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Wimbledon has started, the barbeques have been dusted off, the sun is shining, and all our newly elected MPs will soon be leaving Westminster for the summer recess. Domestic politics, to some extent, winds down for July and August but the nation never seems to collapse. Indeed, the summer months offer a quite different focus on, for example, a frenzy of festivals and picnics in the park. But could this more relaxed approach to life teach us something about how we ‘do’ politics? Is politics really taking place at festivals and in the parks? Can politics really be fun?
Northern Ireland’s part in the General Election, often seen as peripheral, has already attracted more interest than usual. The Democratic Unionist Party’s (DUP) status as Westminster’s fourth largest party has not gone unnoticed – except perhaps by television broadcasters anxious to clinch election debates involving the leaders of much smaller parliamentary parties.
‘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!
The prospective award of substantial new powers to the Scottish Parliament, which is currently being debated by the Smith Commission, has engendered a growing unease about the constitutional position of many different parts of the UK. This issue is causing concern in Wales, still reeling at the rushed and unfortunate decision to rule the Barnett formula out of the current constitutional debate, and Northern Ireland, where there is a gathering sense of uncertainty about questions ranging from income tax to the prospect of a hung Parliament, following the 2015 election, and the political leverage this might offer to the Democratic Unionist Party.
And there are concerns, too, for those English regions that feel squeezed between an ever more powerful London and a more autonomous Scotland primed to use the new levers it may acquire to divert investment in its direction.
The aftermath of the Scottish referendum has also unleashed a much wider debate about how England as a whole fares in the post-devolved Union, and specifically about some of the anomalies and asymmetries which Labour’s devolution reforms have accentuated — not least the question of how legislation that affects England only or mainly is handled in the Commons. The Conservatives have sought to claim this issue for itself, identifying with one particular answer to the West Lothian conundrum — English-votes-for-English-laws (EVEL).
Experts and campaigners have been quick to proclaim the pros and cons of this particular idea (which in fact can signal a spectrum of different changes, ranging from denying non-English MPs the right to vote on final readings of Bills to finding different ways of giving English representatives a greater role during the passage of legislation), and the main parties have for the most part responded to it in a dismally partisan fashion.
But these anxieties and worries need to be framed in relation to each other, so that this becomes a moment for wider reflection and democratic debate about some of the principles, conventions, and structures of governance within the UK. With the notable exception of the debate which the Lords staged a few weeks ago, these questions have been given too little consideration. Foundational issues such as how all the different pieces of the devolution puzzle might be knitted together, and what kind of democratic process is now required to ensure such an overview, are worryingly absent from much political discourse.
PM and Deputy PM outside Number 10 by The Prime Minister’s Office. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.
There is a growing imperative for the parties to consider what kind of territorial constitution they now wish the UK to become, and to indicate the direction of travel in which they wish constitutional reform to move. Instead Labour says little, a stance that reflects its steady transformation into the conservative party in this area — grimly determined to defend a constitutional settlement which it introduced during the first Blair government.
The Conservatives, on the other hand, have been more sure-footed politically on this issue. Yet they would do well to ponder the curious evolution of their own unionism — for so long an essential ingredient within the party’s DNA. As it has become ever more Anglicized in terms of its parliamentary representation and grassroots strength, and as it has lost its foothold in Scotland and fallen back in Wales, the Unionist party has increasingly turned into the party of Southern and Eastern England. (Indeed one of the most striking features of UKIP’s current ascendancy is its current success in reaching across the chasm of electoral geography which neither of the two main parties at Westminster seems able to bridge). And while it makes considerable political sense for the Conservatives to try to harness a growing set of English grievances and sensitivities, this needs to be squared with the party’s attempt to pose as the champion of the Unionist tradition when dealing with Scottish separatism, on the one hand, and the strongly devolutionist drift of its policy thinking on Scotland and England, on the other.
These discordant notes need somehow to be brought into a new melodious arrangement. This, after all, is the Conservative party, which has always developed its thinking around the values of constitutional preservation, a respect for established institutions and governing structures, and a Burkean understanding of change as best undertaken in organic and evolutionary ways, rather than at the behest of abstract principle or rationalistic design. And accordingly, when the party has on occasions argued for big reforms — for instance the Corn Laws or the great Reform Act of 1867 — it has done so on the grounds that these changes would ensure the integrity and continuity of the system as a whole.
Houses of Parliament at twilight by Davide Simonetti CC BY-NC 2.0 via Flickr.
This ethic has formed the heart of a distinctively Conservative statecraft, an approach to governance reflecting the embedded values of prudent territorial management, sensitivity to the dispositions of the English shires, and a willingness to craft and oversee distinctive institutional settlements for the different territorial parts of the UK. Tory statecraft has for the most part sought to take the political sting out of differences over nationality and territory within the UK, rather than to accentuate and make political capital out of them.
But one of the most striking features of the current situation is the relative paucity of voices considering constitutional change in this kind of way. Instead, the party’s leadership seems to have been spooked by the rise of UKIP into jettisoning its remaining Burkean instincts. Forcing a vote on a proposal for the reform of the House of Commons, which it knows will create a major political division may well make some electoral sense — though whether English anomie will be impressed or satiated by EVEL remains to be seen — but also carries the risk of opening up territorial tensions without the prospect of a viable solution to them within a unionist framework.
Above all, the Conservative party needs to connect the case for the greater recognition and protection of English interests to its commitment to putting the Union on a more durable and fairer footing. Such a position is fundamentally different to the kinds of populist and resentful nationalism which UKIP, and some of its fellow travellers, currently favour. Interestingly, there are signs in recent polling that the English have responded to the Referendum, and the prospect of Scotland leaving the UK, by becoming somewhat less resentful and aggrieved about England’s position in the Union. Such a stance is not compatible, however, with the fantasy of symmetrical devolution all round which underlies the suggestions of those Conservative Cromwellians, who wish to introduce the kind of territorial reform to the House of Commons that would almost certainly amount to the creation of an English parliament and the potential dissolution of the Union.
The Conservatives would do well therefore to rediscover their own tradition of statecraft. This means re-engaging with the diversity of England and the English, and considering the changes that need to be made to the governance and economy of different parts of England — to its counties and rural towns, as well as city-regions and metropolitan authorities — as well as to the Westminster parliament. The boldness and ambition of the offer that George Osborne recently made to Manchester suggest an appreciation of the growing desire for devolution among the English. The challenge now is to shape a more extensive conversation that encompasses all the different pieces of the devolution jigsaw.
Headline image credit: Flag by treehouse1977. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr
Anti-politics is in the air. There is a prevalent feeling in many societies that politicians are up to no good, that establishment politics are at best irrelevant and at worst corrupt and power-hungry, and that the centralization of power in national parliaments and governments denies the public a voice. Larger organizations fare even worse, with the European Union’s ostensible detachment from and imperviousness to the real concerns of its citizens now its most-trumpeted feature. Discontent and anxiety build up pressure that erupts in the streets from time to time, whether in Takhrir Square or Tottenham. The Scots rail against a mysterious entity called Westminster; UKIP rides on the crest of what it terms patriotism (and others term typical European populism) intimating, as Matthew Goodwin has pointed out in the Guardian, that Nigel Farage “will lead his followers through a chain of events that will determine the destiny of his modern revolt against Westminster.”
At the height of the media interest in Wootton Bassett, when the frequent corteges of British soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan wended their way through the high street while the townspeople stood in silence, its organizers claimed that it was a spontaneous and apolitical display of respect. “There are no politics here,” stated the local MP. Those involved held that the national stratum of politicians was superfluous to the authentic feeling of solidarity that could solely be generated at the grass roots. A clear resistance emerged to national politics trying to monopolize the mourning that only a town at England’s heart could convey.
Academics have been drawn in to the same phenomenon. A new Anti-politics and Depoliticization Specialist Group has been set up by the Political Studies Association in the UK dedicated, as it describes itself, to “providing a forum for researchers examining those processes throughout society that seem to have marginalized normative political debates, taken power away from elected politicians and fostered an air of disengagement, disaffection and disinterest in politics.” The term “politics” and what it apparently stands for is undoubtedly suffering from a serious reputational problem.
Tottenham Riots, by Beacon Radio. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.
But all that is based on a misunderstanding of politics. Political activity and thinking isn’t something that happens in remote places and institutions outside the experience of everyday life. It is ubiquitous, rooted in human intercourse at every level. It is not merely an elite activity but one that every one of us engages in consciously or unconsciously in our relations with others: commanding, pleading, negotiating, arguing, agreeing, refusing, or resisting. There is a tendency to insist on politics being mainly about one thing: power, dissent, consensus, oppression, rupture, conciliation, decision-making, the public domain, are some of the competing contenders. But politics is about them all, albeit in different combinations.
It concerns ranking group priorities in terms of urgency or importance—whether the group is a family, a sports club or a municipality. It concerns attempts to achieve finality in human affairs, attempts always doomed to fail yet epitomised in language that refers to victory, authority, sovereignty, rights, order, persuasion—whether on winning or losing sides of political struggle. That ranges from a constitutional ruling to the exasperated parent trying to end an argument with a “because I say so.” It concerns order and disorder in human gatherings, whether parliaments, trade union meetings, classrooms, bus queues, or terrorist attacks—all have a political dimension alongside their other aspects. That gives the lie to a demonstration being anti-political, when its ends are reform, revolution or the expression of disillusionment. It concerns devising plans and weaving visions for collectivities. It concerns the multiple languages of support and withholding support that we engage in with reference to others, from loyalty and allegiance through obligation to commitment and trust. And it is manifested through conservative, progressive or reactionary tendencies that the human personality exhibits.
When those involved in the Wootton Bassett corteges claimed to be non-political, they overlooked their organizational role in making certain that every detail of the ceremony was in place. They elided the expression of national loyalty that those homages clearly entailed. They glossed over the tension between political centre and periphery that marked an asymmetry of power and voice. They assumed, without recognizing, the prioritizing of a particular group of the dead – those that fell in battle.
People everywhere engage in political practices, but they do so in different intensities. It makes no more sense to suggest that we are non-political than to suggest that we are non-psychological. Nor does anti-politics ring true, because political disengagement is still a political act: sometimes vociferously so, sometimes seeking shelter in smaller circles of political conduct. Alongside political philosophy and the history of political thought, social scientists need to explore the features of thinking politically as typical and normal features of human life. Those patterns are always with us, though their cultural forms will vary considerably across and within societies. Being anti-establishment, anti-government, anti-sleaze, even anti-state are themselves powerful political statements, never anti-politics.
Headline image credit: Westminster, by “Stròlic Furlàn” – Davide Gabino. 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.
Enter the world of King Henry VIII, encountered through the eyes of 15-year-old Katherine Tylney, best friend of the soon-to-be famous Catherine Howard. Gossip, lust, manipulation, and flattery are the keys to the top in this dazzling glimpse into the 15th-century Tudor Court. Click here to read my full review.
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The Scottish Election of 2011 represents a watershed in Scottish politics. For the first time the Scottish National Party has come convincingly in first place, securing the absolute majority that was supposed to be impossible under proportional representation. Labour, having dominated Scottish politics for over fifty years, suffered a crushing defeat, losing seats even in its industrial heartland of Clydeside. Both of the parties of the ruling coalition of Westminster are reduced to minor players at Holyrood, without even the leverage that small parties enjoyed in the last parliament.
The immediate reason for the SNP triumph is clear; the collapse of the Liberal Democrat vote to less than half the previous level. What is less clear is why these voters should shift to the SNP and not to Labour. The answer lies in the changed nature of Scottish politics and the failure of Labour to adapt. They seemed to think that this was a ‘second order election’, in which voters use the opportunity to reward or punish the central government, irrespective of the local issues at play. Doubtless this was influenced by their good performance in Scotland in the UK election last year. So Ed Miliband and Ed Balls arrived in Scotland to tell electors that this was a chance to send a message to David Cameron and the coalition in London. This was not, however, a UK election and Scottish voters have learned the difference, being prepared to vote one way for Westminster and another way for Holyrood. Three of the four main parties in Scotland represent varieties of social democracy, so they have plenty of choice and nobody can take their votes for granted. Add to this the greater pulling power of Alex Salmond and the rather unplayed SNP message that they have done quite well in office (‘nae bad’ in Salmond’s words) and the campaign became quite one-sided. In the course of a six-week campaign, a Labour lead of 13 per cent, carried over from the UK election, was transformed into an advantage of nearly 20 per cent for the SNP.
If the result of the election is clear, its consequences are much less so. The SNP commands the political landscape, with support across all parts of the country and all sections of society, but has still to decide exactly what sort of party it is. Its policy prospectus combines support for more universal services with tax cuts for business in an impossible combination. Its social democratic and neo-liberal wings have lived so far in harmony, but there are now hard budgetary choices to be made.
Similarly, on the constitution, there is a historic division between fundamentalists, who want independence tomorrow, and gradualists, many of whom would settle for stronger devolution or some kind of confederal arrangement. Since the victory of 2007 there has been a truce between them, made easier by the fact that the party lacked the parliamentary majority to bring an independence referendum about. The present strategy is to pursue both strands. The SNP have already stated their demands for more tax powers, beyond those in the Scotland Bill currently before Parliament, control of the Crown Estate, and higher borrowing limits. At the same time, a referendum is promised in the latter part of the Parliament’s five-year term.
The UK government has already indicated that it will not make an issue of the legality of a referendum but will fight hard on the matter of independence. The SNP, for its part, has to define just what independence means. In the past I have argued that this is by no means an easy question in modern Europe, where many nationalist parties have adopted a ‘post-soverei
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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.
