There is a contradiction at the heart of the British Constitution (if we allow that such a thing exists) that concerns sovereignty.
The UK is described as a democracy but the facts don’t bear this out. Parliament is sovereign, with the expected tacit permission of the unelected monarch, under whom or with whom it rules the land.
Half of Parliament, the House of Lords, is entirely out of reach of democracy. That means that at best only a third of the key institutions can be considered at all democractic.
The other half of Parliament, the House of Commons, is ostensibly democratic as long as we turn a blind eye to the “elective dictatorship” by which the executive, using royal powers, tells the legislative what to do, not the other way around.
In reality, many decisions are made by the unelected personnel of the state (special advisers, civil servants, interest groups) rather than by free and secret vote in the Commons. It is well known that there are many routes for a minister to bypass parliamentary scrutiny and approval. A party leader with a Commons majority can easily alter the constitution if he or she so wishes, without the express consent of the electorate (if the matter in question was not in the last manifesto).
The Commons falls short of democracy in two important ways. One it that it establishes its own rules: what can and cannot be said in the chamber; what members can and cannot do; etc. These practices are justified by tradition but tradition in this case is no more than the convenience and preferences of Victorian gentlemen.
What is discouraged or prohibited in wider society is tolerated or even condoned in the Commons. The system of coercion, in which free thought and free action are dictated by a system called “whipping” is accepted as normal.
More importantly, the House of Commons sets the terms of the franchise: who can vote and in what manner. It instructs, allows and limits the people, not the other way around. It therefore controls its own system of legitimation, which is a contradiction in terms of democracy.
In a democracy the people are sovereign and this power cannot be changed or altered by the institutions above them that serve them.
If two thirds of the apparatus of the state are undemocratic; the remaining third is only dubiously democratic.
This contradiction is caused by there not being a constitution that recognises the inalienable sovereignty of the people as a precursor to government.
The “constitution” as such was not created by referendum of convention that symbolically invests the power of the people temporarily in the hands of the elite. The working rules of the House of Commons are never voted on by the people.
The contradiction at the heart of all this is as follows. In a democracy, the people are sovereign. That is, they get the final say over everything: every appointment, directly or indirectly, and every policy decision. Their say is often nominal or notional, but notionally and technically the people retain all power.
Of course, it is possible to argue that notional power is not the same as real power but the vesting of sovereignty in the people is still the essential and unavoidable basis of democracy. In France, for instance, the inalienable power of the people over their own political system is written into the constitution. The relationship between citizen and government is unambiguous.
Things get more interesting if you think what this statement means: that the people are sovereign.
Sovereignty is not only held by the people as a collected whole (eg all adult British nationals residing in the UK plus anyone who has British nationality who lives abroad). Logically, a precise portion of sovereignty is held by each person in perpetua as the right of birth or naturalisation. “Les hommes [et les femmes] naissant et demeurent libres et égaux en droits”.
In a democracy, this sovereignty can never be taken away. Any politician who claims to speak for the sovereignty of the nation without the express approval of a majority of people, is trying to fool the people.
The inevitable implication is that vote is a human right in a democracy. It cannot be allocated or removed by the House of Commons or any other political institution. Where a institution has control over the terms of its own system of appointment, there is not democracy.
Individual sovereignty is the precursor of all true democracy. Anyone who says otherwise, is probably defending pseudo-democracy or doesn’t care about democracy at all.
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