I’ve found it difficult to make enough time to post over the last few weeks; a period during which time the reputation of Parliament has been steadily and devastatingly eroded and Labour’s, never mind Brown’s, chances of winning the next election have all but evaporated.
It just so happened that I made a trip to visit the Houses of Parliament just as the fortunes of the institution reached their recent nadir. Pugin’s masterpiece remains a stunning example of high-Victorian architecture which seems to evoke the spirits of the great statesmen of British political history, such as Gladstone, Disraeli and Churchill who once graced its elegant corridors and lobbies. Yet when I visited Westminster I couldn't help but find that the grasping nature of the exposed expenses claims, the attempts by MPs to prevent the disclosure of such information and their great reluctance to acknowledge that any wrongdoing had occurred seemed to taint the place with a shabby and tawdry atmosphere which neither history nor architecture could fully remove.
Despite a reputation for being self-effacing, the British, like most nationalities, are often very good at trumpeting their country’s achievements, both real and imagined. Historians may proclaim the Palace of Westminster as the ‘mother of all parliaments’, politicians may like to imagine themselves as playing Athens to America’s Rome and ordinary citizens may sneer at the prevalence of God in American politics. Indeed parliamentary democracy and the rule of law in most of the Commonwealth and beyond is firmly based on the British model and indeed Britain did slowly but surely build a functioning parliamentary democracy while the rest of Europe toiled under autocracy. And if parliament is currently experiencing its nadir then its apogee surely came in the summer of 1940 when Churchill led declared to the House of Commons that Britain and its allies would continue to lead the free world until it had defeated the forces of Fascism. Indeed the House of Commons itself was destroyed in the blitz and you can still see blast marks from the bombing gouged out of the entrance to the chamber. When the palace was rebuilt Churchill ensured that the scars of war were left in place as a permanent reminder of the sacrifices that were made to save European democracy.
Yet Britain never really experienced a full political revolution and parliamentary democracy was only established after a long and sometimes painful evolutionary struggle; in fact the evolution into a fully a modern democracy was never really achieved. France and America both experienced short but violent revolutions (inspired in many ways by British agitators and philosophers) which destroyed the power of the aristocracy, established written constitutions and articles of individual rights in each country; Britain continues to labour under a system rooted in medieval patronage and laden with anachronisms. For a start 12 Church of England bishops are still allowed to sit in the House of Lords and vote matters of state; even though the rational for a strict separation of church and state is obvious. Furthermore whilst US courts block the teaching of ‘intelligent design’ in the US school system, British state schools can choose which pupils to enrol based simply on their religion. And unlike the Bible Belt, creationism can be taught directly from the Book of Genesis. Unelected peers may continue to sit in the House of Lords and disrupt legislation passed by a democratically elected Commons, more than 100 years after their similarly unelected forebears blocked Gladstone’s last Irish Home Rule Bill, with fatal consequences that we continue to live with. Meanwhile we continue to have an unelected head of state with the power to dissolve parliament and to whom members of the armed forces have to swear an oath of personal allegiance. Indeed the Royal Family’s expenses would make even Hazel Blears blush. For example this week the Times reported that Princess Beatrice (and I’m not sure who she actually is) was guarded 24 hours a day during her recent gap year travels, at an expense to the tax payer of over £250,000. The Royal Family is an anachronism and, although the Queen is comfortably the wealthiest woman in the world, the taxpayer continues to fund the lavish royal lifestyle to the tune of at least £37 million per year, although costs of security and protection, tax breaks and expenses incurred by other bodies are not made available to the taxpayer.
Both Brown and Cameron have made a great show of talking about making modest reforms of the expenses system; such reform is obviously needed but it doesn’t address the fundamental problems with the British democratic system. Many politicians have absolved themselves of responsibility for their tawdry expenses claims by blaming the system, and in a way they are right. We will always have some MPs who are incompetent, self-serving or downright bad, we will always have religious leaders who seek to impose their ideas on those who don’t share their faith, and we will continue to have an aristocracy that refuses to surrender its lingering privileges. Yet if we maintain a system which allows these groups to pursue their own desires at the expense of greater society, then we only have ourselves to blame.
