and government.

In his view, creating an elected second chamber would be a big step to resolving both these problems. But will it? Where we agree with Robin Cook is that the reform of the second chamber is an opportunity to create a framework that will strengthen the Commons, so that parliament as a whole has much more authority to check the executive. If this succeeds it should help restore public belief in the political process. The question is whether simply electing the second chamber will achieve this. The 2006 vote by the Commons came after Cook died. His influence lived on to ensure that Parliament once again had a free vote on a list of options. This time his “historic” principle of an elected second chamber was endorsed.

All party support

The second aspect of the process that led up to the White Paper which deserves notice is the cooperation of all three main parties. This is rooted in the procedural nature of the change and Cook understandably went out of his way to create a cross-party alliance for reform. One would be wise to consider whether such collaboration is motivated by the spirit of democracy or a desire by the parties to further enhance (or perhaps one should say ‘modernise’) their control. Since the hereditary peers have been ejected from the Lords (apart from the remaining 92 who, oddly enough, are currently the only ‘elected’ members, because they are chosen by their fellow members of the historic peerage), Britain’s upper house has become more independent minded.

Why were all three main parties meeting behind closed doors for months on end to try and agree on a shared approach? Their argument is that without this, and without a resulting co-ordinated commitment to a democratic second chamber in their manifestos, the Lords will vote down any proposal to abolish it. Certainly, it seems momentum is being created. But manifestos be damned. In these circumstances they have become a matter of convention and procedure. The cross-party investment in the detail seems better designed to ensure reform by inertia under the sheer weight of White Papers and their appendices, rather than by the encouragement of popular support for the transformation being engineered. This alone makes it unlikely that it will light a touchpaper for democracy, let alone create, thanks to its more representative nature, such a compelling centre of legitimacy that further reform will finally be forced upon the House of Commons itself.

What should the Second Chamber do?

In its Executive Summary the White Paper states,

In its three main functions of scrutinising legislation, conducting investigations and holding Government to account, the second chamber should complement the work of the Commons. Irrespective of its membership, this should continue to be the case in a reformed second chamber.

These functions are not discussed in the document which simply states that all parties are agreed that “there should be no change to the powers of a reformed chamber”. In other words while shifting its membership to being predominantly elected, in terms of power the objective is to keep everything unchanged.

But a widely identified problem with the current system of British sovereignty is the way the government subordinates parliament to its will. For much of the nineteenth century government of an empire of hundreds of millions relied heavily upon a small Cabinet drawn from both houses within a weak party system. As the global reach of government shrank, its ranks started to balloon while the influence of the Cabinet diminished. In 2008 the Cabinet is a ghost of its former self while the number of MPs with government jobs has reached three figures, with a concomitant growth of the ‘pay-roll vote’ in parliament. On contentious issues the Commons has become a “bazaar” - to quote the unchallenged description by Diane Abbott MP in the recent Commons debate on extending detention without charge to 42 days.

This system also operates inside the House of Lords. It has its ministers and shadow ministers, its pay-roll vote and aspirant pay-roll vote. It also initiates legislation and functions, as it has since the nineteenth century, as a chamber for the execution of government business. The executive’s domination of the Lords is less complete than that of the Commons. This does not significantly take away from the fact – as well as the perception – that what matters today is government. Parliament is now seen as merely an extension of the government’s writ causing only an occasional wrinkle in the smooth exercise of centralised power.

We need a second chamber that has sufficient authority independent of party politics to scrutinise and investigate what the government proposes. If the existing Lords, and on occasion the Commons, achieves this today it is only thanks to the qualities of exceptional individuals. A second chamber of elected members who have gained their place thanks to the party machines, many of them angling for jobs, is all too likely to diminish that chamber’s spirit of independence. And this is before we come to the voting system.

An elected second chamber

According to the strategy behind the White Paper, the winner of the coming general election will be responsible for creating an elected second chamber. At the moment the odds suggest this will be the Conservative Party. The White Paper states that the Conservatives “favour” (so there is some flexibility),

a First Past The Post system for elections to the second chamber. In particular, they favour using the 80 constituencies… leading to a total membership of 300 (of which 60 would be appointed), plus the Bishops.

First past the post in this context could well be described as “reactionary modernisation”. But at least the Tory view is clear. Labour’s is redolent of the heels-in-the-ground procrastination that Cook witnessed. As the White Paper puts it,

The Government believes that further consideration should be given to the following voting systems options for elections to the second chamber:

• a First Past The Post system;

• an Alternative Vote system;

• a Single Transferable Vote system; or

• an open or semi-open list system.

The choice of a voting system for elections to the second chamber is the subject of much discussion. It is a key decision about the way forward for a reformed second chamber and hence about the institutions of our democracy. The Government is therefore keen to facilitate an extensive and wide-ranging debate on this issue. Hence it would welcome views from all quarters.

How long is that going to take, if after all this time Labour has come to absolutely no view at all? More alarming, it has not even ruled out ‘First Past The Post’ as its preferred voting system. No one has set out why this matters more eloquently and forcefully than David Marquand:

PR elections to the Upper House – and it is surely inconceivable that it would be elected by First Past the Post – would mean that the Upper House was more legitimate than the Lower. I don’t think such an absurd imbalance could last for long. Sooner or later (and I think sooner rather than later) PR for the upper house would force the Government and Opposition of the day to agree on PR, or at the very least AV, for the Commons. With every passing day the absurdity of FPTP for the Commons becomes more glaring. We now have PR elections for London, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales: that already makes FPTP for the Westminster Commons a massive anomaly.

The best way to get rid of the anomaly is to make it even more glaring – which PR elections for the upper house would do. To put the point in another way, the most important single objective for democratic reform is PR. That would, at a stroke, deprive the executive of an automatic single-party majority; end the dreary game of triangulation; liberate currently unrepresented currents of opinion like the Greens; and enable a politics of pluralism and negotiation to take root in this country. A Senate elected by PR would be really big step in that direction; it would be madness to throw that chance away.

It is clear from the White Paper that no such “really big step” is on offer. While Jack Straw may have a greater quotient of cunning than most, the Tories also see that the fairer the second chamber’s election system, the more this will reflect adversely on winner-takes-all elections for the Commons which the two big parties cherish for precisely the reason that Marquand seeks their urgent overthrow.

But suppose there is a government after the next election, perhaps one dependent on a coalition, that does indeed lean towards some version of proportionality in the electoral system for the new second chamber. Will this have the effect that Marquand envisages? It seems to us that the White Paper seeks to put in place a series of defences in depth to prevent this. First, there is the length of time envisaged for reform to come about before the new chamber comes into its own – at least 30 years. Second, there is the multi-member geography of the constituency system it proposes that will make its representative nature opaque. Third, there is the staged nature of the voting, which will ensure that it never represents opinion in the country at any one time. Fourth, there is the commitment to a 20 per cent appointed element (plus some Bishops) that is likely to ensure the new chamber is never perceived as being self-evidently “more legitimate” than the Commons.

The constituencies will be very large. All parties are looking at six member constituencies returning a total of between 300 and 400 members altogether (compared to around 650 in the Commons). The first two members for each constituency will be elected in the first general election after the reform becomes law, the second two at the next general election and the final two at the one after that, with all members serving just one term across three UK general elections.

This means that it will only be some time in the 2020s that the third tranche of elected ‘Senators’ will be created. Even then the option is left open that existing life peers will remain in place until they die (actuarial graphs are helpfully provided) haunting the chamber through to 2040 and beyond.

The Government noted in its February 2007 White Paper that: “The current members have entered the House in the expectation that they will stay for life. Some will have given up careers and other roles to do so. It would be unfair to require them to leave in these circumstances”.

But even after the current life peers have been swept away, the proposed system will ensure that the elected upper house is never representative of current opinion, because it will always be dominated by the two-thirds elected four and eight years previously plus the appointed fifth. We suspect that David Marquand imagined that an upper house elected by a fairer system than the Commons would be wholly elected at the same time as the Commons (as in, for example, Billy Bragg’s ‘secondary mandate’ proposal6), and in any case be seen as representing a self-evidently better balance of current opinion in the country. This will not be the case.

The authors of the White Paper, from all parties, do indeed appear to have used the plan of electing the second chamber to delay progress.

The Definition of a Chap

Finally, there are the 20 per cent of appointed members. Although this option got significantly less support when the Commons voted than the 100 per cent elected option, the White Paper flatly supports a 20 per cent appointed element. Here, then, is a chance to send into the Palace of Westminster regular folk from outside the establishment. And thereby address the most attractive aspect of the Athenian option, by including those who are not part of the political machine in the scrutiny of its outcome, to help bridge the gap between politicians and the public.

The section where the White Paper sets out the qualities its sees as necessary to qualify for the appointed 20 per cent, makes grimly entertaining reading. It says that:

the key focus in assessing potential appointees should be their ability, willingness and commitment to take part in the full range of the work of the chamber

Meaning that they should be potential legislators. It agrees therefore that far from the appointed element introducing a breath of fresh air,

the characteristics of distinguished former public servants are typically such that they would be extremely credible candidates for appointment to a reformed second chamber

Aware of the need to demonstrate some spirit of reform, however, the Labour Government thinks that there should be:

no expectation of membership of the reformed second chamber in the case of distinguished former public servants: each application would be considered on an individual basis. (Our emphasis)

While the Conservative Party on the other hand,

considered that there was a case for an element of automaticity in the case of distinguished former public servants.

In a neat paragraph that reveals the degree of continuity with the present situation that is foreseen, the White Paper states,

The Government would welcome views on whether there should be provision for appointments to a reformed second chamber specifically for the purposes of enabling a particular individual to become a Government Minister.

The White Paper emphasises the importance of the quality of “independence” in any appointed members. What its authors seem to have in mind by this is authoritative mandarins who “know what is best”, such as former public servants and potential but unelected ministers.

No consideration whatsoever is given to whether or not appointed members might provide a counter-weight to the elitist nature of British political life. For example, it would seem to be what the Americans call a “no brainer” that if 80 per cent of the chamber is to be elected and will therefore be members of the political parties, that the “independent” appointed Senators should not also be party members. But this would mean that key back-room party supporters who are at present regularly rewarded with peerages would have to be eliminated from shaping the business of government via a place in the second chamber (current examples might be Lord Gould, Lord Rennard, Lord Ashcroft). So the White Paper goes out if its way to make sure that no one is eliminated from being qualified as an “independent” appointee just because they have been part of the inner sanctums of political power. Here is how this particular circle is squared:

there should not be a bar on those who have or who have had party-political affiliations or connections being considered. Those appointed to a reformed chamber should be, individually and collectively, those able to make the best contribution to its work. Any political affiliations should be disregarded when considering whether someone is suitable to serve and should not be the basis for either preferential or detrimental consideration. However, as the basis for appointment would be to provide an independent element, appointed members of a reformed second chamber would be expected to act independently from any political party.

So we are back to informal “expectations” and a code of honour.

Who decides who “are able to make the best contribution”? It hardly needs to be said that it will be an appointments commission of people who are best able to judge this. But in the age of transparency, some criteria are also needed. The White Paper provides a profile of how to identify a suitable chap, using the term in its gender neutral form. They are people who will:

have a record of significance that demonstrates a range of experience, skills and competencies;

be able to make an effective and significant contribution to the work of the House across a wide range of issues;

have some understanding of the constitutional framework and the skills and qualities needed to be an effective member of the House;

have the time available to make an effective contribution within the procedures of working practices of the House; and

be able to demonstrate outstanding personal qualities, in particular integrity and independence.

In this way we can rest assured that appointed Senators will be “one of them”.

Recall that sneak question, which the Government slipped in, about whether it should be allowed to appoint a person whom it wishes to make a minister. More than anything, this reveals that behind the fine words about ‘independence’ and ‘scrutiny’, our current politicians are thinking about the reformed second chamber as a way to extend their own party and administrative power, and to fill it with chaps like themselves.

What should happen?

Ralph Miliband, father of the famous brothers currently in the Cabinet, once wrote that “parliamentarism” in Britain “simultaneously enshrines the principle of popular inclusion and that of popular exclusion”.7 The British tradition offers a democratic façade behind which there is an excluding reality that keeps voters at arms length. This tradition is healthy and alive in the White Paper. It appears to offer inclusion through the elemental procedure of the popular vote but its mechanisms - from its consideration of voting systems, to the time it foresees reform taking, to its criteria for the appointed members - are dedicated to reproducing the machinery of exclusion that marks the British way of government. We see no way forward here for reformers or democrats, whether from the left or right. The White Paper has been authored on the other side of Robin Cook’s dividing line. It is designed to put as firm a break on progress as can possibly be applied, in the circumstances.

The White Paper seeks to codify what are in effect the corrupt practices of the political class defending its closed shop of power and influence in Westminster and Whitehall.

Reformers who want to ‘Carry On and Hope for the Best’ may back its plans for elections. But they will find themselves participating in a Pinewood revival that may be suggestive but is hardly priapic. Our advice to reformers, especially those who look to action on electing the Lords without any further debate about its role and powers, is that going down a blind alley with your eyes open will not stop it from being a cul de sac.

We challenge anyone to read the White Paper and the Athenian Option side by side to prefer in principle the course proposed by the White Paper. Of course, The Athenian Option needs to be reinforced with international and UK wide research into the variety of deliberative exercises that have taken place. This could also provide more detailed accounts of the best possible size for ‘juries’ to assess legislation and the costs.

If the Athenian Option might be preferable because it seems more attractive in the ‘abstract’, is it practical? The way this question is usually asked assumes that it is not. But behind this assumption there is a greater one: that the existing system works and is only in need of limited improvement. Yet taken as a whole the British system of sovereignty is now a busted flush with many of its parts in need replacement. As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”. We agree: that’s why it needs fixing.

We pose a simple challenge. We should build a second chamber whose role is to strengthen an elected House of Commons, to help it propose laws in a clear and readable English, that are scrutinised to assess both this and whether they will achieve what they are intended to do.

Using sortition to create representative juries of the people who can undertake this role in a serious deliberative fashion will add an element of direct democracy to our parliament. In his new study, Democracy: Crisis and Renewal, Paul Ginsborg, the outstanding historian of Italy, sets out the case for combining participatory democracy with representative democracy. Integrating sortition in the upper chamber with an elected House of Commons does just that.

How do we set about achieving this? When we gave evidence before the Wakeham commissioners Bill Morris asked us whether the fact that we expressed a desire to experiment to see how sortition could best work meant that we were uncertain about our approach. In its own way this is a very significant question. There is a widespread belief that political institutions and government generally must deliver certainty. This is a chimera. We need a spirit of experiment, enterprise and invention in politics just as we expect this in the economy. A spirit of openness in the way we govern ourselves is surely essential to the successful advance of democracy and a better way of ensuring that our historic traditions of liberty, independence, tolerance and self-government are renewed, however threadbare they have become.

Info

The Athenian Option: Radical Reform for the House of Lords Anthony Barnett and Peter Carty Imprint £8.95

www.imprint.co.uk/ourkingdom

Footnotes

1 Robin Cook, The Point of Departure: diaries from the front bench, London, 2004, p 14.

2 As above, p 85.

3 As above, p 148

4 As above pp 274 - 81

5 See ‘Democracy and openDemocracy’, Isabel Hilton and Anthony Barnett, openDemocracy, 12 October 2005, http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-opening/bar...

6 The Guardian, 9 February 2004.

7 Ralph Miliband, Capitalist Democracy in Britain, 1982, p 39