With different faces of rebellion being seen on either side of the Atlantic, Young Fabians chair Sara Ibrahim looks at the various aspects of political loyalty.
Sara Ibrahim is the chair of the Young Fabians
In politics there has been an increasing premium placed on loyalty. This has often been perceived to come at the expense of doing the right thing. If you want to climb to the heady heights of political power, then the prevailing orthodoxy has been that you follow the line of your party, regardless of whether you agree with it.
The events of recent days have therefore provoked an interesting question to one’s mind: when is rebellion a good thing? On Wednesday night, David Cameron and the coalition government suffered a blow when 53 tory rebels voted with Labour on an amendment proposing real term EU budget cuts.
For Cameron and Clegg, the timing could not have been worse. It is the eve of EU budget negotiations and their set negotiating position was for a budget freeze.
This isn’t a piece on the merits or demerits of the respective parties’ positions on the EU budget; instead it throws up a more interesting question about the value of towing the party line and when you should depart from it.
There is a tension that plays out in the minds of most politicians: Do you put your own values above those of your party? To opt to answer ‘no’ is not to be a sell out as many believe. For politicians to have any impact they have to act in concert with one another.
Those steeped in the Labour tradition in the UK will often advocate values of solidarity and collective action. Lack of discipline within a political party can therefore undermine not only the reputation of the whips and the leadership but also the ability to deliver on the manifesto commitments on which many were elected.
Despite realising this political reality of the need for party solidarity, there are principles that trump it. To me, that is the greater recognition that ultimately politics is a means rather than an ends. For those who operate in the political world to remain authentic, they must sometimes depart from the accepted script.
In support of this contention, I rely on the unexpected comments of Governor Chris Christie in support of President Obama’s reaction to Hurricane Sandy. Christie gave a keynote speech at the Republican National Convention only a few months ago in Tampa and has been hotly tipped as a future Republican Presidential candidate.
At the convention, he made it clear he saw the Republicans as the true truth tellers to the American people. In what was perhaps a portentous moment, he called for a “new era of truth-telling”.
Few could have predicted this straight talking politician meant he would be referring to Obama’s handling of the devastation visited on the east coast of America as “outstanding”. When asked by an interviewer about whether Mitt Romney would visit New Jersey, Christie gave him short shrift for focusing on presidential politics.
What are we to make of a hardened Republican like Christie overflowing with praise for Obama? Well maybe in politics there are some things more important than strategising, like putting the people you represent first. That’s why most people go into politics in the first place right?
I leave the last words on the matter to Christie:
Says Christie:
“Right now i have nothing but praise for the way the administration has handled that, and co-ordinated with us at the state level… This is the oath I took, and I quite frankly don’t care about the election at this moment…
“I’ve got lives to protect and rebuild in my state, and if the President of the United States does a good job, I will praise him…He deserves and has earned my praise and he’ll get it, regardless of what the calendar says, because this is much more important than politics, this is the lives of the people of my state.”
47 Responses to “Comment: Rebellions, loyalty and Governor Christie”
Newsbot9
See, that’s a good mutualist view on tax. I’m quite serious when I say it’s not radical.
Your “personal view” is wrong though.
Even without a SINGLE immigrant we’d have a critical housing shortage. Moreover, the amount of brownfield land in the hands of private companies has done nothing but rise…the problem is not planning permission but the lack of incentives to build housing except for the rich when rents are on a decades-long above-inflation escalator, and there is no tax reason not to sit on land.
Quite simply, the private sector’s house building remains effectively unchanged from the day when Thatcher ended council house building, and that rate was always going to be grossly insufficient.
Rents are just one part of the squeeze…house prices have tracked the overall economy well, but of course as wages have been falling as a percentage of said economy…
jeff
and how do you work out that immigration is 5-10% of the issue? without immigration our population would be stable or possibly falling and the only houses needing building would be to replace ones that are knocked down.
at the moment we need around 100,000 houses a year just for new people let alone to house current inhabitants better.
I’ll disagree on the planning permission issue. Given anyone would be allowed permission to build a house given they could buy some farmland to put it on there would be no housing shortage at all.
Newsbot9
Again, this is based on faulty assumptions. The British population, including the White British population, is growing. And how? I read the papers on it, of course.
100k for just “new people”. Right..never mind actual figures on housing density, or who council houses would actually go to. Housing people “better”? Nope, no incentives at all in the current system to do that. Heck, it’s easier in most cases to find a new tenant than to do work if one wants some basic work done on the house.
And of course you think paving over farmland would help. People apart from the rich have to access their jobs. This means transport infrastructure, this means expensive spending simply not required in any major way for brownfield sites (oh, you might need to adjust bus routes and so on, but that’s not in the same order of magnitude).
(Or, alternatively, you’re simply expecting the poor to own a car and to the costs of that on the 90-minute commutes the government requires people to do to their minimum-wage jobs!)
Then there are all the side effects on food prices and so on…
This is on top of the fact that there is NO EVIDENCE that house building will pick up. There have been efforts to ease planning permission which have produced no up-tick in building… (it’s shifted where building occurs, but the same thing happens – you get a few luxury houses and an even small number of “affordable” houses which MIGHT be in the reach of the middle class…) again, building new houses isn’t that interesting to companies when rents are going up as fast as they are. The only way to break this cycle is both new housing (and the only realistic way to get THAT is for the Govenrment to start building council houses) and rent caps!
And no, we don’t need to pave over the countryside given the vast amounts of brownfield land which companies would release if they were taxed on that!
Newsbot9
Mad? No. I just point out that as usual it’s a good Social Darwinist, Totalitarian view. You’ve expressed that often enough that nobody can be surprised about it.
jeff
The White British population contains many people who are from immigrant populations. An Albanian with a UK passport is ‘White British’. Without significant net migration over the last 50 years, we would have a population 10 million lower and there would be houses for everyone – with gardens.
The indigenous population is stable or falling. The ethnic English are probably for the first time in history no longer in the majority in England, certainly not in the their capital, London.