DEMOCRACY

The rise and fall

of British
democracy
If walls could talk, the structures that house our
democracy would teach a desperate lesson. Beneath
the gold and gilt and glamour, parliament is a ruin.
Its walls are riddled with asbestos; its cracked pipes
tip dirty water into the chamber; and fires break out
with alarming regularity. A cross-party inquiry in
2016 found steam lines, gas pipes and water pipes
piled haphazardly on top of one another, in a
“potentially catastrophic mix”. Without urgent
renovation, the whole edifice faced “sudden,
catastrophic failure”.It is not just the building that
is in trouble. Trust in parliament has never been
lower. According to the Hansard Society, barely a
third of voters trust MPs “to act in the interests of
the public”. Forty two per cent would prefer it if
governments did not “have to worry so much about
parliamentary votes”, while more than half want “a
strong leader who is willing to break the rules”. An
unwritten constitution, once prized for its flexibility,
has created a chaotic patchwork of competing
authorities – including the referendum, an uneven
devolution settlement and member-led parties –
with little consideration of how they fit together. In
short, Britain’s parliamentary democracy has rarely
felt more under siege.Since the EU referendum of
2016, parliament has been cowering under the
instruction of a higher democratic authority. MPs
sit sullenly behind leaders imposed on them against
their will, disciplined by manifestos on which they
were not consulted and by activists who plot their
deselection. Journalists, protestors and even the
prime minister stoke popular hostility to
parliament, casting it as a Westminster cabal bent
on obstructing the will of the people.Democracy is a
cruel mistress and parliament has no monopoly on
its affections. Yet our parliamentary constitution is
a cause worth fighting for. Saving it will require a
frank recognition of its failures, and a willingness to
do more than dial the clock back to 2015. During an
earlier political crisis, in the 1830s, the Whig
constitutionalist Thomas Macaulay adjured his
fellow members to “reform, that you may preserve”.
In that spirit, let us rebuild our parliamentary
democracy.Democracy is the civic religion of
modern British politics, but its roots do not run
deep. Until the 20th century, the experimental
record of democracy was notoriously poor. The
democracies of the ancient world collapsed into
anarchy and dictatorship; in the 1790s, a
revolutionary democracy in France expired in a pool
of civic blood; and the United States was engulfed in
civil war in the 1860s. Democracies, it appeared,
were violent, despotic and unstable. “If there were a
people of gods,” wrote Rousseau, “they would
govern themselves democratically. So perfect a
government is not for men.”Even the reformers who
flung open Britain’s electoral system were seldom
believers in democracy. Lord John Russell, who
devised the Great Reform Act of 1832, thought
universal suffrage “the grave of all temperate liberty
and the parent of tyranny and licence”. Benjamin
Disraeli, who carried its successor in 1867, told MPs
it must “never be the fate of this country to live
under a democracy”. By the time of the third reform
act, in 1884-85, the direction of travel was clear, but
not necessarily welcome. The bill, wrote one
minister, was “a frightfully democratic measure,
which I confess appals me”.Against this
background, the triumph of democracy marked an
intellectual revolution, akin to the rise of the great
religions. It brought with it two features common to
mass conversions. The first was an apocalyptic
tendency: prophets of doom, announcing the end
times of democracy, have made a healthy living
since at least the 1900s. The Labour Party, the
Conservative Party, the European Union,
immigration, inflation and anything of which
Rupert Murdoch disapproves have all been
identified as existential threats to popular
government. Democracy, it appears, is both so
mighty that it cannot be resisted, and so frail as to
be ever at risk of extinction.Like so many great
religions, democracy birthed an array of warring
sects. Democracy is a principle, not a set of
institutions. It declares that the people (or the
“demos”) should “rule”, but says nothing about how
they should govern, what they should govern or
even who “the people” are. (Women, slaves,
immigrants and the young have all, at one time or
another, been excluded in the name of democracy.)
Enthusiasts for liberal democracy, industrial
democracy, direct democracy and social democracy
disagree on everything from the reach of democracy
to the mechanism for establishing its will.
Legitimacy, in democratic thought, comes only from
the people; but the very act of decision-making
disrupts its unity, dividing one group against
another.The model that emerged in Britain – more
by chance than design – was a distinctly
conservative idea of democracy. Power remained in
the hands of Britain’s medieval parliament,
operating at arm’s length from the public. Pre-
democratic elements, such as the monarchy and the
House of Lords, both survived and thrived, while
governments successfully fought off demands for
direct democracy or industrial democracy. This was
not the self-governing democracy of the ancient
world, in which citizens made their laws in the
public square. It was government by a select few,
accountable at periodic intervals to the
electorate.The supremacy of parliament was never
uncontested. The programme of the Independent
Labour Party, published by Keir Hardie and Ramsay
MacDonald in 1899, left open the question of
“whether the representative chamber is to remain
the chosen method of expressing the democratic
will”. The Social Democratic Federation went
further, telling supporters in 1893 that “we do not
believe in the parliamentary system”. It preferred “a
system of pure democracy”, expressed through the
“Initiative” and “Referendum”.
In the 1930s, mass unemployment fed growing
hostility to parliament, and to what Oswald Mosley,
the fascist leader, called “the false liberty of a few
old men to talk forever”. Parliament, thought
Mosley, should hand over its powers to a
government based not “on the intrigues and
manoeuvres of conflicting parties, but on the will of
the nation, directly expressed”. A future Labour
chancellor, Stafford Cripps, argued in 1933 that a
socialist parliament should immediately pass an
emergency powers bill allowing ministers to
implement their programme through direct
orders.The Second World War had a paradoxical
effect on parliament, circumscribing its powers but
enhancing its prestige. General elections were
suspended, secret sessions held and emergency
powers vested in the government; even the chamber
of the House of Commons was destroyed by
bombing in 1941. Yet the imaginative hold of
parliament was never stronger, as the arena of
Churchill’s great speeches and a symbol of national
defiance. Churchill called it “the citadel of British
liberty” and the rock on which dictators would be
broken. “I do not know how else this country can be
governed,” he said in 1943, “other than by the
House of Commons.”By the 1960s, however, the
chorus of criticism was swelling once more. Tony
Benn, soon to emerge as the doyen of the Labour
left, railed against the “obsolete philosophy of
parliamentary government”, which limited voters to
the occasional cross on a ballot paper. It was Benn,
more than any other politician, who secured
Britain’s first national referendum in 1975, on
membership of the European Economic
Community. Soon, he predicted, there would be an
electronic button in every household, making
possible “a new popular democracy” in place of
“parliamentary democracy as we know it”.By the
1980s, Benn was calling for a “national liberation
struggle” to tear down “the lace curtains hung by the
Mother of Parliaments”. Britain’s parliamentary
democracy, he concluded, was “a decorous façade,
behind which those who have power exercise it for
their own advantage”.

It was not only the left who looked to democracies

outside parliament. “The democracy of the ballot
box,” said Margaret Thatcher in 1978, was “only one
form of democracy”. In “a truly free society”, it
needed to be “reinforced by the democracy of the
market, in which people cast their vote, not once
every four years or so, but every day as they go
about their daily business”. For Thatcher, the
democratic control of industry would be achieved by
the market, not the state, allowing each consumer to
“have what he or she wants most”.

Such claims were polemical, rather than analytical.

In the struggle for political power, democracy was
the elder wand: a weapon that could win all battles
for its rightful master. It cast its protective spell
over the most improbable causes. GK Chesterton, in
1908, defined tradition as “the democracy of the
dead”; an “extension of the franchise” to those
“disqualified by the accident of death”. Winston
Churchill made a democratic case for the British
empire, which he credited with “spreading
democracy more widely than any other system of
government since the beginning of time”. Margaret
Thatcher deployed democracy as a weapon against
socialism, promising in 1981 to uphold democracy
“in the dictionary sense, not the Bennite sense”.
During the miners’ strike in 1984-85, she rallied her
supporters with a speech on “Why Democracy Will
Last”. Arthur Scargill, of the National Union of
Mineworkers, retaliated with a promise to win back
“for the British people the democracy… they have
been denied over the past 40 years”.So the idea of
“democracy in crisis” – or the conviction that
Remainers, judges or Theresa May pose a threat to
the survival of democracy – is far from new. Nor is a
suspicion of parliament as an obstacle to democratic
politics. What has changed is the direction of fire,
for the challenge to parliament has moved from the
fringes into the mainstream. Tackling that requires
us to understand why that change matters, and how
it came to pass.its best, parliamentary democracy
embodies three core principles. The first is that
democracy is a conversation, conjured from a
glorious cacophony of voices and interests. Human
beings are not, like the Borg in Star Trek, mere
extensions of a single mind. They are farmers and
factory workers; shopkeepers and office clerks;
teachers, writers and musicians. They are “hangers-
and-floggers”, “bleeding-heart liberals”, socialists,
anarchists and none of the above. They follow
different religions, read different newspapers and
have different visions of the good society.

The role of parliament is to bring those voices into

dialogue. The very name comes from the French
word “to speak”: parliament is where the people
come together to parley. For that reason, a
parliamentary system does not entrust a single
figure with the full powers of government; instead,
it returns 650 different voices, ranging from Diane
Abbott and Caroline Lucas to Arlene Foster and
Jacob Rees-Mogg. From the lowliest backbencher to
the prime minister, each has the same popular
mandate; each is a representative of the people. The
symbol and arena of our democracy is an argument
between competing voices.A second principle
follows logically. Parliamentarism not only
legitimises dissent; it institutionalises it, in the role
of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. The archaic title
expresses an important principle: that even those
who have been defeated at a general election remain
central to the democratic process. Minorities are
outvoted, but not silenced. They can test and
challenge the majority, asking difficult questions
and trying to peel off support. Dissent is not treason
or an offence against the people. It is a service to
them, including those – perhaps temporarily – in a
minority.Third, no parliament can bind the hands of
its successor. A democracy can change its mind; the
process of argument, debate and persuasion is
punctuated by the electoral system, not terminated
by it. As soon as one election is over, preparations
for the next begin, with the promise of new
alignments of opinion and the conversion of
minorities into majorities.All three of these
principles are currently under attack. For our latter-
day populists, the will of the people is a single,
unitary intelligence, issuing instructions to its
delegates in parliament. It is an authoritarian
fantasy, made possible only by the ruthless
suppression of dissenting voices. When Nigel
Farage hailed the referendum result as a triumph
for “real people”, he meant precisely that: Remain
voters were recast as elites whose resistance to “the
people” must be crushed. That fuels an intolerance
of dissent, in which minorities must be silenced, not
simply outvoted; and it freezes the democratic
process at a single moment in June 2016. The
people, we are told, have spoken; and like a naughty
child at a dinner party, they are not to speak again
until the feast is over.On this model, “the will of the
people” is no longer a negotiation within
parliament. It is a weapon to be held over it. MPs
are instructed to deliver “what the people voted
for”; but since none of the options before
parliament was on the ballot in 2016, clairvoyance
becomes a necessary art of government. Like a
theocracy without a priesthood, the will of the
people is endowed with the force of holy law; yet no
one can agree on what it is. The test of a policy is no
longer the strength of its arguments or its support
in the House, but its mystical connection with an
imagined people.How did these ideas gain traction?
Parliament itself has much to answer for. Under the
inflated majorities of Thatcher and Blair, MPs too
often served as cheerleaders, rather than critical
friends. On the Iraq War, in particular, too few
asked searching questions of the case for invasion.
The 2009 expenses scandal did lasting damage, as
did the parachuting of party apparatchiks into safe
seats with which they had little connection.Above
all, parliament failed in its core mission: to bring
different opinions into dialogue. Too often, what
passes for our national conversation is closer to a
mass brawl at a football stadium, with MPs yelling
and jeering across the field of play. Great swathes of
opinion are locked out altogether, by an antiquated
and indefensible electoral system. When four
million people vote Ukip, as in 2015, and are
rewarded with a solitary MP, we should not be
surprised if they view parliament as something done
to them by an external elite.It is not only radical
voices that are excluded. In the 2015 general
election, unionist voices in Scotland were washed
away by the Scottish National Party, which won 95
per cent of Scottish seats on 50 per cent of the vote.
The SNP had earned the right to the biggest voice in
Scottish politics – and unlike Labour or the
Conservatives, it did not choose the system that
gave it power. But less than a year after a
referendum on Scottish independence, the result
made a mockery of the most important fault-line in
Scottish opinion.The problem was exacerbated by
constitutional jerry-rigging. David Cameron seemed
to approach the constitution like the dodgy builder
from Fawlty Towers: knocking through a wall here,
putting in a door there, until the building nearly
collapsed around him. His Fixed-Term Parliaments
Act, passed for the convenience of the coalition in
2011, wrought havoc with parliamentary
accountability, severing the connection between
“confidence” and the ability of a government to pass
its legislation. His casual use of the referendum
broke the core principle of responsible government:
that those who advocate a policy take responsibility
for its results. The vote to leave the EU, with no
indication of its terms or conditions, hit the
parliamentary system like a blast from the Death
Star – and as so often, it was left to a woman to
clean up the mess.That referendum was followed by
a series of further shocks, of which the most
important was the Labour leadership contest in the
summer of 2016. When MPs overwhelmingly
passed a vote of no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn,
they pitted their authority as parliamentarians
against the will of the party membership. Their
defeat marked an epoch in parliamentary history.
For the first time, a candidate for prime minister
drew his mandate exclusively from outside the
parliamentary party. The shadow chancellor, John
McDonnell, told a demonstration before the
confidence vote that “we will not allow the
democracy of our movement to be subverted by a
handful of MPs”. In a different context, it was a
form of words that could have been spoken by Nigel
Farage, pitting a democracy outside the House
against its elected representatives.A similar model
is at work in the Conservative Party. If Theresa May
stands down before the next election, Britain will
acquire its first directly elected prime minister:
placed in No 10 not by parliament, nor by the
electorate, but by 124,000 Tory party members. (It
avoided a similar fate in 2016, when Andrea
Leadsom withdrew before the members’ ballot.) The
radicalising effects of that change are already
apparent. As the end of May’s premiership draws
near, so her prospective successors move closer to a
hard Brexit, drawn by the tractor beam of the party
membership. Not since the days of the rotten
boroughs, before the Reform Act of 1832, have a few
hundred thousand people exerted such
disproportionate, unaccountable power.Party
democracy has obvious attractions, at least for those
inside the gates. The chance to set policy, dismiss
MPs and choose a prime minister restores to
members a sense of empowerment that can be lost
in a sprawling, parliamentary system. But it comes
at a price. In bolting on to a parliamentary system
elements of a presidential and plebiscitary regime,
we have cut the central artery of the British
constitution: that a government must command the
confidence of the House of Commons. The result is
gridlock, tempered by intimidation. Labour MPs
cannot force a change; Tory MPs dare not, for fear
of worse to come. A solution may be found in the
constituencies, as activists turf out dissenting MPs.
But if pro-European Conservatives, Labour
Corbynsceptics and left-wing Brexiteers are purged
from the Commons, parliament will become less
representative of national opinion, not more.Like
the buildings it inhabits, parliament needs urgent
renovation. The first priority is a new voting system
that more accurately represents the spectrum of
national opinion. The second is to replace the Fixed-
Term Parliaments Act, which allows zombie
governments to linger on when they can no longer
pass their major legislation. Third, parliament
should radically reduce its workload, distributing
more of its powers to local and devolved
government. Party members are right to prize the
immediacy of a smaller, more responsive
democracy; but that should be open to all, and not
just to a fee-paying minority.

Just as importantly, we need a radical shift in the

culture of parliament. The closure of the Palace of
Westminster for repairs offers a once-in-a-
generation chance to shake the culture of the
existing chamber, through a more civilised, less
confrontational set-up. With the spell of the existing
House broken, we could even build a new
parliament, fit for the 21st century. With apologies
to Birmingham and Manchester, MPs must stay
close to the government they hold to account; but a
new home could be a symbol of a regenerated
democracy.Rummaging around in the ashes of
British politics, there are still some sparks of hope.
With the majority of parliamentary talent banished
from the front benches, we have the seen the return
of the independent backbencher. Committee chairs
have become increasingly powerful figures, while
MPs such as Hilary Benn, Yvette Cooper and
Dominic Grieve have made much of the running in
the Brexit process. They have found a valuable ally
in the Speaker, John Bercow, who has persistently
championed parliament against the executive. It is a
shift that must continue under his successor.

The fractured politics has never been more in need

of a place where competing ideas and interests can
come together, in order to argue, to educate and to
inform. But if we believe in our parliamentary
system, we will need to fight for it. The pipes are
leaking and the foundations crumbling, but the
structure is as precious as ever. It is time to rebuild
our parliamentary democracy.