Popular democracy in Britain
The New York Times has a broad overview article, “Beneath a Scandal in British Parliament, Deeper Furies,” on the current crisis in parliamentary rule in Britain.
We do get a passing mention of “a democratic tradition that traces its origins back at least 800 years.” However, the revolutionary era of the mid-1600s is omitted in this account, as is the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Modern democracy in Britain is dated to reforms made in the mid-1800s:
[P]opular resentment [today] has reached proportions that are drawing comparisons to the situation 180 years ago, when the Great Reform Act of 1832 was speeded through Parliament by riots in several cities. That act laid the basis for modern democracy in Britain by widening the males-only franchise and shifting power to the country’s cities from the “rotten boroughs” controlled by rural grandees.
Without a constitutional balance of powers, such as we allow for in the U.S., the British system has inherent weaknesses.
[R]eforms that began in earnest in 1832 began to be rolled back as early as World War I, with governments claiming ever-widening statutory powers, and imposing their will roughshod through their control of pliant parliamentary majorities. The result, the critics say, has been an entrenchment of “parliamentary dictatorship,” with the only moment of meaningful accountability for governments coming at general elections that are held, in normal circumstances, every four or five years.
1830s to 1920s… Hmmm, how might we characterize Britain’s place in the world during the period that was, by this account, the high plateau of effective democratic parliamentary government?
I lived in England in 1977-78, and left shortly before the election of the Thatcher government, which apparently consolidated the high-handed top-down approach. Thatcher gets a nod here, however, for wielding her “relatively untrammeled power” to initiate “free-market reforms that rejuvenated Britain’s economy.” The Labour governments that followed, however, apparently haven’t used this power so well.
Especially since Tony Blair led Labor to power in 1997, cabinet government has given way to informal cabals of favored ministers and trusted aides, in what British tabloids have called “sofa government.” The independence of civil servants has been undermined, especially at 10 Downing Street, by political favoritism and the proliferation of American-style “special advisers” on the public payroll, who act as the prime minister’s acolytes.
Now a corruption scandal “involving at most £30 million to £50 million in dodgy claims over the past five years,” apparently threatens to bring the current system of arrangements to its knees.
The watershed, historically, may prove to have been Britain’s decision to join the United States in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, at a time when antiwar protests were drawing hundreds of thousands into London’s streets.
It certainly bothered me, watching from “over the pond,” how a Labour government managed to align itself with the U.S. Bush-Cheney regime and force a concocted war upon the people in Britain.
The reformers’ wish list reads like a primer from American experience. It includes fewer members of Parliament — Britain, with a population of 60 million, has 200 more members in its lower house than there are in the United States House of Representatives, which represents more than 300 million people. The list also includes parliamentary committees with real powers of oversight and investigation, in place of tame, government-controlled bodies; primary elections to select parliamentary candidates, superseding the closed, party-run selection system that operates now; and a return to the old traditions of cabinet government, ministerial accountability and civil service independence.
Well, we shall see how things progress in Britain, in this great social experiment called “democracy.”
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