In the end our British culture has always been about finding the creative energy of the centre ground and avoiding the fantasies of the extremes. It was the genius of our constitution—our response to reformation and revolution—through church and constitutional monarchy. It is the core of the concept of a loyal opposition that can contest every policy while accepting the ground rules. It is how we avoided the extreme ideologies of the 20th century. It is the source of our stability—and our economic credibility.
Even British nationalism was always a complex and flexible phenomenon: it had to be, since we needed an identity which could encompass four quite different nations. And the English element was even stranger, with no traditional costume or music to match the bagpipes and kilt. Instead, it was defined by a culture: being good at queuing, stopping at zebra crossings, and indeed having judges that don’t take bribes. It is an unspoken way of behaving, and a very powerful one—admired throughout the world but difficult to codify or replicate. Politically it lends itself to pragmatism and stability, which then supports an economy where investors and businesses judge this to be a safe place to keep their money.
Today, however, I fear that something unfamiliar and new is creeping into British political language: the abstraction and the absolutism more associated with revolutionary republics such as France or indeed the United States. It is alien to our tradition, doesn’t solve anything and—perhaps most importantly—is ill-suited to our institutions, and the way they have always worked.
In the US, whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, his power is checked and balanced in many ways. What is potentially frightening for the UK is that with our much less formal constitution, if we were indeed to lapse into a shrill and irredeemably polarised discourse then political leaders who are only interested in their own narrow base, as opposed to the country as a whole, could operate without checks. A Corbyn government—or, God help us—a far-right administration could do what it liked with a majority of one.
Our governance has sometimes been called an elective dictatorship, and in more tranquil circumstances that might have advantages: when George Osborne needed to take through a very stiff budget, there was no doubt that he’d be able to get it through parliament: it didn’t feel like Greece, or Spain or Italy, where politics seemed like it could be paralysed by the fear of riots on the streets. But even in my own time in the Commons, I’ve seen attempts to rewrite the ground-rules with the slimmest of majorities: when I first arrived, the government was trying to force through the abolition of the House of Lords as we know it without any special majority in parliament.
"Something is creeping into our politics: the absolutism of revolutionary republics"We need, somehow, to push back against all the forces that are taking us towards polarisation: the Brexit divide, elements within our political parties, social media and one-sided journalism. This sort of thinking translates into bad public policy, too. Too many think tanks and factions in parties are, to use Auden’s term, being “pacified by a clever line.” We’re developing a culture which is about shiny slogans and schemes that sound neat to people of a particular persuasion. Trying to run services or departments through eye-catching ideas is disrespectful towards our traditions, our institutions and the texture of society, and contemptuous of the way people actually do things.
We need to recover our standing as a controlled and orderly place—which was always where our national genius lay. We’re not good at polarised discussion, and on the occasions when we lapse into it our institutions have the potential to make matters worse. Indeed, we can only risk the architectural design we have of parliament—the adversarial benches, two swords’ lengths apart—if there is an underlying understanding of shared civility, and consensus about how we engage with each other. The yah boo sucks, Punch-and-Judy performance is a great British pantomime. If it ever gets serious, then we are in real trouble—and we’d surely require a circular chamber to try and cool things down. And the requisite changes at this point might go beyond the architectural.
As a moderate Conservative, my fear today is that a hard left or a sectarian right-wing government could do enormous and enduring damage because there is nothing to stop it. Because that is what the constitution allows for, even if the culture has until now mostly prevented it from being fully exploited. Parliament is sovereign and unconstrained, and so its power is almost limitless. And that provides the opportunity for an extremist party, if it were to get a majority and seize the awesome power we call “the crown in parliament,” to do things that would be unimaginable in a constitutional republic.
Countries need formalised constitutions to defend themselves against extremism in a way we’ve never felt the need for. If we can check the polarisation of politics, we might yet avoid the need. But if we carry on down this polarised route, then I think we may ultimately need—unfortunately—to think again about our constitution.
