The Royal Prerogative is Dead! Long Live Parliament?

 After yesterday’s Parliamentary vote for the first time for many years the United Kingdom will be opting out of joint military action with the United States.  There are two separate issues here – whether we should launch air strikes, covered in the previous blog and secondly, who should be responsible for the decision.  Many worry about the consequences for the Special Relationship and whether Assad’s regime has been bolstered.  It is largely because, following historic precedent, the Government took the lead on foreign affairs rather than Parliament, leading to an impression of support for the United States from Britain.  For reasons of the need for flexibility in changing circumstances, our Government makes use of the Royal Prerogative in foreign affairs.  Things are not as simple as they were though; constitutionally we are in a new area.  In 2003 Mr Blair set a new precedent by bringing an executive decision to go to war to the legislature.  Endorsement by the Commons provided a fig leaf for war on trumped-up claims. Ironically, the new convention of consulting Parliament was established by a Prime Minister who spent most of his tenure in Number 10 arrogantly ignoring longstanding conventions.  Now this new convention has meant that the legislature has frustrated the executive on an executive decision over Syria.

Last night an interesting exchange took place between two Conservative MPs.  Douglas Carswell MP, who may be said to represent the Whiggish tendency in the modern Conservative Party, was agonising as to what he thought the consequences of military intervention might be.  He was interrupted by an intervention from his parliamentary colleague, Benard Jenkin MP, who made the Tory point that the uncertain deliberations in the Commons were evidence of why deciding whether to execute a war should be a decision for the executive.

The blogger has many doubts as to whether intervention is wise.  The British public is extremely sceptical.  Parliament opposed the timetable for action before the weapons inspectors had reported back.  The Prime Minister reacted by taking military intervention off the agenda entirely.  As stated elsewhere on this site, much of the doubt about action was because of the way Tony Blair had taken the country to war in 2003.  It is indeed possible many MPs voted the way they did to put right the mistake they made in 2003 – they took the opportunity to vote against action in 2013, because they wished they had voted no in 2003. 

Be that as it may, there is surely a strong argument that the executive must make the decision on military action.  It is not the same thing as accepting military action was right, to say that exercise of the Royal Prerogative is a better way to decide whether to go to war.  The Government made an executive decision to send more planes to Cyprus, without consulting Parliament – so it still regards the Royal Prerogative as a live concept.

It is difficult for MPs to make an informed decision without full access to intelligence and without being part of an ongoing discussion with our international allies.   It is the Government that has a relationship with foreign governments, not Parliament.  To an extent, as per Mr Carswell’s concerned vacillating in the debate, MPs were deciding in the dark, without all the facts before them.  Consequences that MPs have not foreseen are now coming into play.  The United States will go ahead without us.  The Special Relationship is weakened.  The Prime Minister has been politically damaged.  Assad and his regime feels bolstered, at least for now.  Britain will no longer be at the table to discuss what the international community should do.

Of course the executive will make mistakes and its plans on Syria might have been such an example, but the Royal Prerogative is exercised by a prime minister who is a member of the legislature and heads a government that cannot survive without the support of the Commons - That in itself must be an important factor weighing on any government’s decision processes.   It means the executive remains accountable even if Parliament does not have a vote on the decision.

The vote in the Commons did not stop Tony Blair, due to the tribal party loyalty of the Commons (which has its place in passing legislation, when a government must deliver a programme) coming into play.  Combined with this, the internal politics of the Conservative Party meant it supported Blair.  All this gave the decision a greater air of legitimacy, despite many now regarding Iraq as one of our greatest foreign policy errors.

In the same way party politics cam into play yesterday, whereby a pressurised Labour Leader was desperately looking for an immediate victory.  A Parliamentary Conservative Party that feels neglected by its leader produced thirty rebels.  Does parliamentary politics really give greater legitimacy to executive decisions?

It seems rather that for good or ill the Royal Prerogative as exercised by elected politicians must be the mechanism for decisions of peace and war.  Blair had to face the voters in 2005 and they could have turned him out of office. David Cameron would have had to face the voters if he had made a mistake on Syria.  Instead we now see a situation where Britain has potentially damaged its relationship with its closest ally having initially been a driving force for air strikes, at a time when the Oval Office’s current occupant has little emotional connection with Europe and sees America’s future in the Asia-Pacific.   Meanwhile, Assad has recently launched another brutal attack and Britain may have inadvertently put itself on the sidelines of international affairs. 

I am not arguing that we should have attacked Syria, but that the Prime Minister was best placed to be responsible for that decision.  The fact that it is now not clear who is responsible for the decision means that the Prime Minister built up expectations with our allies only now to disappoint them, with all the consequences for our interests and credibility abroad that will bring

The armed forces serve the Queen, not Parliament.  That is not just because historically when Parliament had an army in the 1600s it committed abuses, it is also because in terms of exigent national emergencies, quick decisions, flexibility and access to intelligence the executive is best placed to decide.  Our constitution evolved that way because that worked best.  This involvement of Parliament in decisions of war and peace is yet another constitutional innovation from the Blair years that is proving to have unforeseen consequences.    

Does the British Public want to abandon its Nation’s Historic World Role? If so blame Tony Blair!

The British public no longer trusts its politicians on foreign wars since being led to war by Prime Minister Tony Blair.  Tony Blair staked the reputation of British politics, British intelligence services and the Special Relationship on his assertion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and the British public has not forgotten.  When no weapons were discovered, he was left looking like a charlatan who had taken the country to war on false pretences.  Thousands died, the region was destabilised and the dark forces of Islamic extremism were able to manipulate events for propaganda purposes against the West and to influence the weak-minded.

There are many reasons why David Cameron should fear being regarded as the “Heir to Blair”, but no more so than in his need to gain public support for military action in Syria.    David Cameron is of course a very different man from Tony Blair, to start with he is a member of a different political party.  His reasons for wishing to launch air strikes in Syria are not because of uncertain intelligence about the existence of weapons of mass destruction that are alleged to be an imminent threat to the U.K.  No, his reasons are humanitarian and are because chemical weapons have already been used.

David Cameron is however faced with very similar problems to Tony Blair – a close vote in Parliament, unpopularity of military action in the country and Security Council members opposed to action (with poor human-rights records of their own).  The UK, the US and France are relying on the duty to protect that falls to the UN since the Rwandan genocide and the UK government has legal advice to the effect that to intervene for humanitarian reasons is legal even without a UN resolution.

It is not clear whether Assad’s regime at the highest level was responsible for using chemical weapons while UN weapons inspectors were in the country and near to the site of the attack.  It is of course possible a rogue commander on the ground acted unilaterally.  It has also been alleged that some rebel groups are trying to get hold of chemical weapons.  It is not at all predictable what the fallout would be of Western air strikes and whether retaliation would result in a strike on Israel and then a conflagration across the region (Lebanon is already being pulled into Syria’s War).

What is clear is that the British public has lost its faith in the political class when it comes to going to war.  Politically it is not feasible that David Cameron would act as he can legally in British law and simply launch strikes by use of the Royal Prerogative.  Since Blair held the vote on Iraq, Parliament will now always be consulted.  That may not be enough to reassure the British public. 

You do not have to be an expert in Middle Eastern politics to understand that removing that hideous tyrant Saddam Hussein destabilised Iraq and the region, giving a foothold to Sunni extremists such as Al Qaeda-in-Iraq in rebellion against the new pro-Iranian Shi’ite government.  Many voters will feel we are again heading down the same road.  It is clear even to the most casual observer that the removal of secular military tyrants in the Middle East does not mean an alternative of liberally-democratic parties taking power, rather political Islam is moving in, whether in Egypt or Tunisia. In Syria minorities, including Christians, depend upon the Ba’athist regime to protect them from Islamism.

Of course, there is a case to be made that the purpose of military action is to send a message that the use of chemical weapons is a moral Rubicon that should not be crossed.  The Government is proposing joining air-strikes as a punitive response to the chemical attack, not as the beginning of a process towards regime change. The British public though will be very hard to convince.  If air strikes lead to a worsening of the situation and a chain reaction, ending in the replacement of Bashar al-Assad’s regime with an Islamist government with control of chemical weapons, then the British public will not forgive the political class and the level of distance between the nation’s politicians and the nation will become even more of a chasm.

Pugin versus Portcullis

In so many ways the cold, metal and glass structure of Portcullis House, where MPs now have their offices is an affront to all that Augustus Pugin stood for.  The author of “Contrasts”, where he argued for a return to the Gothic in architecture, was the man who designed the inside of Sir Charles Barry’s new Houses of Parliament, after the ancient building was destroyed by fire.  He saw in his work the opportunity to reassert mediaevalism and the sublime beauty of the Gothic.

As one walks around the Victorian interior of the cockpit of our democracy, one can gain an impression of the complicated and reserved character of Pugin, the Roman Catholic draughtsman of French descent (whose family had escaped the brutal Jacobin revolution).  There is such intricacy to the design and so many historical references.  Everything is full of meaning and emphasises tradition and history.  For a nation with no written constitution, where precedent and convention shape our government, this emphasis is so important. 

Walter Bagehot spoke of the dignified and efficient parts of the English constitution, where the efficient was the democratic workings of real government and the dignified part that which gave our government its aura of ancient legitimacy.  Thus the Monarchy is the apogee of the dignified side of the constitution, with all its ritual and ceremony, while the real political power is exercised by the democratically-elected politicians who are the efficient part of the constitution.  Bagehot termed the phrase “veiled republic” for our system of government.   Pugin, through his work, ensured that veil was indeed intricate and beautiful.  It surely not only gives a greater sense of history to our democratic proceedings, but also sends a message to politicians that they are the transient part of a longstanding institution.  By making the Palace itself intricate and awe-inspiring, the politicians are forever reminded of their own smallness in history.  No wonder so many career politicians prefer being able to swagger through the emptiness of Portcullis House, our generation’s answer to Pugin’s skill and vision!

Perhaps the key point about Augustus Pugin’s and Sir Charles Barry’s combined effort is that they turned to the Gothic rather than the Classical style.  Whereas the Gothic with its vaulting arches looks to the Divine and the Ancient of Days, the Classical it seems to me puts man himself at the centre.  In a classical setting politicians would be tempted to see themselves as modern-day Ciceros, rather than heirs to the Christian Anglo-Saxons and Mediaeval Catholic Kings.  So there is something that informs the atmosphere of our Parliamentary building that requires the residents to look up to God and back to history, rather than to look to themselves as the centre of it all.  Surely for a Christian society it is more inspiring to have a feel of the church about our legislature rather than to look to the Romans and Greeks, whose peccable gods showed all the foibles of corrupt human nature?

There is so much of the detail in Pugin’s work that can be missed. Some little detail may suddenly be spotted, such a small-stained glass window or the coat hooks and ink wells in the House of Lords.  It is rather like a metaphor for old precedents or ancient rights that MPs stumble across as they endlessly churn out new laws.

Portcullis House on the other hand seems not to look to any era at all.  It is the structure of a hubristic, secular age, with man at the centre.  We no longer even claim that the gods are simply like us.  In Portcullis House the politicians are at the centre, tradition and ritual is cast aside and hubristically politicians can strut the stage, asserting that all that went before no longer matters; this is their day and they are not bound by what went before.  Tony Blair was the nadir of this sort of politician – a man who did not understand history and therefore treated so much of our constitution with contempt.

Of course, not all politicians are of this ilk.  The decent type that springs to mind are those MPs, including a majority of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, who voted against Nick Clegg’s vandalising plans for the House of Lords.  Some politicians do live up to the architecture all around them!

Portcullis House is suited to the modern, career-politician, who is removed from tradition.  For this is a political class where the Speaker dispenses with the trappings of office thus diminishing the office and aggrandising himself.  This is a political class that follows the shibboleth of “modernisation” because by throwing out the old means that what you are doing is far more important.

A salutary parable against this modernisation could perhaps be the cause of the fire that led to Sir Charles Barry’s and Augustus Pugin’s commission.  The tidying up exercise of the tallies from a different era led to the conflagration that destroyed everything bar Westminster Hall.  The lesson being that throwing away what no longer seems necessary can lead to unforeseen and disastrous consequences!

Pugin was worried about the paganism of the classical.  I am sure he would be even more concerned about the atheism of modern architecture.  Whereas the Gothic teaches us to look to the heavens, today’s architecture tells us we are at the pinnacle of nature and not bound by the old or the religious.  The contrast between the Palace of Westminster and Portcullis House speaks loudly of the difference between Pugin’s ideals and today’s political class.

Reflections on the Revolution in Egypt

In this blog I am not going to be so presumptuous as to suggest solutions to the Gordian Knot of Egypt’s current political troubles.  Neither am I going to claim any in-depth knowledge about Egyptian politics.  All I intend to do is draw some general conclusions from looking at Egypt through the perspective of our own political system and find lessons that we can learn.

It is very striking that a key difference between our stable democracy and Egypt’s current turmoil, is longstanding institutions.  It is not democracy alone that leads to our stability, but the fact that our democracy has developed through institutions that have not been overturned.  Democracy, our history must teach us, is a gradual process and cannot be introduced overnight and expected to endure.

It seems that so much of our involvement in the Middle East has gone wrong because we have made the mistake of believing democracy can be achieved by overturning an existing system and replacing it with a new, democratic, Western society.

Perhaps the reason we act in this ideological and revolutionary way in our Middle Eastern and Asian interventions is that part of the United States’ understanding of itself is that it gained its freedom through a revolution.  I am going to be so bold as to say that is wrong.  I think that the United States was able to set up a political system based on freedom and stability because it emerged from an existing system, which to be blunt was our system.  The founding fathers were able to look to the common law developed for centuries, developed by Henry II and the Magna Carta signed by King John.  They also looked at an existing representative system across the ocean, to which they had paid for through taxation as subjects, although not being represented themselves.  The United States, I contend, did not achieve its nationhood through a revolution, it was rather through a war of independence to allow it to enjoy the same existing freedoms and rule of law as the home country.  It carried on its journey based on its Anglo-Saxon heritage, a millennium of political evolution.

Unfortunately, this belief that democracy can be achieved by revolutionary war has informed the foreign policy of the most powerful Western power.  Our intervention in Iraq was based on this mistaken premise and our hopes for Egypt when we turned against our erstwhile ally President Mubarak were likewise based on this revolutionary premise.

Unfortunately for Egypt its institutions are not of longstanding and the vacuum is filled either by the army or religious extremists.  It is a Hobson’s choice, but I am not going so far as to argue that the decadent King Farouk and the 150 years old Muhammad Ali dynasty was an admirable institution.  Rather, as disliking the extravagances of the Eighteenth Century French court does not imply support for Robespierre, so having strong reservations about King Farouk does not mean one favours the military coup d’etat of Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Socialists. 

Once institutions are dissolved however, then there is little to restrain abuse of power or nurture progress.  Just as the French Revolution ended in the Terror, so the military revolution led to Nasser’s brutal oppression of the Muslim Brotherhood. Two examples of how power is inevitably abused when the rule of law and institutions have been cast aside.

The current situation in Egypt, with military government on the one hand and revolutionary religious zealots on the other is I believe a result of there being no institutions and tradition to contain power and curtail abuses.  No system is perfect, but gradualist reform and piecemeal change leads to more stable government than revolutionary overthrow.

The ousted government was elected, but it was also revolutionary.  The President was moving to claim absolutist powers and he represented radical and left wing religion, rather than conservative and institutional religion.

It is worth commenting that the Muslim Brotherhood, with its more radical approach to Islam should not be described as a conservative force.  Rather Political Islam is about a radical return to the original teachings and a rejection of the accumulated wisdom of generations of teachers.  Sayyid Qutb, one of the first leaders of the Brotherhood (imprisoned and executed under Colonel Nasser’s regime) looked to a radical form of Islam that returned to original teaching; this political Islam is about revolution, not a conservation of centuries of teaching.  It is therefore radical and extreme.

Institutional religion inevitably contains and restrains its more zealous adherents and counteracts the individual interpretation with an accumulation of wisdom and teaching.  Without the institution, religion can become radical. 

Looking then at our own system again, we can be grateful for our political stability and freedom, but the chaos of Egypt teaches us why our democracy is stable.  It is democracy within ancient but evolving institutions.  It is democracy in the context of rule of law – a rule of law based on precedent and the accumulation of case law.  Our religion is manifested in an established church that as an institution contains the radical, while, as a Protestant church, giving room to individual interpretation.

Thus we must value that which underpins our democracy and makes it stable and secure – precedent-based common law, an ancient representative Parliament, a constitutional monarchy and an established church. 

My latest blog for Conservative Home can be found here

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/platform/2013/08/matthew-groves.html

My latest blog for Respublica can be found here:

A Story of ”the Church Militant here on earth” and the Usurers? There’s more to it than that!

The Church of England’s contribution to the controversial debate over payday loan companies has received a good deal of media coverage.  This is of course an issue that has troubled politicians and even professional football players (in the case of Papiss Cisse and his Newcastle shirt!).  During these difficult economic times, the thought of ruthless lenders preying on those falling into debt is a worrying and emotive subject.

It is therefore important to emphasise that the Archbishop of Canterbury has not simply leapt into this debate reactively.  There has been a long process of his concern about this area of high-interest lending developing.  I understand that the Archbishop has spoken out on this matter because of his own financial expertise, developed in a business career and demonstrated in his knowledgeable contributions to the Parliamentary Commission on

- See more at: http://www.respublica.org.uk/item/A-Story-of-the-Church-Militant-here-on-earth-and-the-Usurers-There-s-more-to-it-than-that-#sthash.H1odOzKE.dpuf

No separation of powers please, we're British!

This blog will now make a bold and iconoclastic claim, which is that Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron Montesquieu, was wrong.  This Anglophile French aristocrat admiringly described our constitution as being based upon the principle of separation of powers (a concept that he defined).  I want to argue that it is not based on this principle; it is rather based upon parliamentary sovereignty and government by the Queen in Parliament.

The theory of separation of powers is that the system of government works more justly and efficaciously if the three branches are distinct institutions.  These three branches are the executive, the legislature and the judiciary.  In the United States, which relied on Montesquieu’s theory for its constitution, this principle is most clearly manifested.  In the U. S. the executive is a distinct office: the presidency.  The legislature is also distinct as the two houses of Congress and then the judiciary separate again, with the highest court being the Supreme Court.  If you are member of one you cannot be members of the other branches.

In the United Kingdom, however, our system is very different.  The ministers of the Queen, who exercise executive power of the Royal Prerogative are members of the legislature.  Recently, in adherence to Montesquieu’s theory, the Law Lords, our most senior judges were taken out of Parliament and a new American-style Supreme Court was created.

I believe that this reform to our judicial system was a mistake, because our system does not work as Montesquieu thought and we do not have the same system as America.  Rather than the Law Lords being an anomaly, the Supreme Court is now the anomaly in our constitution.  It brings with it new problems to which our constitution is not suited, such as activist judges who make the law.  This risks opening a can of worms as to whether our judges should be elected if they are making law.  That brings with it the issue of party politics creeping into justice.

The whole principle of our system of government depends on the unity of two institutions -–Monarchy (the executive and fount of justice) and Parliament (the legislature).  When these two institutions are in synthesis our system is stable.  Civil strife, whether between De Montfort and Henry III or Charles I and Oliver Cromwell occurs when these two ancient institutions are out of kilter.

Since William of Orange, stability has reigned and monarchy and parliament have been synthesised.  Thus while the Queen’s bishops, ministers and until very recently, judges sit in Parliament, the Royal Prerogative is exercised by ministers who are elected Members of Parliament.  And this system works, not because some founding fathers sat down and wrote out a constitution based on all their learning, but it works through organic evolution.

We have a system where ministers of the Crown are not disconnected from the man-on the-street and the local community.  This is because, even the Prime Minister still has constituency matters to attend to as an MP.  Ministers remain grounded and rooted in the country because they are not only appointed by the Queen (through the Prime Minister’s exercise of the Royal Prerogative), but are also elected by a local constituency.

For those overly squeamish about the Law Lords sitting in the upper house of Parliament, it should be remembered that by convention they did not vote on legislation, but their expertise was there for the upper house to call upon as it revised legislation.

Indeed convention is all-important in our unwritten constitution.  In law the Queen has the power to exercise her prerogative, by convention it is exercised by her first minister, who is an MP.

This Parliamentary system of constitutional monarchy works because it is flexible.  There is not the gridlock between executive and legislature found in the American system.  The trouble is that too many of our politicians remember vaguely from their PPE degrees that separation of powers was a Good Thing and therefore, ignoring the evidence of their eyes that our organic system works, they cannot resist tinkering.  That is why we have a downgraded Lord Chancellor and have expelled the Law Lords from Parliament. And we are worse off for it.