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You could not be signed in. The recent controversy played out in this blog, in the pages of The Times, and elsewhere about whether a UK government could procure from the monarch a veto of any bill passed by both houses of parliament without government support is an example of the curse.
Birch pointed out more than 50 years ago A. Birch, Representative and Responsible Government: an Essay on the British Constitution London: Allen and Unwin, , the British system of government encompasses two very different, often conflicting views of how it works.
One view, perhaps more familiar to lawyers, is the constitution as it looks from Westminster. According to this Westminster view, Parliament, and especially the House of Commons, sits at the centre of the system. The Commons is, with the aid of the Parliament Acts , legislatively supreme, and it makes and breaks governments by granting or withholding its confidence. Ministers, though not technically its delegates, are at its beck and call. As a result, although the House of Commons should not seek to administer the country, it is the ultimate source of authority for those who do.
The other view, the Whitehall view, posits that the Crown, now largely in the form of its ministers, is the centre of the system. Effective government requires ministers to be able to act quickly and authoritatively. On this view, parliament is peripheral. It can assist effective government by passing legislation when ministers ask, but otherwise it is a side-show. These two views map on to different conceptions of democracy.
The Westminster view corresponds to representative democracy in the tradition of J. The Commons encompasses the whole nation, not just the current majority party, and its deliberations allow the country to meet the definition of democracy as government by discussion. The Whitehall view corresponds to what I have called elsewhere [] Public Law the Hilary Armstrong theory of the constitution, in honour of the former Labour chief whip who advocated it at the time of the debate on the report of the Wright Committee.
The idea is that democracy means choosing between a few, ideally two, party manifestoes, presented to the electorate by party leaders who are, effectively if not legally, candidates to become prime minister. The only role of elected MPs is to support their leader and to implement their manifesto. All other forms of parliamentary activity are illegitimate and undemocratic. Parliament has no collective identity or interests.
It is merely a battle field for the parties. The Armstrong theory is a form of plebiscitary democracy or Schumpeterian competing elite democracy, with an added element of binding party manifestoes. Seen from Westminster, the government veto proposal looks outrageous.
Ministers, whose democratic authority on this view derives solely and entirely from the House of Commons, would be frustrating a decision by the only democratic element in the system.
From Whitehall, however, it looks quite reasonable. Parliament should not be allowed to frustrate democracy as expressed in the manifesto of the governing party and in the person of the Prime Minister.
No plausible interpretation of the system exists that accommodates both views. Exchanging historical events as precedents takes one no further because those events were generated by people acting in accordance with different theories.
The system bumps along without theoretical resolution but causing very few practical difficulties in periods when a single party government is backed by a comfortable single party majority and only the occasional difficulty in periods of stable coalition.
The problem is that we are now in a period of minority government and face a time of major instability in which the party system might change radically. In these circumstances, the incompatibility between the two views can no longer be ignored. All one can say from an interpretive, as opposed to a normative, point of view is that during the second half of the 20 th century the Whitehall view was dominant but in the 21 st century, especially since , the Westminster view has made advances.
As for the future, I can only see a continuation of the conflict. On the other hand, the political conditions that generated support for the Whitehall view in the second half of the 20 th century are disappearing.
It also rests on backbenchers having little interest in the work of the House and caring only about their prospects for ministerial office. The problem with the first condition is that the leadership of the main opposition party has no ministerial experience and that many of its backbenchers distrust the leadership and so have no desire to let it govern unchecked. Their interest is to strengthen parliament, not the government.
The crucial question, beyond but also tied up with the politics of Brexit, is where the conflict will next take the system. One possible adaptation is to grant minority governments more powers, so that they can behave more as if they were majority governments.
An adaptation in the opposite direction would be to make minority governments even weaker to encourage the formation of majority coalitions, perhaps including changing the electoral system to reduce the penalty smaller parties seem to suffer for compromising with larger parties in coalitions. The problem with the strengthening option is that it risks handing great power to extreme parties who have fallen well short of majority electoral support.
In a highly fragmented election, such a government could come to power on a very small vote.
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