Brexit, Corbyn, Article 50: in 2017, we need to take back our parliamentary democracy
Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn’s election and Article 50: 2016 saw three profound shocks to the integrity of Britain’s parliamentary system, writes Robert Saunders. Together, they amount to a quiet revolution – potentially the most significant recasting of how Britain is governed since the coming of universal suffrage. Understanding how this has happened, why it matters and what should be done about it is essential, if we are not to sleepwalk into new and potentially more dangerous forms of government in the year ahead.
‘Labour MPs now huddle together on the backbenches, powerless behind a leader whose mandate is entirely extra-parliamentary.’ Labour MPs listen to Jeremy Corbyn respond to the Budget in March 2016. Photo: UK Parliament via a CC-BY-NC 2.0 licence
The Crisis of Parliaments
The first great shock was Brexit, which struck the parliamentary system like a visit from the Death Star. The referendum lifted the biggest issue in British politics out of the hands of Parliament, then delivered a verdict that comprehensively overrode its judgement. With three-quarters of MPs backing Remain, the vote to leave was a devastating indictment of the judgement of Parliament and of its claim to represent the people. The shockwaves will be felt for decades, as the whole cast of British foreign, economic and trade policy is reset in a manner to which MPs are largely hostile.
If Brexit marked one blow to Parliament, the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn was another. For the first time in British history, the Leader of the Opposition commands no meaningful support within the House of Commons. He was placed in that role against the express opposition of MPs; and when they attempted to remove him, even serious news outlets described it as a “coup”. A vote of no confidence, backed by three quarters of the parliamentary party, was dismissed as of “no constitutional legitimacy“. Corbyn’s re-election confirmed a remarkable constitutional fact: that the power to appoint the Leader of the Opposition no longer resides in Parliament. Labour MPs now huddle together on the backbenches, powerless behind a leader whose mandate is entirely extra-parliamentary.
Only a happy accident prevented an even more serious constitutional anomaly on the Conservative benches. If Andrea Leadsom had not given a foolish interview to the newspapers, bringing a premature end to the Tory leadership race, Britain would now have its first directly elected Prime Minister. The new premier would have been placed in Downing Street, not by Parliament, nor even by the electorate, but by 170,000 entirely anonymous party members. Not since the Great Reform Act have a few hundred thousand people exercised so much unaccountable and undemocratic power.
This was followed by a third key blow: the controversy around Article 50. When the High Court ruled that only Parliament could trigger the withdrawal process, the tabloids responded as if a coup d’etat had taken place. The Daily Mail denounced the judges as “enemies of the people“, who had “declared war on democracy”. The Daily Express dismissed MPs as a “Westminster cabal“, that could not be trusted to carry out the will of the people. Even when MPs voted by a majority of 5-1 (rather larger than the majority in the referendum) that Article 50 should be triggered before April, The Daily Telegraph published the names of the 89 dissidents, accusing them of “contempt for referendum voters“. Minorities must now be silenced, not simply outvoted.
The most striking feature of the Article 50 case is that it is happening at all. The spectacle of MPs waiting patiently, while the courts decide whether to return powers that they are quite capable of demanding for themselves, would have astonished the Victorians. If the court finds for the government, Parliament will become irrelevant to the single biggest question in British politics. If the government loses, it will table an unamendable bill designed to prevent any meaningful parliamentary involvement. Either way, talk of “the sovereignty of Parliament” has become a quaint archaism, like singing “Britannia rules the waves” on the last night of the Proms.
Does it matter?
Does any of this matter? Parliament is a medieval institution in a digital age, and there have always been those who suspect that it exists rather to frustrate the popular will than to enact it. Surveys consistently rank MPs alongside journalists, estate agents and bankers as the professions least trusted by the public, a sentiment deepened by Iraq, Chilcot and the expenses scandal. Why have MPs at all when, as the Daily Express notes, we already have “a government carrying out the will of the people“?
Democracy is a principle, not a form of government. It expresses a conviction that “the demos”, or “the people” should govern, but says nothing about the forms through which this is done. Since only anarchists believe that “the people” can govern themselves without rules or institutions, some mechanism is necessary through which “the will of the people” can be tested and expressed.
That is harder than it sounds. In all but the most primitive societies, “the people” are a chaos of different interests, impulses and identities. Human beings are not, like the Borg, mere extensions of a single, unitary intelligence; they are farmers and factory workers; old and young; rich and poor. They are shopkeepers, manual labourers and company directors. They vote for different parties, follow different religions and cleave to different values. Democracy is a process, not a body of opinion, which seeks to arbitrate between the glorious cacophony of voices within a free society.
It is this that underpins a parliamentary system. The word “Parliament” comes from the French word “to speak”. It is a place where the different classes and interests that make up a nation come together to parley. MPs talk, debate and bargain; they make compromises, in order to build coalitions of support. Where agreement cannot be reached, the majority must decide; but even majorities are alignments of conflicting ideas and intentions, pulling in different directions even as they coalesce around a temporary position. That’s why there are 329 MPs on the government benches, rather than one MP wielding 329 votes.
In a parliamentary system, dissidents are outvoted, but not silenced. They can test and challenge the majority, asking difficult questions and trying to peel off support. Opposition is not just expected; it is institutionalised. A shadow administration exists throughout the duration of the parliament, led by “the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition”. The archaic title captures something important: that opposition is itself a patriotic duty.
‘The true meaning of democracy’
The vision of democracy currently taking root is very different. For the tabloids, in particular, “the will of the people” is clear and unambiguous. Those who oppose it are guilty of treason against democracy. “Time to silence Brexit whingers“, proclaims the Daily Express. “Damn the Bremoaners and their plot to subvert the will of the British people“, the Daily Mail expostulates. For a columnist in the Express, no punishment could be too severe for critics of Brexit:
Here’s what I would do with them: clap them in the Tower of London … we should give them 28 days against their will to reflect on the true meaning of democracy. We’re in the midst of an exhilarating people’s revolution and those who stand in the way of the popular will must take what’s coming to them.
The Telegraph was only slightly more measured: “all parliamentarians”, it decreed, must “get behind Mrs May and her ministers”. After all, “why would ministers be seeking anything other than the best possible outcome for the country?”
This vision of “the people” as a single intelligence, issuing instructions to politicians, is a dangerous fantasy, made possible only by the vigorous suppression of dissenting voices. The 16 million voters who backed Remain are summarily expelled from the people; they are no longer “people” at all. When Nigel Farage proclaimed, on the morning of 24 June, that Brexit was a victory for “real people“, he meant precisely that. To the populist, minorities are not “real people”; they are traitors and quislings, “metropolitan elites” whose “snake-like treachery cannot go unpunished“. Their views are of no consequence, except as a source of unpatriotic resistance.
In truth, the voice of the people is like the announcements on the London Underground: loud but often difficult to understand, because so many people are talking at once. In populist visions of democracy, only the voice that shouts loudest deserves a hearing. Whether that means the Daily Mail and the Murdoch press or the Momentum faction in the Labour party, that is a grim prospect for our democratic future.
What’s next?
Over the next two years, the country will confront a series of momentous policy questions, none of which was on the ballot paper in June. What trade relationship do we want with the EU, and what price are we willing to pay? How do we rewrite our laws, after 40 years of integration? What do we want to keep, and what must we replace? Our fractured politics has never been more in need of a place where competing ideas and interests can gather to argue, to educate and to inform. What we have instead is a prime minister channelling the malevolent spirits of the tabloid press, wielding prerogative powers and “Henry VIII clauses“, while dissent is shouted down as an offence against the people.
If we want to turn this around, we’ll have to fight for it. That means demanding the right of Parliament, not just to “have a say” on Brexit, or to vote on some meaningless one-line bill expressly designed to shut down discussion, but to take the lead in determining Britain’s new direction. It means not being cowed by the thugs in the tabloid press, whose language increasingly resembles that of the Blackshirts they so admired in the 1930s. It means not putting up with the delusion that Jeremy Corbyn, one of the least popular leaders in British electoral history, has an unparalleled “democratic mandate”, which demands the obeisance of MPs elected by 9 million Labour voters. But it also means admitting where Parliament has been complicit in its own decline.
MPs must take much of the blame for their shrunken status. Parliament was badly damaged by the Iraq vote, when too few MPs were willing to resist the pressure of government and the tabloid press. The expenses scandal did colossal damage, as did the parachuting of party apparatchiks into safe seats with which they had little connection. Above all, an indefensible electoral system has shut out from Parliament significant bodies of opinion that deserved a hearing. When 4.5 million people vote UKIP at a general election, and are rewarded with a solitary MP, we should not be surprised if they conclude that Parliament is something done to them by an external elite.
If Parliament is to revive, we must do more than simply forget that 2016 ever happened. The culture, behaviour and institutions of Parliament all need to change – a subject to which I will return. But it is a fight worth having, if we are to retain a democracy that is pluralistic, discursive and respectful of minority opinions. As 2016 limps unlamented from the stage, let us take back our parliamentary democracy.
Robert Saunders is Lecturer in Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London.Similar Posts
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Damien,
That’s a useful insight. I based my views on a Telegraph article last year by Greg Rosen, which extracted from the 6 day Commons debate in October 1971, and the nature of sovereignty at stake clearly comes through as a topic of debate, with speeches by Waddington, Enoch Powell, Heath etc, all focused on that issue. However, I take you at your word that the mass media did not convey that to the public. I was three years old at the time so I’m afraid I have no personal recollection to add.
I was happy to go along with the Heath Robinson constitutional arrangement, being I suppose an English Liberal pragmatist, but given the way the Brexit referendum was in part used to express anger and disconnect with the political elites, we have to focus on how the political sausage is made, not just what flavour it is at the end. Maybe PR, devolution and English Parliament are hackneyed, but at least they offer a vehicle for political reengagement. Think how the Scottish referendum has helped reinvigorate politics north of the border, even though it was lost by its champions. Unless I am falling for SNP propaganda and the reinvigoration isn’t real…
Cheer
Ted, as a unionist myself, I am nevertheless inclined to agree with you that the referendum in Scotland was a useful and interesting device from the point of view of engagement. But on the flipside, there of course was another example of what I was talking about – although pro-union I was nonetheless furious with the nature of the claims made by my own side: much of it was scaremongering and using unattributed quotes from “senior businessmen and bankers” about how they would pull the plug on Scotland and plunge the whole into chaos and darkness forever if the Scots dared to vote for independence. It antagonised the voter and caused a drift towards the Yes vote.
As a very politically-involved 18 year old during the ‘Common Market’ referendum, this too I remember was the nature of the campaigning by those wanting us to stay in (who I supported at that time!)…along with bizarre pieces in newspapers about the Queen becoming ‘the Queen of Europe’ or suggesting blatantly that anti ‘marketeers’ (‘Wedgie Benn’ as Tony Benn was disparagingly called) were secretly planning to sell us down the river to become a satellite of the Soviet Union the very second they conned us into leaving (I honestly remember the headlines) and narry a word about sovereignty.
Probably the biggest issue now is that the flavour and style have changed (aided by online campaigning) – I watched the political class turn a two thirds majority in Scotland for the status quo into a close-run thing by the end of that vote…and really if you look at the polls they did the same again (with disastrous consequences for themselves) over Brexit – prior to the renegotiation in February 2016, some opinion polls asked the referendum question on the assumption that the UK government would say that it was satisfied with the outcome of the renegotiation (which is what happened of course)…those polls showed a 55-25 split in favour of remain with 20 undecided. Pretty overwhelming…and then they proceed to chuck it all away with the same old approach during the campaign – “It worked before let’s dust it off”. But of course it didn’t really in Scotland, it moved people towards independence, but the status quo managed to cling on. Not with the Brexit vote of 2016. In subsequent years after the mid 70s, I genuinely and gradually felt I had been conned by ‘my side’ over that vote although I had no firm leave views till the early/mid 90s. The late writer Hugo Young (Times/Guardian, ardently pro-EU) made the point very well in his book This Blessed Plot when he recounted that in the 1971-72 Parliamentary debates, “Ministers did not lie, but they avoided telling the full truth. They refrained from stating categorically that the law of the European Community would have supremacy over British law.” “Nor did ministers state that the European Communities Act would be, in practice, irrevocable.” His book suggests that more honesty at an earlier stage might have helped sell the EU better in the UK and in one line which I cannot find but I assure you I have it in essence right, he implies that it might now be too late (this was 1999). It’s worth a read. Regards
The issue of ‘taking back our parliamentary democracy’ has to be seen within the terms of the fact that much of its decline has been at the hands of EU membership – when members of supposedly ‘devolved bodies’ like the London Assembly (of which I was one between 2004 and 2008) are barred from raising all sorts of London issues or proposing solutions because ‘the matters are EU competences’ (even down to pension reform or ‘jobs for locals’ at the Olympics), then we have a serious problem with parliamentary democracy and cannot just “take it back”. Taking it back would be illegal.
The real danger of the whole argument about some of the recent sudden conversions to the joys of parliamentary democracy (I am not including the author of the piece) is that they appear to be saying that Parliament should ‘grow a pair for this night only’…and then go back to being increasingly sidelined as their powers are removed, having handed over to the EU ever greater powers over ever more areas of life. Where will they be if they achieve their aim in making Parliament ever more compliant to the will of the EU? Silent no doubt
The loss of parliamentary control was specifically understood (but kept obscured) by proponents of membership in the 1960s and 1970s, and therefore the problem is not just one of the EU itself but on what led up to it and what could happen again. One hates the term Quisling but it is how a very large percentage of the population sees those who are doing this, now that it is being properly understood.
It is pointless for Parliament to simply now appease its current overlord, the EU, by becoming confident to try and overturn a referendum which itself was a slight on its master, and then simply going back to the never ending process of handing over its powers without a fight to the EU and quietly accepting the situation through platitudes – when challenged on specifics about why matters cannot be sensibly resolved, we have been told for 30 years by politicians in power that ‘we will work with our partners to ensure the best possible solution that brings game set and match to Britain’ or a variation of this – cunningly never actually saying “Sorry we can’t do anything, don’t you understand? The EU makes the rules not us”).
Only when this issue is addressed will we be able to take back parliamentary democracy – otherwise it is surely just a sham, and in the end once the trap is truly shut, the UK will be in the same position as Greece – electing a left wing government on specific anti-austerity policies, having a referendum overwhelmingly backing the government on a specific issue…and being calmly told in a sealed room the next day by the EU (shades of Hradcany Castle 80 years ago, with all the fist banging and savage threats, and cowed leader of the nation emerging battered and compliant) that Greece will do as its told by its real masters and ignore parliamentary democracy (or that those elected will simply obey or else, what a choice). And then giving way and becoming the most right-wing austerity enforcer in the EU on behalf of its masters. What price parliamentary democracy then? And where do the people go when its ‘parliamentary democrats’ commit suicide in this way?
I take issue with the oft-repeated idea that loss of Parliamentary control was kept obscured by pro-EU politicians.
Read the 1971 Commons debate on the accession act. Much time was spent on the nature of sovereignty at stake…. for example, future Tory Home Secretary David Waddington, “[a] country may have complete legal sovereignty, complete power to pass whatever laws it wishes in an attempt to control every kind of activity of its citizens, and yet be so weak as to be incapable of protecting its people from military, economic, or other action taken by other countries. Conversely, another country may sacrifice quite a lot of its legal sovereignty and yet, by acting in partnership with others, be able to exercise very much more power and give greater protection to its citizens than it ever could and did before that sacrifice was made.”
It is right to demand Parliament “grows a set” as we navigate a plethora of constitutional, econonomic and foreign policy questions on the journey out of the EU, and resist the new mobocracy. And you are right this should not be for a day.
What’s missing here is the question of England. Our Heath Robinson constitutional arrangement whereby Scotland and N Ireland have de facto sovereignty over a range of issues, whilst England and Wales operate only in a Westminster construct, seem increasingly ill-equipped to reflect the challenges of renewing our democracy for the age we live in.
An English Parliament, elected by Single Transferable Vote, housed in a city in the Midlands (I nominate my town of birth, Derby!) and bearing equal powers to the Scottish Parliament, would give us a chance to renew this institution. Westminster would become primarily a museum, with a day a week for delegates from the other assemblies to meet and vote on residual UK issues.
I take your point Ted that it was mentioned in Parliament, but parliamentary proceedings like this were barely reported and in essence unavailable easily to the public in those days (no tv, no radio there, just Hansard) – the entire thrust of all the debate from the join side in public (media were all pro ‘Common Market’ so there was little deviation in the established line anywhere) was based upon the then PM’s claim that “there is no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty”.
The full extent of the knowledge by the Executive of what they were signing us up for (and most of this WAS concealed) is summarised in the infamous 1971 Foreign Office advice FCO 30/1048 released under the 30 year rule in 2001. While in rarified circles the loss of sovereignty was discussed, in public those who claimed it (Powell, Benn, Castle, Shore) were held up to ridicule, the latter 3 accused of trying to make the UK part of the Soviet Union. If you check all the front pages of the national newspapers (or tv reports) at the time you will see that the public were not told in any meaningful sense what Parliament was discussing in this way. I myself as a politically active 18 year old at the time was later very angry at having been so fooled (maybe I bring too much of this to my own subsequent views on the EU).
On the subject of the UK’s constitutional arrangements, you have a point also, but there is such enormous resistance to ‘England’ as a complete entity having its own arrangements: you are more likely to get something which is surely much worse – a set of tinpot agencies or ‘parliaments’ with limited powers based upon the English ‘regions’. They keep trying this one. You are right that there is a much greater appetite for a Full English arrangement. I was wrong in assuming that the voter would reject my own desire for a UK out of the EU – it may be that I will be wrong again and that something I myself am a tad less keen on (the English Parliament) might indeed emerge in some form amid the present uncertainty. It’s worth a punt for those campaigning for it.
Damien,
That’s a useful insight. I based my views on a Telegraph article last year by Greg Rosen, which extracted from the 6 day Commons debate in October 1971, and the nature of sovereignty at stake clearly comes through as a topic of debate, with speeches by Waddington, Enoch Powell, Heath etc all focused on that issue. However, I take you at your word that the mass media did not convey that to the public. I was three at the time so I’m afraid I have no personal recollection to add.
I was happy to go along with the Heath Robinson arrangement, being an English Liberal pragmatist, but given the way the Brexit referendum was in part used to express anger and disconnect with the political elites, we have to focus on how the political sausage is made, not just what flavour it is at the end. Maybe PR, devolution and English Parliament are hackneyed, but at least they offer a vehicle for political reengagement. Think how the Scottish referendum has helped reinvigorate politics north of the border. Unless I am falling for SNP propoaganda…..
Cheers