The Crown in Parliament

The Thatcher revolution introduced the concept of popular democracy to a Conservative Party that long considered it the chief threat to the status quo. Though she couched it in terms of personal choice in the economic sphere, and otherwise cleaved to the usual social reaction of the Tories, Thatcher unwittingly encouraged the demand for a wider devolution of effective power beyond the confines of Westminster and the establishment. Her populist success has proved damaging, and may yet prove fatal, to the most successful political party in history. Its legacy is all too obvious in recent developments, from Brexit to the far-right riot in Knowsley. The problem is, how do you put the genie of democracy and popular sovereignty back in the bottle? The answer increasingly appears to be that you sub-contract the task to the political centre. The liberal turn to intolerance and the rejection of democracy is not simply a reaction to Brexit or the incursion of the hitherto marginalised left under Corbyn. It reflects a belief that the Tories have failed to defend the state and in particular it centrepiece of parliamentary democracy. That the latter is highly unusual, indeed unique, among developed democracies elicits little comment in the UK beyond the perennial demand for modernisation. It was notable that the mainstream epitaphs to Tom Nairn interpreted his The Enchanted Glass as a reflection on the House of Windsor rather than Parliament.

The latest liberal to take up the cudgels on behalf of parliamentary democracy is Sonia Sodha in the Observer. As has become the norm since 2016, her case is made in the form of a highly-personalised rant (with not a few factual errors) rather than a reasoned argument. Stripping away the invective, she advances the linked ideas that MPs have a unique mandate from their constituency electorate (and so deselection by their local party would be anti-democratic) and that they alone have the legitimacy and competence to decide on a party leader (so party members should have no say). This position has long been the preserve of conservative political historians enamoured of the genius of the British constitution, but it is increasingly promoted by liberals who were hitherto insistent that we needed to modernise the constitution through measures such as proportional representation. The apparent paradox - that the electoral system is insufficiently representative and must be reformed, but MPs are the epitome of effective representation and so should not be challenged - is easy enough to explain in cartel party theory: the political caste should divide up power among itself in a way that avoids legislative monopoly while resisting any incursion that would undermine the party oligopoly. 

There are rational and pragmatic arguments to be made in favour of cartel politics, such as that it promotes political expertise and the peaceful alternation of governments, but these aren't arguments typically made in Britain. Instead we focus on the mystagogy of the constitution, notably the spiritual union of MPs and the electorate. But contrary to the myth, MPs are actually less in tune with voters than party members on many political issues, notably around inequality and workplace power, which clearly reflects lived experience and highlights MPs' sympathy with the managerial class, a sympathy shared by the commentariat. According to Sodha, "It is fundamentally undemocratic to give the small, unrepresentative sliver of voters that constitutes the Labour party membership too much power to impose a leader that neither the party’s MPs, nor the country at large, think is decent and competent, or to impose an idiosyncratic choice of individual as a likely local MP on tens of thousands of voters. Liz Truss’s success in winning the votes of Conservative members in her party’s contest sharply illustrates how this extends beyond Labour: giving party memberships too much power gums up parliamentary democracy." 

You'll notice that sandwiched between the claims that neither Corbyn nor Truss should have been allowed to become party leader is the suggestion that constituencies should have no say in the selection of candidates. Again, you could make respectable arguments for this, notably that it is how it used to be done. But leaving aside the reasons why the process was changed, not least that anti-democratic stitch-ups produced candidates who were never remotely representative of the constituency, consider how different the parties are today. The mass membership Conservative constituency parties were a rough proxy for bourgeois society in the 1950s and Central Office generally trusted them to organically produce the right type of backbencher, but no more. Likewise, CLP selections used to reflect the strength of trade union branches and affiliated socialist societies. Again, no more. Ironically, the nearest we've got in recent years to the good old days of mass membership was the influx to Labour in 2015 and 2016 around the election (and re-election) of Jeremy Corbyn. The reaction against that, from the weaponisation of antisemitism to the flouncing-out of Change UK, indicated just how much the Labour Party apparat were determined not to turn the clock back and just how far we had already travelled towards the cartel model.

In suggesting that Conservative Party members "gummed up" parliamentary democracy Sodha ignores the role of the party's MPs. The only choice that the members were given was whether to elect Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak as leader. They opted for one and after a brief period ended up with the other, which hardly suggests democracy run riot, particularly when all the opinion polls indicated that they would have preferred to have retained Boris Johnson who, whatever his flaws, won a resounding majority in 2019 after being elected by much the same membership. Of course, if you point this out, the defenders of parliamentary democracy will insist that what 2019 really shows is the danger of having a leader, i.e. Jeremy Corbyn, elected by the membership who then proves unpopular with the national electorate: heads I win, tails you lose. As only one party leader can become Prime Minister, a system in which multiple parties allow the membership to elect them will reliably produce such "failures" at every general election. Does this invalidate internal democracy? The serial failure of the Liberal Democrats to get their leader into Number 10 is never taken as evidence that the party membership should be denied the right to vote in leadership contests.

Defenders of Corbyn might interject at this point that Labour's improvement in the 2017 general election was a validation of the members' choice, but this falls into the centrist trap of treating electability as the only relevant measure. The purpose of political parties is not to reflect the mean voter but to persuade that voter to shift position. Were it otherwise, all parties would inevitably gravitate towards the assumed centre (as narrowly defined by the press), with the result that we'd have at best personality-led factions and at worst a de facto one-party state (we may now be witnessing the journey from one to the other). In a two-party system, both parties must be "off-centre" to a degree. One may claim to be closer to the centre and its opponent further away, but it would be ridiculous to claim that a similarity in policies was a sign of democratic health. In this regard, it's worth recalling that Blair's rhetoric about the "vital centre" in the 1990s was very much a reaction to the populist genie unleashed by Thatcher in the 1980s. Her neoliberal economic dispensation would be accepted but the postwar social management role of central government would be re-established, albeit now on a more technocratic footing (the contemporary echoes are obvious).

Viewed historically, Sodha's abhorrence of party democracy is over the top. The "threat" doesn't justify the reaction. The strength of democracy within the Labour Party in recent years can best be judged not by the leadership contests of 2015 and 2016 (or even 2010) but by the minimal progress in the deselection of clearly useless and unrepresentative MPs, the auto-expulsion of the Change UK bloc notwithstanding, and the acceptance of turncoats such as Christian Wakeford. It has always been the selection of MPs that has been the chief battleground for democracy within the party, leadership elections being (usually) rare events. Between Tony Blair's election in 1994 and Ed Miliband's in 2010 there was only one leadership election and that was uncontested (Gordon Brown in 2007). The run of three elections in under 5 years since 2015 (one forced by a PLP coup) is anomalous. Since 2020, the membership has been purged, candidates imposed by party HQ, and nobody seriously expects Starmer to abide by conference decisions any more than he kept the pledges on which he was elected leader by the membership.

Among the centrist commentariat the idea that anybody but the PLP should elect the leader, and that the leader's office should dictate policy, is now regarded as laughable. What distinguishes this attitude is not the obvious partisanship (the belief that Starmer will pursue the "right" policies), but the unabashed deference it entails. This is also evident in the terminology, such as "the grown ups are back in charge". Far from a critique of the infantilism of the left, this is an admission that what centrists really want is to be subject to the firm discipline of the political parent (the "father of the nation"). The Labour right's performative disciplinarianism - the talk of Respect Orders and being the party of national security - is not simply about winning over reactionary voters in the mythical Red Wall, any more than the angry flag-waving and tearful monarchism is. It also expresses their sado-masochistic tendencies: the attraction of a style of governance in which punishment and obeisance go hand in hand. They really do get a hard-on about this sort of stuff.

Parliamentary democracy is obviously more about the first word than the second, and part of its justification is the "glamour" of the state and the "enchantment" this gives rise to, in the sense used by Tom Nairn in the Enchanted Glass. Nairn quotes R W Johnson on "the peculiar British political culture, characterised on the one hand by a uniquely powerful and successful state and, on the other, by it's non-inclusive conception of the popular interest ... It is unthinkable that a state like the British one can be 'possesed' by its people. The very institution of the monarchy makes this plain." In late-twentieth century British political history, not enough attention has been given to what the supposed froideur between Thatcher and the Queen actually meant, outside of class snobbery. Brexit may be a mis-step of epic proportions, but there is no doubt that the impulse towards popular sovereignty was real. The explanations for leavers' motivations on this dimension quickly settled on the supposed democratic deficit of England, notably it's disadvantage relative to the devolved assemblies of Scotland and Wales. This is objectively absurd, but the absurdity stems from the attempt to address the sense of a lack of popular sovereignty without mentioning the monarchical elephant in the room, which would in turn would mean addressing the nature of British democracy: the Crown in Parliament.

It's generally recognised that Starmer's historic brief is to restore the competence of the British state and the pre-eminence of the establishment after the populist shocks of Brexit and the Corbyn upsurge. This extends at a practical level to preserving the Union, re-establishing the UK as a key player in international governance (notably NATO), and restoring the country's credibility as a destination for global capital. But there is also a symbolic mission: restoring the divine right of parliament after Brexit raised the possibility of popular sovereignty. What the 2016-19 period exhibited was the unwillingness of MPs to be over-ruled by a popular vote, which was only brought to an end by another popular vote in a forced general election ("Tell them again"). Starmer's style, with its mixture of bureaucratic gravitas and belligerent intolerance, is a conscious expression of that mission to restore Parliament's dignity. His problem is that the steady decline of the monarchy, which probably won't be allayed by any temporary coronation celebrations, means that the glamour and enchantment of the state is weakening at just the point when it is most needed.