Right now you could be forgiven for thinking that the foundation stone for British democracy is the sovereign power of parliament. Some 375 years after The Levellers warned of parliament turning against the people, today’s born again defenders of ‘democracy’ seem to have forgotten where sovereignty lies.
ADRIAN HART August 2019
As I write this – late in August 2019 – ‘the battle for democracy’ has become a rallying cry for both of the opposing sides; a battle to defend parliamentary sovereignty against the executive powers of government (essentially the power of parliament to dilute or quash a referendum result), or the exact reverse – a battle to defend the 2016 result precisely because it represented an instruction to government issued by the people.
It’s telling that few on the left of politics who are currently animated by notions of parliamentary sovereignty seem to have any time for the democratic principles upon which parliament rests. General Elections call power to account. The powers MPs have are on loan. When MPs agree Government can hold decision making referenda, to overturn the result is anti democratic.
‘The Parliamentary democracy we have developed and established in Britain is based, not upon the sovereignty of Parliament, but upon the sovereignty of the People, who, by exercising their vote lend their sovereign powers to Members of Parliament, to use on their behalf, for the duration of a single Parliament only — Powers that must be returned intact to the electorate to whom they belong, to lend again to the Members of Parliament they elect in each subsequent general election.’
Tony Benn (January 1975)
On democracy Tony Benn is a hero of mine. He was unswerving in his commitment to its core principle and never gave up an opportunity to argue that it is the people who are sovereign. In terms of British history this ideal, for which many have fought and died, came to life less in ancient Athens than in 17th Century England. I’m tempted to focus on the true radicals of the English Revolution (a group called The Diggers) but events taking place in south London (Putney to be exact) powerfully resonate Benn’s sovereignty principle. During the Putney debates in 1647 members of the New Model Army exchanged radical proposals on how post-Civil War England should embrace one-man-one-vote. It was Thomas Rainsborough, the MP for Droitwich and spokesman of the New Model Army faction (later known as The Levellers) who famously said ‘The poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee.’ His statement echoed the popular, largely underground, stirrings of these revolutionary times (an all too short-lived period for which the radical historian Christopher Hill borrowed a phrase from The Diggers describing the years 1640 to 1660 as ‘A world turned upside down’ [1] ).
The Levellers expressed the radical ideal that even the poorest, uneducated man should possess the right to vote (alongside all men) and consent to who rules. ‘Losers consent’ – that you accept the outcome of a vote in which you participated – was and, up to 2016, remained a given. Moreover, both winners and losers would know that the representatives elected would have popular sovereignty passed over to them on loan and that sovereign power must later be returned and a new mandate given before it is lent again. Cromwell was at odds with the Levellers, whose demands were truly revolutionary. He and fellow officers desired the franchise to be limited to owners of freehold land and to the freemen of trading bodies. That it be shared by all men terrified Cromwell.
Days after the Putney debates Cromwell crushed the mutineer Levellers, overrunning their marching ranks at Burford village church and executing 4 of their leaders. Leveller ideologues like John Lilburne and Richard Overton were imprisoned. Read more on this remarkable time here. Suffice to say the years spanning the trial of Charles I and the restoration of the monarchy saw the democratic principle come alive all too briefly.
The boundless tenacity of democrats continued to intrude on history terrifying its entitled hosts like rowdy, distinctly unwelcome gate crashers. For two hundred years Leveller ideas resurfaced again and again in Britain, matched only by determined (one might say Cromwellian) attempts to crush them. The little people demand what? Isn’t a parliamentary monarchy enough? An end to it! The 1819 Peterloo Massacre represents one poignant example. Across the many decades that followed, despite growing expressions of love for ‘democracy’, the ambivalence of the British ruling elite (including even the liberal-minded within it) is palpable. Chartists and Suffragettes agitated and levered-in changes that were soon after lauded as a must for modern times and yet that Cromwellian streak – that distaste for a Leveller-style democracy based on ‘the poorest hee’, on the ideal that asserts it is the people who are sovereign (all of them) – has never really gone away.
To a greater or lesser extent most of us are guilty. Today, in Britain, that ambivalent streak which stirs worries over ‘too much democracy’ is expressed explicitly. We not only flinch at a democratic result going ‘the wrong way’ but instantly gravitate toward off-the-peg explanations that confirm our prejudice. Today we can just come straight out and say it – stupid people, led astray by malign forces, have poisoned the democratic process. Working class, thick and probably racist, ideally they wouldn’t be allowed to vote! The same instinct flares up in relation to freedom of speech. We say we’re for it but later betray the fact that, really, we only believe in ‘me speech’, the expressions that spring forth from ourselves (and other decent, well-informed good-thinkers). With a nod to Cromwell we sign up to the cause of ‘democracy’ over the rule of kings but later reveal a caveat that we’ve hidden away … democracy yes, except when we need to over-rule it. As Cromwell listened to radical Leveller demands over one man one vote it is possible that a feeling of horror started to grip him. Looking across Putney church at those rough soldiers who came crowding in, Cromwell may well have been the first to ponder the notion of too much democracy. Democracy for everyone? It is not difficult to imagine his thoughts – No! tis for me and not for thee!
Are you wondering if I’ve got Brexit in mind? Yes! The Tony Benn quote that I began with came ahead of Britain’s 1975 Referendum over EU membership (known then as the European Community). After that referendum – his hopes for a decision to end British membership defeated – Benn said this:
‘When the British people speak, everyone, including members of Parliament, should tremble before their decision and that’s certainly the spirit with which I accept the result of the referendum’
For Benn, like most who voted to end membership back in 1975, ‘losers consent’ was an accepted and taken for granted principle. Doubtless, back then, disgruntled Eurosceptics could have mounted a campaign based on how the referendum had been sullied by misinformation sponsored by the Wilson government in collusion with the Tory opposition. But in reality the idea of overturning a referendum result would have been considered repugnant. Compare this to today: self-styled ‘EU Supergirl’ Madeleine Kay (and musician), when asked if she’d accept a leave result if her campaign to re-run 2016s referendum was successful replied ‘No, because we live in a democracy.’
On a constitutional fork-in-the-road decision of this scale it wasnt a surprise that the phrase ‘once in a generation’ was uttered by both sides ad infinitum. After 1975, it took forty years of European political integration – the very thing Benn warned about – for a burning question over quitting the EU to be asked of the people once again. The story currently in-vogue with more than a few remainers holds that Cameron’s Conservative government (with Ukip snapping at its heels) steered Britain into the 2016 referendum. In this story the British people sit passively in the background not bothered about – happy with even – their country’s membership of the EU. If 17.4 million then said they wanted out it was only by virtue of being asked – and that red bus of course. Too frequently commentators sidestep the fact that for at least half of those forty years Britain had slowly and steadily divided into those instinctively pro EU, comfortable with (and benefitting from) a cosmopolitan society within a globalised world, and the largely ignored group who were far less comfortable and experiencing few of the benefits. Not at all enamoured with the EU this section of the population linked working class Britons – especially those from the north – with the disaffected middle class countywide. A factor frequently absent in Brexit explanations is that this much maligned group who were later to vote Leave had already united around a profound feeling of cultural insecurity. This was the population substratum who were – as one heretical (but accurate) commentator described in 2014 – continually told to ‘mind their language, police their thoughts, suppress their views, respect all cultures, hide their traditions, be ashamed of national histories, never wave their national flags …’. For a brief moment Ukip became the only cipher for all this popular resentment … an energy which in May 2014 saw Ukip propelled to success in the European elections (a phenomenon underpinned by the haemorrhaging of working class support for Labour).
Tony Benn’s death two months earlier seemed to spell the end for Labour’s decades of leftwing Euroscepticism. It will be recorded as a historical irony that Benn’s protégé Jeremy Corbyn would soon take the wheel and renounce his forty years of principled Euroscepticism. Here, inside Corbyn’s head, the people’s instruction to leave the EU morphed in to ‘yes we must but not in a Brexity, completely leavey kind of a way’. To leave, argued Corbyn, would be undemocratic without parliament’s (i.e. without Labour’s) approval. It would be a ‘Tory Brexit’ (a Brexit without a special Labour-approved deal that stays inside a custom union, retains all the benefits of the single market, secures workers’ rights and environmental protections). In other words Labour was not for leaving. By 2015,when the decision on another referendum was made, the question of exiting the EU belied a far more complex divorce process than most could ever have predicted. What few could imagine was the incessant negativity and determined resistance to the very act of leaving emanating from within parliament itself. Here in Brighton many remain voting friends would contend that I’m placing this the wrong way round: the knots to untie are more like arteries to sever and doing this will wreak untold harm on a country now irreversibly hard-wired to EU systems. It’s the dawning realisation of this, say my friends, which causes understandable negativity and resistance.
If in 1975 parliamentarians like Benn accepted the referendum result without question, the same could not be said after June 23rd 2016. From that day to this ‘losers consent’ has been subjected to the caveat of ‘except when the thing decided is more complicated than we thought’.
A referendum achieving the largest democratic mandate in British political history crashed head-on with parliament. The government and indeed the majority of MPs from all parties wanted none of it. Aside from denouncing the minority of ‘hard’ Brexiteer MPs, parliamentary battles have been restricted to how best Brexit might be watered down or avoided altogether. And before we cast these remainer MPs as hapless figures morally boxed-in by both conscience and those tough judgement calls which come with the job we ought to remember that at the 2017 election their commitment to constituents was to respect the result of the EU referendum (a referendum which all but a small minority of our MPs happily agreed to hold back in 2015). The collision between referendum and parliament does not reveal a defect with representative democracy so much as it reveals the political duplicity of MPs: first pledging to respect a referendum result then later arguing that, naturally, this can be trumped by a heartfelt change of opinion. Moreover, it has exposed the facile view of democracy which actually thinks a democratic decision can be double-checked by a new referendum before it has been implemented. On BBC Radio 4s Any Questions Brighton Kemptown Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle said this:
‘Democracies cease to be democracies if you stop asking people the direction they wish to go to. If you say the will [of the people] 3 years ago means you can never change your mind that is what all totalitarian regimes do.’
This MP – similar to Caroline Lucas (the MP for his neighbouring constituency) – seems deadly serious. A shrewd politician in the making young Lloyd cannot be in the same category of ‘immature citizen’ as EU Supergirl (can he?) In effect he is deliberately putting forward the notion of voting once then voting again, presumably with implementation only coming after voters – if there are any of them still left – finally giving a ‘correct’ answer. Like the EU itself Russell-Moyle sees no problem with this approach (when Ireland voted to reject the Lisbon Treaty the EU forced them to vote again). He knows, of course, that there’s nothing to stop fresh referendum campaigns for re-joining the EU at some point in the future (just as 2016s referendum followed one in 1975) but, like most remainer MPs, he is not about to let democratic principle get in the way of a tantalising opportunity for parliament to erase the “Brexit mess”. Far better, then, that he dresses up parliament in the heroic role of democracy’s saviour. Dragged kicking and screaming, the idea of honouring the vote by implementing it becomes re-cast as “anti-democratic”. Make no mistake, Russell-Moyle’s rhetoric is authoritarian. By cynically playing the ‘hey, but people change their minds’ card, a pre-agreed referenda system of vote/decide/implement can be swept aside because, as he puts it, ‘that is not democracy, that is deeply troubling, that is anti-British and it’s something I and my colleagues won’t stand for [my emphasis]’. In case we’ve been listening to Corbyn’s equivocations Lloyd is here to say Labour is deadly serious. A few days later (in The Independent) he says: ‘we must be willing to do absolutely anything to stop it – and of course that would mean, if we had to, whipping to revoke Article 50’. Corbyn must surely cringe when he hears the Labour Party attitude to Brexit put in such a jaunty, iron-fist kind of way (but glad of it just the same).
The Levellers, arch proponents of representative democracy, discussed the risk of parliament turning against the electorate and concluded that in such circumstances the power entrusted in MPs should ‘returneth from whence it came’. In modern times diverse arguments are brewing throughout society for a revitalised politics. The parliamentary and technocratic power wielded by the Westminster few has seldom been perceived as more detached and aloof to so many millions of us. If the 2-party system propped up by first past the post voting arrangements wasn’t unrepresentative enough, both Labour and Conservative parties are zombie versions of their former selves. The party model itself is increasingly viewed as tribal and riven with group think.
Never has there been a worse risk of a mass public turn away from democratic engagement, running exactly alongside an explosive potential for political revival and the collapse of the old order. In an accompanying piece to this (to be posted soon) I explore a few developments I’ve noticed that embody this revival. Essentially they are street-level experiments with democracy. But – at close to 3000 words – this piece needs to conclude (in fact my Brighton friends – those who’ve read this far – might find this last statement the only one they agree with – thanks for reading though, do please respond).
In Conclusion: Welcome to the Hotel Eu-phoria (you can check out but you can never leave)
It won’t surprise you that I view the institutions of the EU as the epitome of aloof, technocratic governance. By presenting a veneer of accountability through the election of MEPs, the EU is nonetheless explicitly anti-democratic, its ‘parliament’ boxed-in by the real power. Like Disneyland is to kids, Brussels is the happiest place on earth to modern, globalised business interests – to which the ‘business’ of running former nations (now “member-states”) is an integral part. If I sound glib it’s because I want remainer friends to google and research these words: coreper and trilogue – perhaps you already know these things because you’ve taken that deep breath and studied the byzantine, mind-numbing systems of the EU.
It is no wonder they’re so happy. By constraining national sovereignty and pooling as much of it as possible in Brussels, the wings of popular sovereignty are clipped. As a result the supranational project can shut out the persistent interference if not outright explosive volatility of democratic politics (keeping it nicely out of the way so that the EU elite can more easily conduct its business). What’s not to like? Gift wrapped in liberal cosmopolitan values I’d describe the EU as a perfect place for member-state ruling elites to shelter. Its institutions act as castles and moats serving to keep the European public at arm’s length.
Brighton friends invariably frown at my description and quiz me over why, when the British system is so lacking, I’d prefer it to the EU? Frowns become fixed when I deploy Benn’s oft quoted line ‘I’d rather have a bad parliament than a good king’ (never more fixed than on those who would absolutely prefer a good king. Once sovereignty is pooled and controlled in Brussels, real democracy – the ability of the European public to hold power to account – is diluted. The fantasy of kings – even good ones – is the promise of a European empire held together by unassailable treaties. ‘There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties’ said Jean Claude Junker in 2015. His words were aimed not just at deluded Greek socialists hoping to leave the Eurozone while still remaining in the EU but at all member-states who might imagine some modest clawback of democratic control.
With the EU’s function as a capitalist club suitably camouflaged its anti-national democracy character can be presented as just anti-nationalist. It’s easy: established in the wake of the WW2 the European supranational project trades on the claim that it acts as a safeguard against tribal conflict. In other words, so long as the EU acts as a fetter on nation states it is an altogether good thing (albeit with a democratic deficit to get on and fix someday).
By now, just like my Brighton friends, you might be frowning too. Adrian must surely be blindsiding us with some kind of leftish-sounding anti-EU sophistry? All I can say is, wherever our hopes for internationalism lie, we’d be remiss not to reflect on how the nation state provides the essential condition for effective democratic politics. Without the hard slog of radical democratic politics (of building it ground up), waxing lyrical about a borderless world democracy is surely music to the ears of ruling elites itching for more globalisation and for powerful supranational institutions unhindered by democratic interference.
In the here and now the only effective arena in which to push back is that provided by citizen membership of nation states. Inside the boundaries of a nation the solidarity that arises from a shared experience of cultural tradition, of neighbourhood, language, workplace, regional and national histories adds up to something that the builders of superstates are keen to dissolve away. It amounts to the knowledge that however bad things get we are free to assemble, agitate and, as messy and imperfect a business it is, form the majorities needed to assert control and reign-in the power. Tony Benn knew this and it seems fitting to end with his Five Essential Questions (aka the democracy test). The EU fail the test. More troubling is its immunity – ask Claude Junker these questions and he’d fall around laughing. Once again he’d say ‘there is no democratic choice against the European treaties’ … such questions are irrelevant!
Despite the shiver it seems to send amongst ardent EU supporting British remainers, a precondition for real democracy – the kind fought for by Levellers, Chartists and Suffragettes alike are the borders that define a nation and its people. Only from within the boundaries of a nation can citizens ask its rulers Benn’s questions. Finding answers wanting we generate the solidarity to act.
Ask how they feel about democracy and a lot of remainers will bluntly say there’s too much of it. They’ll tell you that power is best safeguarded by EU (like a good King it knows what is best for us far better than we do). Right now they’ll say that Britain’s pro-EU parliament knows best what to do with the Brexit result. True democrats already know this much: Forget about who takes the Cromwell role right now – Farage, Boris – there’s no time to conjure the Lexit that never was. Lovers of EU ‘good’ kings ruling their lands from behind castles and moats need reminding that it is the people who are sovereign.
Ask the powerful these five questions:
“What power have you got?”
Footnotes:
“Where did you get it from?”
“In whose interests do you use it?”
“To whom are you accountable?”
“How do we get rid of you?”
1. Hill borrowed this line from Diggers leader Gerrard Winstanley: ‘Freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down, therefore no wonder he hath enemies…’ also quoted thus, ‘Was the earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?”
The New Law of Righteousness, 1649