Richard Heller: The pointless rituals of political shadowland

Shadow Cabinet members take responsibility without reward. They get no extra salary – just a share of the so-called Short Money to help meet research and office costs (and miserably short it was too, when I got paid from it). If they continue to earn any money, or accept financial or staff support, from outside sources you run the risk of scandal. David Cameron's Shadow team escaped amazingly lightly for the support they received from special interests who stood to profit from their decisions in government. Ed Miliband would be wise to ban his new team from doing the same.

Shadow Cabinet members are expected to master the business of a

Department of State with none of the back-up given to its real ministers: no civil servants to create policy (or the illusion of policy) and supply answers (or the illusion of answers) to difficult questions, no diary secretaries to organise their lives, and most cruelly, no official transport to move them about. They have to pay attention, if not homage, to every special interest group in your area of responsibility. Their correspondence bulges with submission from busybodies and cranks – worst of all, those who are well-informed. They often have to immerse themselves in Eurobabble as well as all the tedious output of their shadowed UK department.

However hard they work, their political life is ultimately shaped by the Government – workload, media opportunities and reputation. Apart from those inside the bubble of politics and special interests, almost nobody will be interested in any independent initiative by a Shadow Cabinet member although the media will pounce on anything which can be manufactured into a gaffe or a split with their party leader. Junior shadow spokesman have it even worse. Any exciting bits of their brief will be seized by their bosses, leaving them with the latenight leftovers in the Commons and the unwanted invitations to rubber-chicken banquets.

All of these horrors are well-attested – yet there is always a superabundance of volunteers for Shadow positions. Ed Miliband has just given frontbench roles to 23 of Labour's 66 new MPs – people who have barely had the chance to find the lavatories in Westminster, let alone achieve anything for their new constituents. Yorkshire MPs Michael Dugher and Rachel Reeves have signed up for years of unpaid drudgery which barely 50 voters will notice in Barnsley or Leeds.

Britain's "shadow government" system has been much imitated, especially in democratic Commonwealth countries. It purports to give Britain the advantages of an alternative government-in-waiting and a fair hearing for opposition policies and viewpoints.

These advantages are greatly over-stated. Few party leaders choose their Shadow Cabinet as future real ministers: they make appointments on the basis of internal party politics. Ed Miliband has just given his three top portfolios to people with almost no relevant experience: Alan Johnson shadowing the economy, Ed Balls home affairs and Yvette Cooper foreign policy. He is the first party leader to ask his shadow foreign secretary to take on an additional portfolio – women's and equality issues. This may again be due to internal party politics. He may have wanted to remove these issues from Harriet Harman or to give Yvette Cooper additional compensation for losing out on the Chancellorship. But perhaps he read my article in this newspaper in September, and recognises that Britain should pay less attention to foreign policy.

A fair hearing for opposition policies – oppositions do not have these any more, and certainly not from their Shadow Cabinets. The last vote-winning policy by any opposition was council house sales by the Tories in the 1970s. (George Osborne successfully panicked Gordon Brown out of an election in 2007 with his proposed cut in inheritance tax but this policy had to be abandoned before the real election). Labour in opposition came to grief over policy proposals in 1983, 1987 and 1992. Tony Blair responded by shrinking policy into five simple, attractive postcard pledges, removing all unpopular commitments and relying on voters to eject an exhausted, discredited government. David Cameron learnt the same lesson and this has become the standard opposition playbook.

For modern shadow spokesmen, the prime ingredients for success are opportunism, plausibility (especially on television) and avoiding offence to major interest groups. The size of front bench teams ensures that up to a half of any opposition's MPs are rewarded for these qualities. To these can be added all the opposition MPs who want to replace them or secure some other reward from their leaders, which leaves only a handful of opposition MPs prepared to think and speak independently about national issues.

The Shadow system guarantees that the first response to any significant government policy comes from an opposition zombie whose prime aim is the safe delivery of a prepared script. It perpetuates political ritual which leaves more and more voters indifferent and disenchanted.

Richard Heller is an author and former policy adviser to Denis Healey.