Autocrats, Kleptocrats and Populists

Lord Balfe Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, I hope that we are not going to deteriorate into a sort of two-party or three-party squabble, because the Question that the noble Lord has put on the agenda is a fundamental one in European and wider terms. In 1979, Jim Callaghan noted that the age of post-war consensus politics was coming to an end. He probably did not realise how true the words that he spoke were. Today we have not only a very unsatisfactory democracy for those of us who grew up in the immediate post-war world but one that is largely underwritten by the population. This is something quite new.

I spent most of my active political career travelling around the world in many different guises and visiting other countries with many different forms of democracy. When I started in 1979, most of them at least subscribed to the idea that they were doing the best for their people. But by the end of that era, where we are now, we have not only a situation that is quite unsatisfactory but, I put it to your Lordships, a system that has far more support from the grass roots than we should be happy with.

I spent 20 years in the European Parliament as its rapporteur on Turkey. I saw it from the rule of General Evren and the colonels right through to the present President, Mr Erdoğan, who was Prime Minister when I finished. We may not like it, but we have to accept that Erdoğan has won all the elections that he has stood in. They have all been observed by Council of Europe and OSCE delegations and been passed as, on balance, acceptable. The people of Turkey have consistently voted for the policies that their President has wished on them, even though most of those policies are a big abnegation of anything that we could call democracy.

The same can be seen in other countries. My son studied in Moscow. I visited Moscow around the time of the Crimea incident, among other times. It was clear that the Russian population were overwhelmingly behind Putin, and they still are. He still has a roughly 60% positive rating, which is something that Keir Starmer or Johnson can only dream about.

My point is that it is fine for us to feel unhappy about the decline in democracy, and I indeed do. I share a lot of the reservations the noble Lord, Lord Browne, mentioned but I also think that we need to look beyond where we are and see why it has come about. I think one of the reasons is the genuine collapse in confidence of ordinary people that politicians can make a difference to their lives. That is probably the thing we need to direct our attention to.

Politics has become far too professional. I remember when I came into politics in the 60s—this was after 1966—they used to say we have 300 members of the parliamentary Labour Party, 100 of them are totally unfit for office, another 100 do not want office so that gives us 100 people from whom to fill 80 ministerial posts. If you look back, Ministers lasted a long time. Now, virtually everybody in Parliament is capable of being a Minister, but I am not sure that they are capable of relating to the people who elect them to this building.

There is a fundamental challenge. I do not think it is a clash between two parties; it is a challenge for us to get our act together and start building democracy back and promoting the values on which it is based.