IN FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY’S 1868 masterpiece The Idiot, the hero, Prince Myshkin, makes a naïve, impassioned plea to a gathering of Russian nobles. Forgetting his fiancée’s strict instructions not to embarrass her by saying anything politically controversial, he urges the assembled aristocrats to respond to the growing risk that their class will ‘disappear altogether into the darkness, unguessing its danger, blaming everything around it, and losing ground every day’. All they need do, he suggests, is cede some of their power to the oppressed masses: ‘Let us be servants, that we may become lords in due season!’
They didn’t, of course – in fiction or in fact. We all know what happened in Russia half a century later.
Politicians who live and work in the Palace of Westminster are in a comparable position. Faced with an obvious but vague and possibly exaggerated danger, they could, if they chose, take radical evasive action. Nothing we know about politics or people suggests that they will do so.
As far as the physical Palace is concerned, most MPs accept the conclusion of the Joint Committee report that warned in September 2016 that they face ‘an impending crisis which we cannot responsibly ignore’. They must act decisively to repair the Houses of Parliament immediately, it urged, or face ‘a substantial and growing risk of either a single, catastrophic event… or a succession of incremental failures’. Even then, however, decisive action seemed beyond them.
For a few short months following publication of that report, there were signs that facts were being faced. There was talk of a free vote in the Commons on which course to take, tentatively scheduled for April, then May, 2017. The snap general election of June 2017 threw that timetable off course. By July (by which time an infestation of bed bugs had been added to the building’s list of problems) the word was that – although preliminary contracts for management, architecture and design had been awarded and work would soon begin on making Elizabeth Tower safe for Big Ben – the main project was ‘dead in the water’ for the foreseeable future. As the BBC’s Mark D’Arcy put it: ‘Spending billions revamping Parliament is not a good look, in the wake of the Grenfell Tower disaster.’
In fact, MPs were due to readdress the issue in a Commons debate in early 2018. Yet the reference to Grenfell remains relevant, reminding us that decisions guided by short-term political priorities can have catastrophic effects for real people. No doubt there were sound political arguments for seeking every possible financial saving when the tower was being renovated in 2014–16. That did not make it the right thing to do.
The obscenity of Grenfell may seem far removed from the selection procedures of Parliament’s upper chamber, but the two subjects are not entirely unrelated. When democracies break down, there is usually a price to be paid in lives as well as liberty. We, the British people, are responsible for the upkeep of our democratic system – and there is no reason why we should be exempt from the general rule that failure to address what feel like remote, theoretical threats can have appalling human consequences.
The UK’s tradition of parliamentary democracy is precious. It is not perfect; nor is it guaranteed. Right now, it is weak, partly for reasons we have already considered but also because it shares the flaw of all representative democracies: a tendency to degenerate, over time, into oligarchy. (I use the word in the modern sense of a democracy that has become subservient to wealthy vested interests.) British political parties accepted about £40 million’s worth of donations from private sources in 2016; the UK lobbying industry is worth an additional £2 billion a year. People wouldn’t spend that sort of money if all voters’ interests carried equal weight. In the US, this process of degeneration is so advanced, and the lobbying industry so entrenched, that some consider the Washington machine barely fit to govern, irrespective of who is in the White House. And when the whole system is discredited, there is nothing to prevent the unscrupulous from taking over: champions of the status quo lack the credibility to defend it.
The process then becomes as disastrous as it is predictable. The oligarchs effect the initial separation of power from ‘the people’ (that is, from the less privileged part of the population). Then, to the horror of the oligarchs and those who have thrived under their rule, the kleptocrats move in. As far as most ordinary voters are concerned, it barely matters. They’ve had power taken out of their hands either way, and they have little reason to feel loyal to oligarchs who have delivered only government by the elite, for the elite. But there is a difference. Oligarchs can be constrained, up to a point, by public outrage. Kleptocrats, being shameless, cannot. And, unlike oligarchs (who are generally doing well out of the status quo), they have a clear and sometimes urgent interest in changing the law – or subverting the system – to protect themselves from retribution. So kleptocracy, with equal inevitability, tends to drift towards tyranny.
Any resemblance between this entirely theoretical description and contemporary politics is of course coincidental. Nonetheless, you may be able to think of examples. And that, of course, is only the beginning of the process. The more visible the degradation of the system becomes, the greater the risk that other potential tyrants – from the neo-totalitarian left, for example, or from the fanatical religious right – will use that degradation to justify their own attacks on the system.
Fixing our decaying parliamentary democracy by reforming it would be neither revolutionary nor reckless. It would be renovation, sensible and long overdue.
The physical deterioration of the Palace of Westminster is an important problem, but the risks it poses affect few beyond those who work there. The danger resulting from the evaporation of Parliament’s moral authority affects us all. On both sides of the Atlantic, and across the Channel too, new threats to democracy are rising. The daily discourse of Western politics has become so polluted – by election meddling, fake news, agents of hostile foreign states, lobbying, astroturfing, ‘dark’ money, hackers, bots, trolls and populist politicians who scorn the checks of the Fourth Estate – that nothing feels safe any more. Nations whose citizens once fought in their millions for democracy are stalked with growing confidence by would-be rulers who simply don’t accept democracy’s ground rules. Behind them swirl perplexing forces: shapeless, invisible, relentless. We sense the danger. We fear that our political system is being made to serve interests other than the nation’s. But we cannot agree what to do about it.
In such a climate, safety comes from institutions – the more solid and venerable the better. In Britain, that means Parliament; and, no less importantly, it means the people: those untamed, diverse, self-willed, flesh-and-blood voters who between them keep our justice system’s feet on the ground and who, given the chance, could do the same for our legislature. In a world of terrifying political complexity and barely comprehensible dangers, great strength can come from simplicity. And it is hard to think of a simpler, stronger way of shoring up Parliament than replacing its overcrowded chamber of unelected, unrepresentative, ineffectual Lords with a house of People’s Peers: one chamber; 400 people; a simple, transparent way of selecting their names at random (I suggest an old-fashioned, non-digital method); and a universally acknowledged right, basic as habeas corpus, for them to assemble in person in their chamber and perform their functions as they see fit.
I’m pretty sure those People’s Peers would do a good job. I’m certain that they would do much good simply by being there, bearing living witness to the electorate’s consent to parliamentary rule – and to the principle that, in the UK Parliament, every single citizen has the potential to be heard.
Extensive input from better minds than mine would be required to convert this back-of-an-envelope sketch into a workable blueprint for a reformed chamber. I look forward to it. A well-designed People’s Chamber would strengthen Parliament where it most needs strengthening. It would provide a radical brake against policies that were damaging to the general population – delivering, in effect, a better managed nation. It would protect it against the current free-for-all of political populism, in which public ignorance is exploited by the unscrupulous to achieve outcomes that serve the few, not the many. It would provide a safety valve for popular grievances. And it would provide a fresh and powerful line of defence against future attacks on our democratic rights, with its members acting as living, breathing reminders that each attack on parliamentary sovereignty is an attack on the rights of every last one of us; not someone else’s problem but yours and mine.
For all its decrepitude, there is something reassuringly solid about the Palace of Westminster. We gather here not because it is the perfect place to do so but because it is here that our ancestors gathered. When our enemies attack us here, as happens from time to time, they attack our past as well as our present. The weight of our parliamentary history is one of the things that makes us resilient. Yet today there is a significant and growing part of our electorate that does not feel bound to that history – subscribing instead to the view (popular on both left and right) that democracy is as much about mass activism as about what happens in Parliament. We can ignore this drift and risk the consequences. Or we can allow the currents of popular discontent to make a difference inside Parliament.
It seems obvious to me that people power would be an infinitely more benign and constructive force flowing through Westminster than it is today, left to rage against the system from outside. Would it really be so reckless to act now to accommodate it?
Parliament has a chamber crying out to be abolished, a chamber crying out to be created, and a physical makeover crying out to be implemented. If we tackled all three problems at once, representative democracy could be reborn.
There’s just one problem: the current system hasn’t collapsed. It’s hard to argue that there’s nothing wrong with it. But there’s no denying that, like the crumbling palace that houses it, it functions, after a fashion.
Yes, of course – everyone agrees – we really ought to do something about reform. But right now? At a time like this?
To remake Parliament to suit the modern age would involve a long, hard road of campaigning, agitating, haggling, whipping up enthusiasm, shrugging off setbacks and banging on the door until finally, long after any rational person would have given up, it began to open. No significant parliamentary reform has occurred without such a journey. Does anyone have the stomach to embark on one now – when, on reflection, it doesn’t seem absolutely necessary?
Yet look at the world around you. Follow the news. Listen to the voices of hatred in cyberspace. Check out the reported irregularities in recent elections in the West. Forces we barely understand – technological, economic, demographic, environmental – are remaking our world, scattering certainties like huts in a hurricane. Someone, somewhere, may be in control – but it’s hard to feel confident that it’s someone who has the UK electorate’s interests at heart. Instead, we look on helplessly. Wealth, employment and security are melting away. Brexit is coming. New economic superpowers are emerging. There will be bigger and more bestial terrorist atrocities on British soil. Our current Queen, our most visible shared link to the world of Churchill and Attlee, cannot reign for ever. Cracks are showing in the European Union, and in NATO. The comforts of the past are receding, and the future bears down on us regardless. Who is to say that we will not one day face our own battle to escape ‘the abyss of a new dark age’?
It certainly isn’t hard to imagine a populist leader declaring in the near future that the ‘will of the people’ – discerned by whatever means that leader sees fit – will henceforth trump parliamentary democracy in the UK. It’s arguable that something close to this is already happening, with Brexit. Remember Nigel Farage’s threats of civil unrest (‘political anger the likes of which none of us in our lifetimes have ever witnessed in this country’) if our elected representatives fail to obey his interpretation of the people’s directly expressed will on Brexit? And it’s more than arguable that senior figures in both main parties are happy to assert (when it suits them) that the popular will (interpreted as they see fit) carries more weight than the considered conclusions of the people’s elected representatives.
If you feel that this is a fair and sustainable way of doing politics, you will presumably see no need to build a new safeguard into our parliamentary democracy. So what if the system crumbles to irrelevance? It deserves to.
But you may feel, as I do, that a flawed, formalised, tradition-hallowed system of representative government is actually as good as democracy can be expected to get, in the real world. It may not be perfect, but it gives the people their best chance of hanging on, in the long term, to those ‘real treasures that free men possess’. And in that case, Parliament needs all the protection it can get – including the wholehearted support and active involvement of the electorate.
The People’s Chamber that I propose would not be perfect. No doubt it would have its share of gropers and expense-fiddlers as well as fools; it would have bad days as well as good. But it would have democratic legitimacy, of a kind that would complement the legitimacy of the Commons rather than challenging it. It would be simple and transparently fair, and capable of commanding popular enthusiasm.
And for that reason it would be a workable solution to a real, urgent and obvious danger. At the risk of trying your patience, let me restate that danger one last time. There is a rising tide of populism in Western politics: a non-specific clamour for direct democracy that threatens to submerge representative democracy in the tyranny of the mob. It is folly to ignore that tide. It is folly to yield to it. The wise course is to react constructively, neither denying facts nor surrendering to them. Somehow, we need to channel those waves of popular discontent.
My rough proposal for Lords reform offers a simple form of channelling. Others may be able to suggest a better form. But we have to do something.
And will we? What do you think?
I know what I think: we will leave things as they are. Our time-honoured traditions of inertia demand it. Very few people in British politics are unaware of the dangers. Very few don’t care. Yet we drift on regardless because… because that is what we do. Churchill would recognise the symptoms: ‘Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong.’
That gong has not yet struck, for democracy or for the Palace of Westminster. Until it does, we will keep calm and carry on, muddling through, making do and mending – and doing all the other things that we like to regard as British virtues. Our well-fed parliamentarians will continue to perform listlessly for the tourists, squabbling occasionally about how best to patch up their tumbledown workplace. And we will continue to congratulate ourselves, complacently, on our fine old democratic traditions – even as we let them die.
If only we dared to act. If only we dared to get up from the tracks of the history while there is still time. Perhaps we will – only not today. Perhaps in the meantime the decay will somehow repair itself. But don’t count on it.
‘Democracy never lasts long,’ warned John Adams. ‘It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.’
If ours does so in the UK, in our lifetimes, it will not be for want of options. It will be for want of courage.