We think of ourselves as a democracy because all adults have the vote.
But that’s a new thing, pretty much. Before 1918, only 58% of British men had the right; and no women. It was another 10 years before the minimum age criterion for women dropped from age 30 to 21 to match that for men; the centenary of equal rights is not due for another six years.
The voting age for all was lowered further to 18 in 1969, under Harold Wilson’s Labour government. (If he was hoping that youngsters would bolster the Left’s support, he was to be disappointed: the Tories won in the 1970 General Election.)
Now that we all have a say, we have the problem of dilution. In 2021 there were over 46 million registered voters, which divided by 650 seats gives us an average of 71,631 per Parliamentary constituency. There are only four football stadia in the country that could take such a crowd; imagine yourself in the packed stands, trying to get your MP’s attention! In 2011, legislation was passed which could allow cutting the number of Commons seats to 600, making the average constituency swell to 77,600 voters (so, Twickenham or Wembley, chaps and chappesses?)
With such vast numbers opinions will be very diverse; how can there be any question of getting together and influencing one’s MP?
And should we have the right to do so? In 1774 Edmund Burke told his Bristol constituents:
[An MP’s] unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
(However, some of our modern politicians who like to refer to his principle should be reminded that Burke was unseated at the next General Election.)
Worse, not only are MPs free to use their discretion, they are not even obliged to reply to your communications; this was confirmed in a 2009 court ruling. (There are various codes of conduct and a Parliamentary Ombudsman; but you can’t use the hammer of the Law.)
On the other hand, MPs can decide to have fun with their constituents. In one case a man wrote to his MP demanding a response immediately on receipt; the latter was at an all-night sitting and having collected his mail from the House of Commons Post Office at around 2 a.m., took pleasure in telephoning his correspondent there and then. Chalk one up for malicious compliance?
Oh for the good old pre-1832 days of ‘rotten boroughs’! Old Sarum in Wiltshire, once owned by the Pitt family, had the right to return two Members of Parliament, despite having no residents. The landowner could nominate seven electors as occupying the long-since-demolished houses there, and the hustings and elections were held under a tree. The ratio of voters to MPs was far better then; though admittedly the grandee chose the constituents, rather than the other way round.
Why should we bother about politics anyway? Isn’t it like commercial sport, something to get excited about if there’s nothing else to watch, but not really relevant to our personal lives?
We might have said that, once. AJP Taylor’s English History 1914-1945 opens:
‘Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman…’
But now the State takes and spends a third of our GDP.
There is almost no aspect of our lives in which it does not intervene; often with benevolent intentions, but sometimes with an intolerable and in some ways disastrous high-handedness, as we saw in the controversial response to Covid. The powers it used to enforce lockdowns were based on a severe stretching of The Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984, and the Parliamentary Opposition, supposedly the guardians of our liberty against an overweening Executive, did not so much as force a vote when the emergency provisions came up for renewal last October.
Some activists call for ‘direct democracy’, but most of us have quite enough to do without trying to become co-rulers of the country. Public affairs can be exceedingly complex and our understanding is not helped by the news media and commentariat with their bias, emotionalism and occasional ignorance. It would be easy to give up, to leave it all to the authorities in the hope that they are wise and good.
That would be a mistake. In a much-underrated 1970 film ‘The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer’, starring Peter Cook, an ambitious young man uses opinion polling to represent himself as a man of the people, a genuine democrat; and then burdens the electorate by involving them in policy decisions until he gets what he wants: their exhausted permission to become dictator so he can decide everything himself. In the light of New Labour this seems prescient, and perhaps it is significant that Google requires personalised ‘age verification’ before it will let you see the movie!
What is the alternative to the Parliamentary Bedlam of the deaf? Apathy? Riot? Nationalist revolt?
During the 1991 phase of the Maastricht debate, Tony Benn observed:
If people lose the power to sack their Government, one of several things happens. First, people may just slope off. Apathy could destroy democracy. When the turnout drops below 50 per cent., we are in danger.
The second thing that people can do is to riot. Riot is an old-fashioned method of drawing the attention of the Government to what is wrong. It is difficult for an elected person to admit it, but the riot at Strangeways produced some prison reforms. Riot has historically played a much larger part in British politics than we are ever allowed to know.
Thirdly, nationalism can arise. Instead of blaming the treaty of Rome, people say, ‘It is those Germans,’ or, ‘It is the French.’ Nationalism is built out of frustration that people feel when they cannot get their way through the ballot box. With nationalism comes repression.
I hope that it is not pessimistic--in my view it is not--to say that democracy hangs by a thread in every country of the world. Unless we can offer people a peaceful route to the resolution of injustices through the ballot box, they will not listen to a House that has blocked off that route.
In a way, Brexit was a relatively peaceful version of the third.
We must hope that Parliament - still re-learning how to wield real sovereign power, and how to listen to the people - does not forget this great man’s words.