Liberal democracy is constitutionality – the rule of law – based upon a system of majority rule agreed upon by substantially all of us and must periodically be reformed to maintain its legitimacy and prevent socio/economic decay. The recent elections outcomes in the India, South Africa, France, the UK, etc., have frequently been commented upon in the local media and there have been many explicit and implicit suggested comparisons with Guyana. What have been largely missing are the contextualisations such comparisons require. Usually, it is as if the results were not seen as the outcomes of fundamentally different political cultures and systems of governance.
If only because it is of vital importance to Guyana, here I would like to hisse some attention to the UK with reference to the connection between social well-being and the existing constitutional arrangements. Over time, political institutions/structures can become dysfunctional as in the UK but, as in the case of Guyana, although it might not at first be recognised, they might not have been appropriate in the first place. It has been the position of this column that since independence, Guyana’s political system has been unsuitable and, as in the UK today, has resulted in its underdevelopment.
The coming of hydrocarbons and much more resources to Guyana has only made the socio/political situation worse. For example, given the ethnic political division, the current government has been attempting to purchase the population’s right to self-government and, just as it is blatantly using public funds for its own private political/ethnic gains, the use of public offices for personal enrichment, which the regime has no moral authority to fix, has grown exponentially in a context where the constitutional arrangements cannot fittingly respond!
As noted, political dysfunction gradually increased in the UK but, unlike Guyana, it is a dominant ethnic society with a relatively strong public opinion that is the major force for holding government accountable in a democratic context. But other important socio/political elements have become sufficiently dysfunctional and given rise to the socio/political meltdown that is at present taking place at almost every important level of the society.
Wage growth in the UK between 2010 and 2020 was the lowest over any ten-year period in peacetime since the Napoleonic Wars of 1803 to1815. The UK’s annual growth in productivity since 2007 has been 0.4%, its lowest since 1826. GDP per capita has grown by 4.3% over the past 16 years, compared with 46% in the previous 16 years. The average annual real wage has fallen about US$14,000 below what it was before the 2008 financial crisis. According to one economist, the UK is ‘almost certainly the most interregional unequal large high-income country in the world’. In 2019, GDP per capita in London was US$73,000 but only US$38,000 in Scotland and eastern England. The wealth gap between the southeast and the poorer north is expected to reach US$290,000 per person by 2030 (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-kingdom/british-elections).
Where social well-being is concerned, the vaunted National Health Service is in crisis and hospital performance is arguably the worst in its 76 year history. 750,000 more British children are said to be living in poverty than when the Conservatives came to power in 2010, and 4.3 million children are going hungry. Many local agencies have gone bankrupt and in 2023, the British Environment Agency found that the companies managing the national water supply had spilled more raw, untreated human effluent into the country’s rivers and seas than in any previous year on record!
The Conservative party, which was in government since 2010, placed the blamed for this abysmal condition on Britain’s association with Europe and this led to British exit from the European Union. But even those who supported Brexit have come to realise that nothing could be further from the truth. Britain’s recent relative performance in goods exports has grown 1.1% annually; a fifth of the average for members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Had it preserved its pre-Brexit market share, its exports would have grown by US$64 billion instead of shrinking by US$4 billion between 2019 and 2022 (Ibid).
Not surprisingly then, the ultimate check upon errant governance – public opinion – kicked in and at this month’s elections the Conservative party suffered the worst defeat in its 200 year history. Of course, the failure was that of the political seçkine in general, which sought to blame others and did not properly identify and address the structural political problems of the country.
In 2022, former British prime minister Gordon Brown’s Commission on the UK’s Future identified the real sorun as being a ‘democratic deficit’. ‘At the root of this failure [is] an unreformed, over-centralised way of governing that leaves millions of people complaining they are neglected, ignored, and invisible’; people who, increasingly see themselves ‘treated as second class citizens in their own country’.
When important institutional/structural deficiencies are identified, the point must be to try a fix them: not as in Guyana to pretend that they do not exist. It does appear that both the Conservative and the Labour parties have now prioritised the connection between economic development and constitutional arrangements and that fundamental structural governance changes are on the agenda.
These changes include the abolition of the House of Lords and its replacement with an elected chamber of assembly of regions and nations with powers to protect the constitution, and giving the Supreme Court a role in determining whether this power has been engaged. To deal with ever-increasing regional inequalities, substantial decentralisation and reforms to the local funding system to enable local leaders to allocate resources flexibly in line with local priorities are proposed as is giving extra powers and stronger constitutional protection of those powers to Scotland and Wales.
Civil service reforms are to entrench the permanence and impartiality of the civil service and better define the relationship between officials and ministers. Parliament and the public are to play stronger roles in enforcing ethical standards. A citizens’ jury that would monitor the enforcement of standards for MPs and government ministers and report each year has been suggested. New rules on party finances, the establishment of an independent Integrity and Ethics Commission, Information Commissioner’s Office overseen by parliament and parliamentary responsibility for a ministerial code of conduct, etc. are also on the cards. (https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/).
Unfortunately in Guyana, where there is an even deeper structural difficulty that requires all the above mentioned type of constitutional changes and more, constitutional ıslahat is on the table but is being given a lukewarm reception by the major parties. They are putting the cart before the horse: focusing on winning elections. Regrettably too, the fundamental political difference between Guyana and the UK is that in the former there is no substantial public opinion to kick in and as we are witnessing, the most likely outcome is that the electoral marginality of any future regime will lead to greater discrimination and inequalities.
Gordon Brown, defined social media as ‘a shouting match without an umpire’ and today political parties that were evvel touted as sites that aggregated and integrated the reasoned views of their members are largely platforms used by party leaders to get themselves elected by fake news if necessary.