What appears to the electorate to be confusion in our parliamentary operations has had its parallels from time to time in other Commonwealth jurisdictions. In Britain, for example, between 1974 and 1979, the Labour Party ruled as a minority government. It came in first as a minority in February 1974, went back to the electorate in October of that year when it secured an overall majority of three, but was soon reduced to a minority again through deaths and the loss of by-elections.
As a consequence, it was defeated more times in the House than any other government in British history, although as here, only a vote of no-confidence which it lost could bring it down. It did lose such a vote eventually, although that was shortly before it was due to call an election anyway. Its defeats came at the hands not just of the opposition, but also sometimes its own back-benchers, who entered the opposition lobby when they disagreed with their front bench on specific issues. The government’s term – and its major business ‒ was not really curtailed as such, however, and it survived after negotiating with other parties in the House of Commons such as the Ulster Unionists, the Scottish Nationalists and the Liberal Party to secure passage of one bill or another. In fact, the last-named of these parties entered a 16-month pact with the government at one stage.
All this occurred at a time of some turbulence in the country at large, with confrontations with the unions and more than 20% inflation. In the end, the government had to have recourse to the IMF. In Parliament itself the government whips worked hard persuading their members to turn out and vote, and according to academic and parliamentarian Philip Norton, at a time when there was no such thing as a cell phone or the current sophisticated means of communication, they knew where every one of their 300-odd MPs were at any given time. It is a lesson the AFC might take to heart, after one of their members did not turn up to a critical select committee vote.
Since every vote counted, on important divisions sick and injured MPs were ferried in ambulances, which Norton said were parked in New Palace Yard outside the Houses of Parliament, where they were counted as if they had entered the lobby. Norton recounts Shirley Williams being brought back on a 17-hour flight from China having just arrived there because her vote was needed, and another minister being flown by military helicopter from Northern Ireland in a tremendous storm when all civilian aircraft had been grounded. Norton also quoted J Ashton as witnessing government Deputy Chief Whip Walter Harrison grabbing MP Eric Heffer “by the lapels on the terrace of the House of Commons and threaten[ing] to throw him over the wall into the Thames if he didn’t get into the Chamber and effin’ vote.” It is hard to imagine our whips engaging in such heavyweight tactics – but then they don’t need to.
In the popular memory the period is best remembered for the chaos which ensued in the House of Commons when the opposition thought that the government had double-crossed them on a pairing convention. Shouts of ‘cheat’ and worse echoed across the floor, scuffles broke out between MPs, two of whom had to be parted by other members, and Michael Heseltine famously seized the mace and swung it over his head with all the facility of a drum-major leading a pipe band.
Despite the drama and uncertainty, Norton said there were very positive aspects to the period, and more particularly, positive consequences. In the first place, he wrote, there was a recognition from the top down that Parliament was an important institution, and both Prime Minister Harold Wilson and his successor James Callaghan (Wilson resigned mid-term) took the House of Commons seriously and spent time there. They also went to some trouble to listen to their back-bench MPs. These and the opposition, while not formulating policy, nevertheless influenced public policy to a degree which had not happened before by virtue of exercising the power to say no to the government.
For its part, the latter acknowledged that the practice and procedure of the House needed to be reviewed, and set up a commission on procedure in 1976, which reported in 1978. According to Norton, the commission stated that “the balance of advantage between Parliament and Government is now weighted in favour of Government to a degree which arouses widespread anxiety and is inimical to the proper working of our parliamentary democracy,” and proposed that a “new balance… be struck.” With this in mind, apart from legislative reform, one of its recommendations included a system of new, independent select committees which would cover all the departments of government. These were introduced under Mrs Thatcher’s government (the Labour government fell not long after the vote on the report), and represented, Norton said, the most important parliamentary reform in 50 years. Among other changes too, he said, was the fact that the previous deferential attitude of the back benchers to the front benchers was abandoned in favour of a more participatory one.
The parallels with the Guyana situation are, of course, limited, but not entirely inapplicable. Certainly the opposition and many outside our House of Assembly see the urgent need for a ‘new balance’ between parliament and government for the sake of our democracy, although this view is stoutly resisted by the PPP. While the party pays lip service to the importance of parliament, it certainly does not want it to function in the way that most politicians on both sides of the British House wanted the Commons to do.
In the first place, the National Assembly is in a sense a part-time organization, meeting only when there is business to be done; there is no space for, or tradition of socializing within its precincts – nothing of the ‘tea room’ tradition of the House of Commons, where in the 1970s ministers of government could be found discussing issues not just with their back benchers, but all sides at all hours. Here party headquarters (and favoured hostelries) are where much of the political socializing is done, which makes for more intra-party exchanges than inter-party ones.
Secondly, there is a greater rigidity in the Guyanese system because of its structure. Constitutional select committees may have been introduced, but the chief executive (the President) does not sit in the House, and is therefore removed from its operations in a way which British prime ministers are not. When the other parties meet him, they have to go to the Presidential Secretariat for formal talks; there can be no informal discussions with him within the framework of the Parliament Building.
Thirdly, while there are back benchers on both sides of our House, they are not allowed any leeway for independent thought, let alone action – the party list sees to that. Anyone who did not toe the line would be dropped, and replaced with someone more tractable. As a consequence, when the parties face each other across the floor they have far more the character of monolithic entities than would be the case in Britain. This is exacerbated by the smaller numbers in our parliament which in turn also lends to greater rigidity. MPs, particularly on the government side, simply parrot the party line, one after the other, which in most cases seriously diminishes the quality of the ‘debate.’
Smaller parties in our House are notable by their absence, unlike the case of the UK in the 1970s, where there were quite a few of them on which as said above the Labour Party often depended for its survival. There is, of course, the AFC, but the government has not taken the route of seeking its support on specific issues – or that of APNU either; rather, it has directed its propaganda to denigrating the AFC and its leadership. For all of that, the AFC and APNU did split in the vote on the security budget. The political aim of the PPP/C seems to be to associate the AFC in the mind of its traditional constituency with the main opposition. In other words, it is not exploring avenues for a different approach to governance in the current circumstances; rather it is trying desperately to set up a situation whereby in the next election it would be returned with the coveted overall majority.
While it is true that the opposition has not operated with the best of wisdom in this situation, the administration for its part has shown no disposition to explore possibilities for a “new balance” between parliament and government. There is little hope, therefore, that it would be amenable to the fundamental constitutional changes which would be required, if greater participation in parliament were to be achieved. It seems to regard the 2011 result as an aberration. The next election should demonstrate to them whether or not their assessments have any validity, although it should be understood that even if they do, it would only be for the short term. In the longer term parliamentary change hovers on the horizon.
