Greg Dyke gave an interesting speech to a meeting organised by CentreForum yesterday. I suspect a good number of those present had come because they thought he might be about to announce his candidacy for the London Mayoralty. But he didn’t say anything about that, and just stuck to the advertised title about how Britain’s democracy will fare under Prime Minister Brown.
A lot of what he said was not new. His theme was the public’s disengagement from the political process, and he was particularly critical of the unfairness of Britain’s electoral system, and how that contributed to the fact that so few people voted. He reminded us that 55% of those who voted at the last General Election voted against Labour, but they won with a clear majority anyway, and that taking into account the low turnout figure, in fact only 21% of voters actually voted for Labour.
But he clearly believed it passionately and it was interesting to hear him say how strongly he is committed to proportional representation.
And hearing him reminded me that it’s been a few years since I have heard some of those complaints about Britain’s constitution - in fact, I was reflecting, since we reached the stage when it was clear that the Tories had been in power too long. And - although there certainly have been those making the case ever since - it does seem to be something we recognise most keenly when a party has been in power for a long while. As if to prove to point, he quoted a Jack Straw speech from 1995 on one of his points.
He also talked about a lot about devolution, and is clearly on the enthusiastic wing of localism - including in the NHS, which as regular readers will know is one of my own favourite pet topics.
On the day that Alastair Campbell’s diaries were published, he touched on politicians’ relationship with the media. Although he outlined how he had tried and failed to reform the BBC’s political coverage - basically to have less of it, as he thought it played an unhelpful role - I thought he did let the journalists off fairly lightly. Although he’s right that politicians helped to make the whole system unworkable when they all went on training telling them simply to use every interview to get across the message they want to get across, irrespective of the question, he didn’t ask what it was that interviewers were doing that had caused them to start feeling the need to do it. Actually I thought he was rather less balanced in his critique on this whole area than Blair had been.
His prescription promoted heavily proportional representation, and as a means to better public engagement, finding ways of getting local people to participate in local decision-making more than just once every four years at the ballot box - though he emphasised that he didn’t mean “endless local referendums” or votes by text. And in fact unless I missed it, he didn’t say anything about the role of the internet in engaging the public more.
It was an interesting speech - full of passion and, as he said, optimism. As he said, when he was growing up, everyone thought that the Cold War was a permanent feature of the landscape. But one day the Berlin Wall did come down - and he hoped that one day what seem like permanent features of our political-media landscape will change.
Those dramatic events of 1989 did not just happen by accident, however, and although he said he hoped things would change, and he made a very good case for why they should, he didn’t do much to outline a historical analysis of why there was any reason to think that they might. I hope his optimism is justified, but as with Gordon Brown’s constitutional pronouncements last week, the right moment will depend on the political need of those who decide, as well as principle.