Wrecking the Constitution

The Plague of ‘Good Intentions’ in Constitutional Reform

By Franek Bednarski

The recent election of the Prime Minister was for many a moment of elation; for others, one of worry; for the majority, one of relative indifference.  The assumption, even among the most optimistic conservative commentators, was that at best the change in leadership would somewhat assuage the loss of seats at the next election; that the defeat which then seemed likely and now seems near-inevitable would be tempered and the new Prime Minister, while not renowned especially for economic ability, would at least present a relatively credible programme to replace the directionless economics of the Johnson era.

That, I think it is clear, has not happened.  It is not my intention, however, to brood and fulminate over my disillusionment with the government’s performance; nor do I intend to write about my horror at the fiscal restraint that ought to have been the guiding policy ab initio being reluctantly enforced by a Chancellor whom his Prime Minister cannot fire, whose position relative to her can best be compared to that of the Frankish Magister Militum Arbogast to the child emperor Valentinian II.

I intend rather to reveal and to analyse, to consider and to carefully sift through the root causes of these tragedies.  I do not mean, alas, the economic roots of our nation’s problems, or the personality traits that caused the hubris that led us to this precipice.  I mean quite simply the misguided ‘democratising’ principle: a false one, as I hope to prove: that meant that a politician who never commanded the confidence of a majority of her MPs; indeed, who never even commanded their respect; ended up wielding, though such a term seems unduly generous, the reins of power.

It was William Hague who first, following on from that cataclysmic defeat that was 1997, decided to separate the choice of the leader of the party, in good times the Prime Minister, from its natural roots, a ballot of the Members of Parliament.  It can easily be seen how such an idea could have been popular at the time: the party had just collapsed, after four terms in power, into an electoral position so dire that few alive could recall a similar electoral disaster, one that, indeed, made Michael Foot look like a competent politician.  It seemed like only huge change: immediate, comprehensive change: could ever elevate the party to power again.

If only such dark times, when great collapses fan the flames of demands for revolutionary change, did not have such uniformly disastrous results!  If only there had been even one man to stand up and oppose them!  Indeed, how many awful and damaging changes, under the specious pretences of ‘democracy’ and ‘transparency,’ have blighted the British constitution over the past fifty years.

Was it not under such pretences that the House of Lords was mangled and debased, that the horrid elevation of the patronage of politicians led to the filling of that venerable body with soulless technocrats and undeserving donors?  Was it not thusly that the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly were formed, notwithstanding John Major’s sage warnings, tugging at the very heart of the Union and threatening the country with imminent dissolution?  Was it not in this way, in a vain drive for ‘discarding outmoded ceremonies,’ that those symbols of the British Parliamentary system, the House of Commons opera hats, were discarded and a venerable ceremony vandalised and overthrown?

It is doubtless true that many of these champions of reform, those who wish to abolish the Lords and slim down the monarchy, to destroy, indeed, our very electoral system, would want nothing more than for the House of Commons itself be moved and the bland, European interiors of the Welsh and Scottish Houses be imported into the heart of British democracy. 

It is not my role here, and neither could it be in this setting, to establish, or indeed propose remedies for these developments; a conservative government must naturally do nothing to further them, must strive to maintain the traditional balance of our constitutional system.  However, I cannot see any clear remedy for a permanent protection of the constitution.  The best conservative instincts are, in the best sense, reactionary, and ought to be a stabilising influence that towers over the mad storms that occasionally affect society.

We are sentenced, tragically, like Stilicho trying again and again to save the Roman Empire, to stand as a bulwark against destructive reforms; to propose genuine, conservative clarifications, allowing our institutions to stand, in their essential form, strong forever.  We must propose bold solutions when it comes to grave crises and take bold action when the nation is at stake, but never disrupt the gentle balance of our organically formed constitution.

That the Conservative Party, usually so unswerving and persistent, has succumbed to the temptations of modernity; that we have unleashed to ordinary members a voting process for a position in which they ought not to hold primacy, where it is the people’s elected representatives who should rightfully dominate, is frankly a betrayal of our basic principles.  Members of the Conservative Party do not own the Conservative Party; they are not its principal mechanism of action.  The Party existed before mass membership and will exist after it: we have, in fact, no firmly entrenched tradition of it.

The authority of a Prime Minister is fundamentally, and constitutionally rooted in the authority he holds in the House of Commons.  Conservative MPs, selected by the local members, are the ones elected by the people in order to represent them there.  To steal the parliamentarians’ prerogative, to give it to anyone who pays a nominal fee to sign up is frankly unjustifiable.  It is what saddled our nation with the unconscionable burden of Jeremy Corbyn; the Conservative Party should be no party to it.

The membership, fundamentally, are totally unaccountable.  No one elected them, no-one can vote them out.  They already enjoy the immense honour of selecting local MPs, of choosing for the voters the candidates who will represent them.  It is then those MPs, and no one else, who ought to enjoy the universal and unassailable privilege of choosing the nation’s leader.

It is finally time we drive the reformist scourge, which has so blighted our nation, from our party.

Franek Bednarski (The Welfare Officer) is a second-year undergraduate reading Literae Humaniores at Jesus College.