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The Cavalier Constitution

About

In the 70s I studied Politics at Bristol University and I was taught to accept the facts of the Westminster-Whitehall system, but also to ask questions.

Some of these were (and still are) unavoidable. If things are a particular way, we must ask, why should they be so? Is it right that they are as they are? Is there any alternative that should be considered? etc.

The last year of my course (1977-1978), much of it spent writing my dissertation, was a fever of personal and societal enquiry. This was the start of polarisation and the triumph of the neo-liberal ideology that believed itself to be non-ideological.

Those were heady times before student grants were converted into loans. This was before Thatcherism took hold and the British state began to turn the screw on civil liberties. What could be more symbolic than closing off Downing Street to the public – to voters – in 1982?  The elected representatives who ran the state no longer wanted to confront the common people who they claimed to speak for and theoretically answered to.

Several aspects of the British political system worried me while I was studying for my BSc, not least the stubborn survival of the House of Lords; the persistence of the reserve powers of the monarchy even if the Queen was described as a powerless figurehead; and the patently iniquitous electoral system that emulated horse racing and favoured two parties, one proudly resistant to intelligent reform; the other being scared witless of the national press. 

The strange thing is that no one could explain why things were as they were. The British Constitution, I was told, was a historical tradition had to be respected because there was no alternative. It had been adapted to the needs of modernity, I was assured and the anachronisms were mere details that provided colour and charm.

When I researched and wrote my book Politipedia, I took the opportunity to look more closely into things and found the British “constitution” to be a strange thing. Charmingly eccentric was one way to look at it; chaotic to the point of preventing good government was another.

During the furore over Brexit (2016–2019) I read a great deal of articles from the Daily and Sunday Telegraph articles which demonstrated to me that many learned people in the country had a very poor – usually ideologically-driven – understanding of the constitution. I realised that someone had to set things straight if these misconceptions were not to be propagated by each new generation. 

I approached the august Political Quarterly with my informed, but nonconformist ideas and was shocked to be shooed away with a broom. The chair of the editorial board, a professor emerita of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London, quite literally told me never to submit anything to her periodical ever again, for the rest of time. That told me I was on to something.

I got a similar reaction later on from another reputable journal, British Politics. One of the co-editors, now at Nottingham University, would not respond to my emails. He even ignored an article and letter submitted by recorded delivery. Times have changed. Professional courtesy is obviously no longer the default in institutions of higher education.

The other co-editor, a professor at my alma mater Bristol University, read the abstract of my article but not the article itself and decided unilaterally not to have it peer reviewed. 

Peer review is, of course, one of the few methods we have for distinguishing truth from fake news. When the main organs of academic debate in the country do not want to discuss a subject, when they maintain a taboo rather than be forced to think, there is important work to be done that we cannot expect them to tackle.

Scholarly rigour demands nothing less than to challenge the status quo. Every generation must do it.

University professors who have lost their curiosity and are afraid of paradigm shift are in the wrong job. Their function is the examination of knowledge to distinguish sagacity and from ignorance. If they rules some facts and hypotheses out of order, then they are deliberately favouring the latter over the former.

Despite, the rebuffs I carried on trying to answer the questions in my mind. What was this “British Constitution” exactly? Did the voters understand it? Where did it come from? How was it legitimised? Why did the great and good venerate it instead of interrogating its credentials? 

Gradually, I discovered that there was a parallel world of constitutional sceptics and an alternative non-Victorian-Edwardian version of British political history. 

Abandon the comfort of ideology, and it is quite clear that a trail of failure leads back from the present to the turbulent 17th century (1642–1689) when a tiny fraction of the population decided that an absolute monarchy at permanent war with a corrupt parliament should cede to an absolute monarch in name only in partnership with the same corrupt parliament. No one then thought about legitimacy and accountability. The system that has survived since then is lacking in both qualities. Everyone since has assumed that the system has been legitimised by history.

The Cavalier Constitution is my attempt to fit all the pieces together so that the learned contributors to the Political Quarterly and British Politics have the means to reassess the legacy of history in a rational way. Whether they take the opportunity or not is up to them.

Nick Inman nickinman.com