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In a symbolic gesture toward creating an ever closer Union, the European Union conferred citizenship on everyone who was also a subject of one of its member states. However, the rights of European citizens are more like those of subjects of the pre-1914 Germain Kaiser than of a 21st century European democracy.
The general election of May 2015 brought an end to five years of coalition government in Britain. The Cameron-Clegg coalition, between 2010 and 2015, prompted much comment and speculation about the future of the British party system and the two party politics which had seemed to dominate the period since 1945. A long historical perspective, however, I think throws an interesting light on such questions.
As the UK General Election draws near, the economy has again been the over-riding feature of the campaign. Yet the debate itself has been pretty narrow, being principally framed around ‘austerity’ and the reduction of the size of the government’s budget deficit. The major political parties are all committed to eradicating this deficit, with the main question being the time-frame in achieving this goal.
In anticipation of the imminent General Election on 7 May 2015, we pulled together information from Who’s Who to take a closer look at the major players bidding for our votes. We’ve mapped nine party leaders and deputy leaders to their constituencies.
‘London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down; London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady’. ‘Oh no it’s not!’ I hear you all scream with oodles of post-Christmas pantomime cheer but Parliament is apparently falling down. A number of restoration and renewal studies of the Palace of Westminster have provided the evidence with increasingly urgency. The cost of rebuilding the House? A mere two billion pounds! If it was any other building in the world its owners would be advised to demolish and rebuild.
The Georgian Parliament Building might be a rather odd place to begin this New Year blog about British politics but the visionary architecture behind the stunning new building in Kutaisi offers important insights for those who care about British politics.
Put very simply, the architecture and design of a building says a lot about the values, principles and priorities of those working within it. The old parliament building in Tblisi was a stone pillared fortress that reflected the politics of the soviet era whereas the new parliament is intended to offer a very public statement about a new form of politics. Its style and design may not be too everyone’s taste – a forty-meter high glass dome that looks like a cross between an alien spaceship and a frog’s eye – but the use of curved glass maximises transparency and openness. It represents the antithesis of the stone pillared fortress that went before it.
New Parliament building of Georgia in Kutaisi, by Spartaky. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
I’m not suggesting that the London Eye is suddenly upstaged by the creation of a new frog-eye dome on the other side of the Thames but I am arguing in favour of a little creative destruction. Or to make the same point slightly differently, if we are to spend two billion pounds in an age of austerity – and probably far more once the whole refurbishment is complete – then surely we need to spend a little time designing for democracy. Designing for democracy is something that imbued the architecture of the new Scottish Parliament and the National Assembly of Wales, it also underpinned the light and space of the Portcullis House addition to the Palace of Westminster.
The importance of Portcullis House is important. The underground corridor that connects the ‘old’ Palace of Westminster with the ‘new’ Portcullis House is far more than a convenient pathway: it is a time warp that takes the tired MP or the thrusting new intern back and forward between the centuries. The light, modern and spacious atmosphere of Portcullis House creates an environment in which visitors can relax, committees can operate and politicians can – dare I say – smile. The atmosphere in the Palace of Westminster is quite different. It is dark and dank. It is as if it has been designed to be off-putting and impenetrable. It is ‘Hogwarts on Thames’ which is great if you have been brought up in an elite public school environment but bad if you did not. It has that smell – you know the one I mean – the smell of private privilege, of a very male environment, of money and assumptions of ‘class’. It is not ‘fit for purpose’ and everyone knows it. And yet we are about to spend billions of pounds rebuilding and reinforcing this structure.
Old Parliament building of Georgia in Tbilisi. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
There is, however, a deeper dimension to this plea to take designing for democracy seriously: architecture matters. The structure of Parliament, in terms of the seating and the corridors, the lack of visitor amenities, the lack of windows, and the dominance of dark wood, represents the physical manifestation of that ‘traditional’ mode of British politics that is now so publicly derided. The structure delivers the adversarial ‘yaa boo’ politics that now turns so many people off.
The Palace of Westminster should be a museum, not the institutional heart of British politics.
In recent years the Speakers of both Houses of Parliament have made great strides in terms of ‘opening up’ Parliament but modernisation in any meaningful sense is fundamentally prevented by the listed status if the building. A window of opportunity for radical reform did open-up when an incendiary bomb hit the chamber of the House of Commons on 11 May 1941. The issue of designing for democracy was debated by MPs with many favouring a transition to a horseshoe or semi-circular design. But in the end, and with the strong encouragement of Winston Churchill, a decision was taken to rebuild the chamber as it had been before in order to reinforce the traditional two-party system. ‘We shape our buildings’ Churchill argued ‘and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ Maybe this is the problem.
The refurbishment of Parliament has so far escaped major public debate and engagement. And yet if we really want to breathe new life into British democracy then the dilapidation of the Palace of Westminster offers huge opportunities. The 2015 General Election is therefore something of a distraction from the more basic issue of how we design for democracy in the twenty-first century. Fewer MPs but with more resources? Less shouting and more listening? A chamber that can actually seat all of its members? Why not base Parliament outside of London and in one of the new ‘Northern powerhouses’ (Sheffield, Manchester, Newcastle) that politicians seem suddenly so keen on? Two billion pounds is a major investment in the social and political infrastructure of the country so let’s be very un-British in our approach, let’s design for democracy. Let’s do it! Let’s rip it up and start again!
British politics is currently located in the eye of a constitutional storm. The Scottish independence referendum shook the political system and William Hague has been tasked with somehow re-connecting the pieces of a constitutional jigsaw that – if we are honest – have not fitted together for some time. I have written an open letter, encouraging the Leader of the House to think the unthinkable and to put ‘the demos’ back into democracy when thinking about how to breath new life into politics.
Dear William (if I may),
I do hope the Prime Minister gave you at least a few minutes warning before announcing that you would be chairing a committee on the future constitutional settlement of the UK. Could you have ever hoped for a more exciting little project to sort out before you leave Parliament next May? Complex problems rarely have simple answers and this is why so many previous politicians have failed to deal with a whole set of questions concerning the distribution of powers and the respective roles of various sub-sets of both politicians and ‘publics’. The timetable you have been set is – how can I put it – demanding and those naughty people in the Labour Party have taken their bat and ball home and are refusing to play the constitutional game.
I’m sure you know how to sort all of this out but I just thought you might like to know that amongst all the critics and naysayers who claim the British constitution is in crisis I actually think that a crisis might be just what we need. Not a crisis in terms of burning cars and riots in the streets but a crisis in terms of ‘creative destruction’ and the chance for a new way of looking at perennial problems. What’s more – as the Scottish referendum revealed – there is a huge amount of latent democratic energy amongst the public. From Penzance to Perth and from Cardigan to Cromer the public is not apathetic or disinterested about politics but they feel disconnected from a London-based system that is remote in a number of ways.
The reasons for this sense of disconnection are numerous and complex but as a constitutional historian you will know better than most people that British democracy has evolved throughout the centuries with a deep animosity to public engagement. The (in)famous ‘Westminster Model’ that we imposed on countries around the world was explicitly elitist, centralized and to a great extent insulated from public pressure. These features and values – as Scotland revealed – are now crumbling under the weight of popular pressure that will not accept their legitimacy in the twenty first century. But as I said, this should be interpreted as a positive opportunity for re-imagining, for re-connecting and for breathing new life into the system.
The question is how to deliver on this potential for positive change in a way that takes the people with you?
William Hague, 2010, by U.S. Department of State. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Now I’m no Vernon Bogdanor or Peter Hennessy and so writing notes to members of the Cabinet is not a common task but could I just offer three little ideas that might help smooth the path you have been asked to map out?
First and foremost, please ignore Russell Brand.
Secondly, make sure all your officials are also ignoring Russell Brand.
Finally, the trick to moving forward is thinking about constitutional reform not as being like moving pieces on a chessboard or as a zero-sum game in which a ‘win’ for one side means a ‘loss’ for the other. This traditional way of thinking about constitutional politics has served us badly and the aim has to be to turn the problem upside-down and inside-out in a way that creates new opportunities. This means starting with the people – with the demos – and viewing the constitutional puzzle not like a board game but as a multi-level game that suddenly focuses attention on the existence of connections or bonds.
The real challenge is not a lack of political interest amongst the public (indeed the appetite for meaningful engagement is huge) but a lack of ways of drawing upon the upsurges of bottom-up civic energy that keep exploding in various forms – from the off-line Occupy Movement to the on-line growth of ‘clicktivism’ – but to which the ‘traditional’ political institutions seem to offer no answers. Put slightly differently, the public no longer believes that traditional forms of political engagement are actually meaningful. In this context the promises of populist movements suddenly become attractive and Mr Farage gorges on a feast of anti-politics. The focus of your committee on a new constitutional settlement might therefore adopt a quite different approach to all those committees, commissions and inquiries that have gone before you by focusing on what I term ‘nexus politics’. That is, on the institutions and processes that can re-connect the spontaneous and the local and the single issue with the pre-existing institutional framework in a way that positively channels, absorbs and welcomes civic energy and activism. In short, British politics must learn to love democracy in a manner that is quite different to the one-night stand of five-yearly elections.
The problem is that despite the Prime Minister’s pledge on the 19 September to ensure “wider civic engagement… we will say more about this in the coming days”, the days have ticked by but the plans for public engagement remain unclear. What we are experiencing is best characterized as a (classically British top-down) ‘constitutional moment’ in which the existing elite decide what they think is best for the public. However, it has not yet evolved into a truly ‘democratic moment’ in which the public decide for themselves. My note – to bring things to a close – is therefore a simple plea for the Creation of a Citizens Assembly on Constitutional Reform that takes party politics out of discussions about the future and puts power in the power of the people. What a radical thought…
Yours truly,
Matt
P.S. Did I mention avoiding Russell Brand at all costs?
Feature image credit: Union Jack and Scotland, by Julien Carnot. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.
The 29 August 2013 will go down as a key date in British political history. Not only because of the conflict in Syria but also due to the manner in which it reflects a shift in power and challenges certain social perceptions of Parliament.
“It is very clear to me that Parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action,” the Prime Minster acknowledged, “I get that and the Government will act accordingly.” With this simple statement David Cameron mopped the blood from his nose and retreated to consider the political costs (both domestically and internationally) of losing the vote on intervention in the Syrian conflict by just 13 votes. While commentators discuss the future of ‘the special relationship’ with the United States, and whether President Obama will risk going into Syria alone, there is great value is stepping back a little from the heat of battle and reflecting upon exactly why the vote in the House of Commons matters. In this regard, three inter-related issues deserve brief comment.
The broader political canvas on which the vote on military intervention in Syria must be painted can be summed up by what is known as the Parliamentary Decline Thesis (PDT). In its simplest manifestation the PDT suggests that the government became gradually more ascendant over Parliament during the twentieth century. Texts that lamented the ‘decline’ or ‘death’ of Parliament — such as Christopher Hollis’ Can Parliament Survive? (1949), George Keeton’s The Passing of Parliament (1952), Anthony Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain (1962), Bruce Lenman’s The Eclipse of Parliament (1992), to mention just a few examples — have dominated both the academic study of politics and how Parliament is commonly perceived.
What the vote on Syria reveals is the manner in which the balance of power between the executive and the legislature is far more complex than the PDT arguably allows for. There is no doubt that the executive generally controls the business of the House but independent-minded MPs are far more numerous, and the strength of the main parties far more constrained, than is generally understood. (Richard Crossman’s introduction to the 1964 re-print of Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution provides a wonderful account of this fact.)
Drilling down still further, this critique of the PDT can be strengthened by examining the changing constitutional arrangements for the use of armed force. The formal legal-constitutional position over the use of armed force is relatively straightforward: Her Majesty’s armed forces are deployed under Royal Prerogative, exercised in practice by the Prime Minister and Cabinet. However, the last decade has seen increased debate and discussion about Parliament’s role in approving the use of armed force overseas. From Tam Dalyell’s proposed ten-minute rule bill in 1999 that would have required ‘the prior approval — by a simply majority of the House of Commons — of military action by the UK forces against Iraq’ through to the vote on war in Iraq on 18 March 2003, the balance of power between the executive and legislature in relation to waging war has clearly shifted towards Parliament. Prior assent in the form of a vote on a substantive motion is now required before armed force can be deployed. The problem for David Cameron is that he is the first Prime Minister to have been defeated in a vote of this nature.
Defeat for the coalition government brings us to our third and final issue: public engagement and confidence in politics (and therefore politicians). The data and survey evidence on public attitudes to political institutions, political processes and politicians is generally overwhelmingly negative with a strong sense that MPs in particular have become disconnected from the broader society they are supposed to represent and protect. The public’s perception is no doubt related to the dominance of the PDT but on this occasion it appears that a majority of MPs placed their responsibility to the public above party political loyalties.
With less than 22% of the public currently supporting military intervention in Syria, Parliament really has ‘reflected the views of the British people’. The bottom line seems to be that the public understands that ‘punitive strikes’ are unlikely to have much impact on a Syrian President who has been inflicting atrocities on his people for more than thirty months. (Only in Britain could war crimes in Syria be relegated for several months beneath a media feeding frenzy about Jeremy Paxman’s beard!) War is ugly, brutal, and messy; promises of ‘clinical’ or ‘surgical’ strikes cannot hide this fact.
At a broader level — if there is one — what the ‘war vote’ on the 29 August 2013 really reveals is that politics matters and sometimes works. Parliament is not toothless and it has the ability to play a leading role in restraining the executive in certain situations. Could it be that maybe politics isn’t quite as broken as so many ‘disaffected democrats’ seem to think?
Professor Matthew Flinders is Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He wrote this blog while sitting in the Casualty Department of the Northern General Hospital with a broken ankle and is glad to report that he received a wonderful standard of care.
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Image credit: London Houses of Parliament and Westminster Bridge. By Francesco Gasparetti [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Professor Matthew Flinders is Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield. He wrote this blog while sitting in the Casualty Department of the Northern General Hospital with a broken ankle and is glad to report that he received a wonderful standard of care.