06.10.2004

No to the elected monarch

What does Blair's leadership announcement mean in constitutional terms? Once again, argues Mike Macnair, it points to the democratic deficit within the UK state

First the good news: Blair is going to go. Then the bad news: not for another five years. On Thursday September 30, after Labour Party conference delegates had dispersed, Tony Blair surprised the political journalists - and many members of his own party. He announced that he would serve one more term as prime minister and then stand down. That is, of course, assuming that Labour wins the next election.

The context of the announcement is the tortuous infighting in the Labour leadership around the succession to Blair, which has already started. Blair’s announcement was widely seen as a way of dishing Gordon Brown’s ambitions to succeed him - or, alternatively, of damping down speculation about the succession.

Any actual political differences between Blair and Brown are absolutely marginal. The trouble is that elements of the old Labour right and centre see a Brown leadership/premiership as a way of getting rid of the ex-communist and ex-fellow-traveller, born-again free-marketeers who are associated with the ‘Blair project’. This, they think, would let them reposition Labour as a social-democratic rather than neoliberal party.

Roy Hattersley commented that “Tony Blair’s announcement emancipated the membership. Alan Milburn, Charles Clarke and Peter Hain must all realise that their hope of preferment requires them to appeal to the rank and file. More competition and privatisation in the public services? Not if you want to be party leader. Unwittingly, Tony Blair has brought the party back to life” (The Observer October 3).

The talk of Blair-Brown splits thus expresses in a deformed way the contradiction between New Labour’s political character and role in government, and its still-surviving links to the trade union movement and the working class. No amount of clever manoeuvres will make this contradiction go away: with the result that leadership speculation will keep resurfacing.

The current form of expression of this contradiction is so deformed that it is of pretty limited interest to communists. Neither British capital nor its US protector is prepared to give up Thatcher’s anti-union legislation, kleptocratic privatisation or any of the rest of this crap. Nor are they prepared to give up Britain’s role as the US’s main Trojan horse in the EU (which is why the Tories currently do not look like serious contenders for power). Committing to these policies is the condition of Labour forming a government, and hence none of the likely serious contenders for the Labour leadership will break from them.

The state of political play in the Labour Party, reflected in Blair’s announcement, is thus still very far indeed from a serious reassertion of the working class pole in the party’s contradiction. Graham Bash argued in his assessment of the Labour Party conference that “the key struggle is not simply to ‘reclaim’ what already exists, but to actually rebuild the structures of our Labour Party. Alongside that, the complementary struggle in the unions is to make their leaderships and delegates at various levels of the party genuinely accountable, so that they vote according to agreed union policy” (Weekly Worker September 30).

But if the task facing socialists is to rebuild a party of the working class, it is not at all clear why that task must proceed only or mainly within the Labour Party (Graham’s view). Certainly the current expression of the contradiction between Labour’s capitalist character and its links to the workers’ movement - manoeuvres and speculation round the succession to Blair - cannot be allowed to divert us from that struggle.

Constitution
Blair’s announcement is more interesting to communists for the things it tells us about the current functioning of Britain’s constitution. For a prime minister to announce his retirement so long in advance is constitutionally unprecedented. If Blair makes it stick, which seems unlikely, another step will have been taken towards the ‘presidential’ prime minister.

Communists fight for a democratic and federal republic of England, Scotland and Wales. Rejecting the economism common on the far left, we take constitutional questions seriously. The struggle for extreme democracy, and for democracy to be given a social content, is the struggle for the class rule of the working class.

The rise of capitalism within the existing order of private property led to the creation of constitutional forms through which the capitalist class rules. In the epoch of capital’s decline, capitalist property is not self-legitimating, not automatically accepted as the best way to do things. The capitalist class relies increasingly on the state, and the constitutional order. This guarantees and legitimates the rights of property which give capitalists their economic power.

A constitution is just a body of rules which defines the state order. The British constitution is ‘unwritten’. There is no document called ‘The British constitution’, though there are some texts which judges have called ‘statutes of constitutional importance’: the 1689 Bill of Rights, and the 1700 Act of Settlement. The Parliament Acts limit the role of the House of Lords: the Countryside Alliance is about to challenge in court their use to ban foxhunting. The Representation of the People Acts define election arrangements and who can vote. And so on.

In 1966 the British government allowed British citizens to apply directly to the Strasbourg Court of Human Rights. As a result, the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights has come to have indirect constitutional effect. Since 1972 other rules have been contained in the European Union treaties and the rulings of the Court of Justice of the EC in Luxembourg. These directly limit what parliament and other UK bodies can do.

Other rules are contained in judicial decisions. Some are in textbooks, in particular Erskine May’s Parliamentary practice. Some are purely customs of the politicians, of the judges or of the army officers or senior civil service. These, called ‘constitutional conventions’, are only effective so long as politicians, judges, army officers or senior civil servants keep observing them. If they start to break the rules and no-one successfully objects, the rules have changed.

Walter Bagehot’s The English constitution (1867) drew attention to the difference between two parts of the constitution: “first, those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population - the dignified parts, if I may so call them; and, next, the efficient parts - those by which it, in fact, works and rules” (Fontana edition, 1981, p61). Nowhere is this distinction sharper than in the role of the prime minister.

Prime minister
According to the rules of the “dignified part” of the constitution, which have remained unchanged in this respect since 1689, the head of the government is the queen. She appoints ministers, judges and army officers, and they - and MPs - have to swear allegiance to her.

In practice things have gradually changed. If the king or queen appoints a government which cannot get tax legislation passed through the House of Commons, the government will not work without overthrowing the 1689 Bill of Rights, which lays down (among other things) that taxation without parliamentary consent is illegal. Through the 18th century kings - and Queen Anne - could usually, but not always, get the government they wanted by manipulating elections to the House of Commons. Sometimes they could not and there would be clashes. As late as George IV, in the 1820s, the king had an effective veto over ministerial appointments and legislation he disagreed with. But sometimes the king or queen had to put up with a disagreeable government because this was the only way to create a parliamentary majority.

The role of ‘prime minister’ is commonly said to have begun with Sir Robert Walpole, who put together a coalition of dissident Whigs and Hanoverian Tories which defeated George I’s preferred ministers in parliament around 1720. The prime minister thus emerged as the guy who put together a coalition which could create a parliamentary majority. Under the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) there developed a ‘constitutional convention’ that the monarch did not veto either legislation or ministerial and most other appointments, with a few exceptions. The prime minister thus became the effective head of the government.

It is important to understand that this is just a convention. The legal rules of the “dignified part” are still in place. If by some bizarre accident Respect or the Socialist Party suddenly got a majority in the House of Commons, the queen could perfectly legally veto ministerial appointments or legislation and/or, dissolve parliament and insist on a new election. The Tories, Labour and Liberals would no doubt support her. In 1975 a Labour government in Australia was kicked out using these powers, which Australia inherited from the British constitution.

Until the emergence of the Labour Party there was no question of the prime minister being the elected leader of a political party. A process of negotiation took place between the king or queen and the principal leading figures in the parties. Creating a majority involved getting faction leaders to serve in the cabinet and bring their supporters onside. The prime minister was thus in effect recallable by the body which elected him: the House of Commons. For a relatively recent example, in May 1940, though the Tories had a majority, Chamberlain fell and Churchill became prime minister because dissident Tories, and Labour, were not prepared to serve in a ‘national government’ under Chamberlain.

Strange as it may seem, this system was actually more democratic than the current regime in which an elected party leader gets to be prime minister. You got to vote for your MP, who was locally selected. Someone got to be prime minister because they could assemble a coalition of MPs. The prime minister thus did not have the level of control of either the government or the House of Commons which a prime minister in the style of Wilson, Thatcher or Blair has. There would be no question of a prime minister announcing that he would go in five years’ time - or, as Thatcher did, announcing that she would “go on forever”. Under the current regime, voting for a party’s candidate is in reality voting for its leader to run the country. Elections and political news become personalised: we are to choose ‘Blair’ or ‘Brown’ or ‘Howard’ or ‘Kennedy’ and so on. The prime minister actually has more power relative to elected representatives in general, through control of party patronage, than a US president or a president of the French Fifth Republic.

In place of a parliamentary elective oligarchy (rule of a few), we get an elective temporary monarchy (rule of one). Our rulers pretend to us that this is ‘more democratic’. In fact, the direct election of party leaders is a watered-down version of Hitler’s 1933 plebiscite to establish his personal rule.

Less democratic
The growth and strengthening of the role of the prime minister over the last 150 years thus involves this aspect of the constitution gradually becoming less democratic. It is not the only anti-democratic change. Since the later 19th century the ‘professionalisation’ of local government - taking decisions out of the hands of the laity - has gone on apace. So has the decline of trial by jury. So has the growth of the centrally controlled state bureaucracy. Why?

Here the “dignified part” of the constitution and its “efficient part” prove to react back on one another. The struggles of the working class, and of women, for the right to vote, have meant that to preserve the capitalist character of the constitution it was necessary to remove this right from the “efficient” to the “dignified” part of the constitution.

Tom Paine in Common sense (1776) famously made an analogy between the state and a joint-stock company. The implication, though it is not one Paine drew, is that the shareholders have votes in proportion to the shares they own. Bourgeois or capitalist ‘democracy’ means exactly this: that the state is to be controlled by the property-owners in proportion to their property. Under the old order this mechanism worked through the open sale and purchase of votes in elections, which were attached to property, the customary right of the very rich to get a peerage, and trading in votes in the houses of parliament. It was also directly reflected in the sale and purchase of commissions in the army. Similar regimes of open corruption and sale and purchase of votes have characterised US politics before the 1930s and Japanese politics after World War II.

Over the 19th century, however, the rise of the working class made it impossible to maintain this open system in Britain. The regime was forced to concede the vote to widening social layers, the secret ballot and anti-corruption legislation. Under these conditions, the capitalist class risked losing control of the state in two senses. First, there was a danger that the workers would take over. Second, the mechanism by which politics reflected, through corruption, the relationships of force within the capitalist class risked destruction. The more people that need to be bribed, the harder it is to bribe effectively.

Both dangers point to taking more powers away from the voters and away from their elected representatives and concentrating them in fewer hands. Less danger of working class takeover, and fewer people to be bribed. Under cover of a variety of ‘reformist’, ‘modernising’ and plebiscitary ‘democratic’ lies and fakery, step by step we move towards forms of elective monarchy in which corruption functions primarily through the top of the system. Britain is not unique: the same tendency is visible in all the capitalist states.

Succession problem
Once you have monarchical forms of rule, of course, you have succession problems. It is true just as much of the ‘leftist’ monarchism of Stalin or Mao (or on a smaller scale of a Healy, Cliff or Matgamna). Hereditary monarchy solves this problem, but at the expense of routinely producing incompetent kings. Elective monarchy produces episodic succession crises, because the leader’s patronage powers over his subordinates (usually his; Thatcher was an exception) suppress changes in the political relation of forces below him and prevent potential successors properly emerging until crisis point is reached. The Americans’ partial solution is the 22nd amendment (1951) which prohibits anyone holding office as president for more than two terms. Thus, there will necessarily be a succession, but not necessarily a succession crisis.

This, of course, brings us back to the beginning. If Blair is trying to do anything with his announcement, it is to render the succession to his rule a little more predictable (and hopefully be able to swing the succession towards a ‘favoured son’).

Fighting for political democracy - or, to put it in Dave Craig’s terms, fighting for republicanism - means among other things opposing the development of elective monarchy and the ideologies of ‘plebiscitary democracy’, ‘expertise’, and ‘one-man management’ which go along with it. We need to get back the idea that leaders should be recallable by the bodies which elected them - and should be elected by bodies which are capable of recalling them. We need to oppose elective monarchy both in the working class’s own organisations and in the larger state.