Why must government be ‘representative’, asks Carol Sarler. It makes no sense. We must fight back against this pernicious new orthodoxy
Only a week ago, as Julia Gillard was sworn in as Prime Minister of Australia, the sheilahood could scarcely believe its luck. A woman, no less! And not just any woman, either: Miss Gillard ticked all the righteous boxes as an avowed feminist, a pro-choice campaigner and a proud member of Emily’s List, an organisation founded — there as here — to promote sex equality in all things, especially in governance.
By Monday this week, the most fervent of fans didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Gillard’s first Cabinet reshuffle not only kept all 14 men in its 18-strong number but even divvied up the additional tasks that the ousted Kevin Rudd might have performed among, yes, the chaps. Funny old place, the real world. For those who ever get there.
Which brings us, as such topics always must, to Harriet Harman and to how infuriatingly far she is from the quick study that Miss Gillard has proved to be — for what Gillard latched on to, at the drop of a voting slip, still eludes our very own Harriet. Even as Gillard played her pragmatic opening gambit, Harriet carried on chewing the ears of the shadow Cabinet, where she is currently pastured and which she insists should be forcibly comprised equally of men and women. It is, I suppose, a superficially attractive proposal — at least it is for those able to disregard value in meritocracy — and were she only lamenting discrimination against women, gay, black or usual-suspect people, it could be a proposal worthy of some support.
But discrimination is not actually her beef. The clue to her real agenda lies in the precision of her goal; she doesn’t want a generalised increase — ‘more’ skirts, ‘extra’ frocks — nor a 60-40, nor any other numeric split. She wants 50-50 and she wants it for the same reason that Emily’s List has always wanted it: because that is the ratio of women to men in the country and therefore that must be the right and proper ratio of their representatives. It’s the politics of ‘s’obvious, innit?’
Except that it’s not obvious at all. What this argument does is to conflate the reasonable view that discrimination is bad with the unreasonable view that any group in office would, per se, do a better job if its ratio of men to women was an exact reflection of that of the population outside it. In short, the passion rests upon the rather newly fashionable notion that nobody can adequately represent those of whom they are not representative; that nobody can properly fight your corner unless they are standing in it.
To be fair to her, Harman is not alone in this conceit; at the moment, for example, the accusation of ‘unrepresentative’ is the weapon most commonly wielded against the coalition government. The writer Gary Younge recently garnered an astonishing quantity of press to promote his book just by reciting the sums therein: 22 cabinet ministers are white, 18 are millionaires and 15 are Oxbridge-educated — conditions which, everyone agreed unchallenged, imperil their ability to serve.
Last week, an Independent columnist reprised him by referring to ‘the broken Britain that a bunch of uxorious public school boys is itching to fix’ — once again their schooling, all by itself, renders them incompetent — and then, ludicrously, scorned Nick Clegg’s credentials to speak of parenthood because his own children wore ‘lovely organic cotton’.
The accused, oddly, seem to accept the same orthodoxy: take, for instance, the sheepishness of the pre-election Tories, whose candidates’ biographical notes proclaimed grammar school backgrounds but were frantically vague about Harrow. And so, as terror increases that anyone who seeks to represent us might be exposed as ‘unrepresentative’, we listen with straight faces while Diane Abbott explains her Labour leadership campaign as nothing less than a selfless effort to spare us from ‘the stranglehold of people who all look the same at the top’. Again: it’s not that she would be better off for being a black, female party leader; it is that our multiracial community would be better off for having one.
There are two problems here. The first is that history does not prove us to be automatically best represented by our like. The Earl of Shaftesbury never went up a chimney but ably represented those who did; William Beveridge had no need of welfare support but represented those who had; David Steel is unlikely to have become unwittingly pregnant but introduced legislation for those who did; Joanna Lumley is neither brown nor short but sternly represented the interests of Gurkhas; Michael Mansfield QC is not poor, Irish nor state-educated but good money says few blue collars in Derry last month felt under-represented as a result; the tireless anti-death penalty advocate Clive Stafford Smith isn’t American, black, criminal nor living on death row but moves mountains to represent those who are.
Sometimes, indeed, membership of an identifiable group appears to encourage disinterest. Harriet Harman might reflect upon who better fought for women: Keir Hardie or, 70 years later, Margaret Thatcher. Not even a close call, is it?
The second problem is that what sounds neat and tidy in theory is unwieldy and unworkable in practice. Imagine that the 50-50 male-female ratio were to be attained and the shadow Cabinet — or company boardrooms or judges’ benches or anywhere else subject to similar clamour — finally did mirror the ratio of the British population; by what moral, intellectual or philosophical rationale may we stop at sex?
Already Harman’s colleague, former Europe Minister Denis MacShane, is only giving her proposal a nine out of ten because, he says, if the party is to be ‘in the quota business’, it should be extended to create equal numbers of working-class and ethnic members. Splendid, Denis — but, in that case, by what moral etc etc may we stop at sex, class and race?
Surely the disabled should also be represented according to their proportion of the population? And before we are deafened by agreement from the disabled lobby, should that not decently include the mentally disabled? If not, dare we ask why not? How do we determine the number of ‘representative’ seats for gays — by a count of those self-declared, or by an estimate to cover the more timid residents of closets?
Now that convicted prisoners are to vote, their enfranchisement would logically include the right to be represented by their peers. What then? A clanking of handcuffs during PMQs? There are a reported eight million illiterate adults in the UK; proportionately they could demand a heck of a lot of Commons seats — but would it be too brutal to ask what they would do with the contents of a red box?
Fortunately for all concerned, none of the above is or needs be taken seriously. It requires a very particular set of skills to represent the interests of others and none of them, whatever Diane Abbott might airily claim, involves looking like them.
The fact is, in politics, law or finance, most of us would choose to be represented by people we prefer to think are nothing like us at all: the nerds, the geeks, the ones with a tenacious grasp of footnotes and protocol, an appetite for committee and regulation, a willingness to accept briefs from the capricious and to be sacked if they fail to implement them. All we ask is that this is tempered with one quality — we care not from where it came or how it is honed — which is an indomitably rigorous sense of fair play. And that’ll do us nicely.