Burke versus Gramsci – the Great British Institution and the Conservative Dilemma

 Conservatives look to Edmund Burke as their great founding father.  Central to Burkean thought is the institution with its historical memory as a repository of the wisdom of the ancestors.  In terms of modern philosophy and the Burkean tradition one might also look to Alasdair MacIntyre in his account of institutions and nations acquiring a tradition of virtue and as a Burkean opponent of Burke’s dreaded sophists, economists and calculators .

If conservatism depends for its philosophy upon manmade institutions there is always the risk such institutions will prove fatally fallible and corruptible.  Such could well be the problem in today’s United Kingdom.  Unlike the United States with its revolutionary origins, there has not been such a strong suspicion of Government and institutions within the British Right, sometimes quite the opposite.  The Crown and the Church as Margaret Thatcher once outlined are of far greater import to a Tory than the economy.  This perspective, it should be remembered, was held by the Conservative Prime Minister now looked to as an exemplar by today’s sophists, calculators and economists – the libertarian and neoliberal Right.

Margaret Thatcher though experienced the problem of the dilemma I intend to outline at first-hand.  All the British institutions, the Church of England, the BBC and even the hierarchy of the Conservative Party were opposed to her.  This tension has only grown more stretched and extreme.  While the Conservative Party has moved culturally to the Left, it is still faced by a hostile hard Left in control of the institutions that it should naturally be at home with.

The Church of England is no longer the Conservative Party at prayer, as the saying had it.  The BBC is faced with calls to be defenestrated by conservatives not radicals, because of its cultural Marxism.  Even the Conservative Party itself, at least its high command, is now a proponent of the hard-left cultural agenda in terms of same-sex marriage, “diversity” and equality of outcome.

It seems as though the Gramsci agenda of the “long march through the institutions” as extreme Leftist German-activist Rudi Dutschke put it, has been emphatically achieved in Great Britain.  The universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, the BBC, the Church are all advocates of a hard-line cultural Marxist agenda dressed up in palatable phrases such as “diversity”, “equality”, “openness”.

So what does a Burkean conservative do when the institutions its whole philosophy seeks to conserve and be guided by have fallen into the hands of the Marxists?  One answer is the populist response, looking to the American Right as an example.  Here characters like Nigel Farage and Aaron Banks are notable champions for such an agenda.  Indeed, despite being placed upon the Right, their populist agenda sometimes puts them on the Left.  For example, whereas an earlier Eurosceptic like Enoch Powell was a keen defender of the House of Lords, as well as the Crown and the established Church, Farage and Banks are radical constitutional-reformers.

The other response is the classically liberal agenda, advocated by the sophists, calculators and economists that conservatives should instinctively distrust.  From this free-marketeer liberal perspective privatisation rather than conservation is the answer to the BBC’s political subversion.  The free market is not really a conservative response to dealing with preservation of the institution.  We are not talking about a nationalised industry, but a British institution which is a custodian of many great British traditions.  Would commercialisation and advertising culture really be a conservative answer?

One might contrast arch-liberal free-marketeer George Osborne with populist Nigel Farage as two contrasting answers to the Gramscian victory within British institutions from Oxbridge to the BBC.  To abolish our institutions though is surely not a conservative solution, whether it be BBC privatisation or Church disestablishment. 

The populism of Brexit might have unleashed patriotic forces against the Gramsci institutions, but populist nationalism is not inherently conservative, as any cursory knowledge of Nineteenth Century nationalism will tell us.

It is undoubtedly the case that while the Right and conservatism look to be in the ascendancy, the whole movement is riven by internal contradictions.  This new populism rightly unleashed against the EU has now turned on British institutions like the House of Lords (admittedly corrupted into a culturally Marxist institution by the likes of Blair, Cameron and Clegg).  It could just as easily turn upon the Monarchy and nationalism again would have reverted to its radical-Leftist Nineteenth-Century roots.

It has to be admitted that when the Marxists own and control what you are trying to defend it is difficult to know how to proceed.  The only answer I believe is not one for people looking for instant solutions.  Only a gradual return to the values of Tradition will rescue our institutions and our culture.  And this might have to be carried out in a radical and unconventional way, outside of the apparatus of British institutions.  It might mean home schooling of our children, to teach them traditional values outside of the Marxist-run education system.  It might mean leaving the Church of England as a Church of Laodicea for a more traditionalist denomination that might feel foreign at first, such as Eastern Orthodoxy.  It might mean stepping back from the rat-race of the neoliberal economy with more self-sufficiency and less consumption.  In short it might mean letting the light of conservative tradition shine before men as an example, rather than trying to fight for it and impose it through democratic elections and the party system.  From the small acorn and with Providential nurture we might see a large oak of conservative counter-culture grow that provides a genuine alternative to the anomie of cultural Marxism and its insipid shadow, neoliberalism.  Only with a cultural change, rather than election victories will conservatives see their institutions restored and again linked back to the Burkean wisdom of ancestors. 

LAWFARE - THE WEAPON OF THE PROGRESSIVE ASS

When Charles Dickens revived the old phrase “the laws is an ass” in his novel "Oliver Twist", he was writing in a time when despite the legal reforms in the Victorian age, law generally meant the law of precedent known as common law and the law of equity or fairness.  The former was the strict interpretation of legal rights, the latter was the evolution of a process of fairness within the jurisdiction of the Lord Chancellor, known as the keeper of the King’s conscience. 

In his novel that focused particularly on the legal profession, “Bleak House”, Dickens portrayed lawyers as mercenary, cynical and self-interested.  Those who became caught up especially in equity disputes in the Court of Chancery, where the Lord Chancellor sat, found themselves consuming their capital and destroying their happiness, chasing the chimera of legal settlement in their favour.  The interminable case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce has entered the popular consciousness of Englishmen.  It was of course ironic that the area of law meant to do away with a legalistic and inflexible approach itself had become a burden upon litigants.

Yet today we have a new and particularly post-modern form of legal abuse – that often referred to as lawfare, implying war by other means.  Examples current are the ongoing persecution of the hunting community through the courts and the blatant political attempts to prevent implementation of the referendum on EU membership.

What makes the development of lawfare so troubling is that England was a nation in which the rule of law was a sacrosanct principle.  Back before Henry II (who built upon Anglo Saxon respect for the law in his legal reforms) the King’s Peace meant that common law in Anglo-Saxon England that extended across the realm.  These principles, although much undermined, survived post the Conquest and were restored by Henry II and reluctantly reaffirmed by his son, King John when he signed the Magna Carta in 1215.

That deep respect for the rule of law, by which an English aristocrat like the commonest felon could be sentenced to die on the scaffold, as a principle before which every Englishman was equal, spread across the globe.  Most famously the constitutional governmental system in the United States built upon the English principle of the rule of law.  Through the Commonwealth this principle became worldwide.

What then is the modern Western nation state without the rule of law?  It is that system of commonwealth suffering from that constitution most feared by the Whigs in their rhetoric at least, arbitrary government!

Yet what Whigs say should never be taken at face value.  The Whigs overturned important principles such as the precedent of Royal Succession and used their new found power in England to run a corrupt oligarchy.  It is interesting and telling that today’s liberals, who use the law as a weapon against political opponents, are the philosophical descendants of the Whigs.  That belief in history going in a positivist direction has been further affirmed harmfully through a Left wing account of jurisprudence by the American academic of the Left, Professor Ronald Dworkin.  "Progress", according to the ideology of the Left, could now be enforced by judge-made law.  A hybrid of Whig positivism and cultural- Marxist jurisprudence has given us "lawfare".

By taking advantage of the Englishman’s reverence for the rule of law, corrupt progressives are not just blatantly attempting to overturn referendum results, but to tie up the Englishman in red tape and restrictive laws   In a sense the ban on hunting with hounds was the test case, the canary in the coalmine.  Contrary to the principles of English common law, which looked to established practice for legality, Parliamentary statute overturned generations of a country sport, symbiotically tied in with rural life, in a complex ecosystem of nature, agriculture, sport and tradition.  The English common law would never have ruled in such a way.  It depended upon Parliamentary statute to overturn a prescriptive right to hunt.  After such an egregious victory, many more things became subject to bans and restrictive legislation, until the Englishman has found it difficult to emerge from his house without breaking one law or another.

This abuse came from the growing importance of parliamentary statute, depending upon a transient majority in the Commons, over the importance of common law, which looked to legal precedent and also, in a sense even more importantly, established usage.  If something had been done for time immemorial, then in a free country it must be legal – unless a Parliamentary statute overruled this.

There is nothing antiquated, quaint or anachronistic about the common law: the most serious offence of murder remains a common law offence.  Statute though, with its expression of the sacrosanct principle of Parliamentary sovereignty, commands legal legitimacy and transcends pre-existing common law.  Courts would go on following precedent until overruled by a new act of Parliament. Statutes should be rare and something like a matter of last resort.

The problem with the increasing level of legislation is not just that it is used to restrict an Englishman’s historical rights, but that there is nearly always a political agenda behind it.  There is currently a lot of talk about the Benn Act, which – against all precedent and having been passed through a breach of parliamentary convention – forces the executive to approach the EU for an extension in the event of no deal at the time of the legislated deadline. 

Those MPs who passed the bill in a cynical and political manoeuvre now grow disingenuously indignant about the rule of law when the Prime Minister has threatened to disobey this cynical law – as though the Benn Act were some ancient principle handed down for generations.  What hypocrites!  This law is nothing more than a tactic and yet it is granted the same sanctity as court rulings based in centuries of precedent.

Even worse and especially since the creation of a “supreme court” by Tony Blair’s government, the problem of judge-made law through judicial review is growing and threatening the nation with a constitutional crisis.

Before our eyes we can see that the Whig history was wrong about our constitution.  We are governed by the Queen in Parliament.  Within its realm Parliament is sovereign, but it depends upon the head of state for Royal Assent.  Furthermore Parliamentary sovereignty has nothing to do with the exercise of the Royal Prerogative and neither is that Prerogative justiciable. 

This is not simply a misreading of history that is leading to a constitutional crisis.  It is also to do with that ongoing problem of the “long march through the institutions” by the cultural Marxists.  To a large extent left-wing liberals are the useful idiots of the cultural Marxist agenda, even if they are not fully-aware or fully-signed-up to the agenda of cultural Marxism.  In any event, they are willing to breach with precedent, protocol and prescriptive rights to achieve a political agenda. 

That means that longstanding practices unpopular with or unnoticed by the majority, such as foxhunting and shooting can no longer depend upon being established customs.  They are threatened by a simple majority in the Commons.  If the Lords object they will be overruled (and since Blair’s reforms, the Upper House has been completely corrupted, anyway).  The exercise of the Royal Prerogative by a Government to achieve democratic goals such as dissolution or prorogation are prevented by statute or the Supreme Court.

The whole agenda of the progressives, by which they essentially cheat the system, is reliant upon the Englishman’s acquiescence to the law as an-almost-sacred principle.  Nonetheless, this cannot carry on forever.  If one or two political movements use the law to frustrate democracy or destroy ways of life, then the law itself will lose credibility.  There is an arrogant contempt of the law by those who weaponise it for their own political goals, however complacent they are about their own righteousness.  Being self-satisfied about one’s political views and having the power to abuse the law cannot go on with impunity.  The danger is progressives (liberals and cultural Marxists) will push people too far so that the law and our institutions are no longer respected.  That will not only take away their power, but be a loss and a blow for Anglo Saxon civilisation.  The mistake was to believe the Whig analysis of ever-increasing parliamentary power and history heading in a liberal direction, rather than recognising our rights and civilisation depend upon established usage, custom and precedent.  That Tory spirit of precedent and prescriptive rights in our law making is needed if our institutions and respect for the law are to survive.

Putting things right

As another hunting season draws to a close (one much disrupted by the weather), it is worth considering the position of one of our great cultural traditions.  Despite the Conservative Party’s pledge to hold a free vote on the ban, despite Tony Blair, the man who as Prime Minister who used the Parliament Act to force the ban through the House of Lords unconstitutionally, admitting he was wrong and despite a clear impact on farms such as sheep farms on the Fells hanging on by their fingertips, hunting for political reasons alone remains banned.

Just as it was once useful for Mr Blair to allow frequent free votes on hunting to keep his more prejudiced backbenchers happy, so for the current Government hunting can be a useful political football.  It is all very well to launch a review into the impact on farming of restricting the despatch of foxes to one couple of hounds, but repeal of this aspect of the ban could be achieved by statutory instrument, with no need for a Parliamentary vote.

It feels more as though the review is to send a message of sympathy to hunting people without actually acting.  Yet even Tony Blair now admits the hunting ban was a mistake.  There are few who would argue the ban was about animal welfare.  It was as Tony Banks said “totemic” – it was a deliberate attack on a certain way of life and an imaginary, stereotypical foxhunter, who bares little resemblance to the majority of keen hunt supporters - The people that in Tony Banks’ bitter mind represented the class enemy.  Because this was about a visceral hatred and class resentment, no argument would ever have won around a man like Tony Banks.

So what is to be done?  Hunting has shown its determination to survive within the law, despite that law being unjust and unclear.  It faces the threat of animal-rights extremism, increasing urbanisation taking away country, an ambiguous and draconian law and this season, as so many others have also suffered, the impact of the flooding.

Hunting has rightly been defended on animal welfare grounds.  Most people of sound mind understand that hunting an animal is more natural and humane than trapping, poisoning or shooting.  Most realise that fox numbers have to be controlled.  The real misunderstanding seems to be that urban people assume that people enjoy hunting because they enjoy killing.  This is a complete misunderstanding and comes from ignorance, so perhaps it is time to talk about what is so enjoyable about hunting.

If hunting is only justified on the very valid argument of pest control the debate is narrowed to a question of whether foxhunting is cruel or not.  While that argument can be clearly won, the urban mind still does not comprehend what is enjoyable.  So they then ask: Why don’t you just treat it like pest control?

The answer to that is surely that hunting has grown organically throughout the centuries as part of rural English culture.  It is therefore multi-faceted.  Nobody sat down one day and planned hunting as the means to control foxes.  Rather, it has arisen naturally through tradition.  So the enjoyable things about hunting (which previously did a vital job in wildlife management) are the community, the tradition and pageantry, the thrill of riding across country and jumping fences and most importantly of all working with animals – horses and hounds.  Anyone who truly loves animals cannot fail but be absorbed by hounds working.

We know hunting did a vital job before the ban, but just because it did that vital job, does not mean that it should not be enjoyable or rich in community and traditions.  So rather than the hunting rules and rituals being unnecessary, they are precisely what make hunting so rewarding.  This is perhaps why hunting is surviving all that the Government throws at it. 

However, the question must be asked:  What about the fox?  For as long as there are so many restrictions on how a fox can be legally hunted, other less humane methods have to be resorted to by others (trapping or shooting).  The landowner will need to be rid of the fox, whatever the intentions of Labour MPs when they voted for the ban.  So really anyone who cares about animal welfare should be pressing for the ancestral duty of hunting to be restored to it.  Hunts across the land are fighting hard to sustain a way of life handed down to us, but for as long as hunts can only go through the motions, the fox must be controlled in more brutal ways by others.

Our ancestors handed us a method of fox control that respected the law of nature – often the sick and the diseased despatched naturally through hunting, rather than more indiscriminate means of culling.  The fox was given a clean chance of either complete escape or instant demise, with minimal suffering.  Hunting has survived under the ban because it is multi-faceted and is sustained by the commitment of hunt staff and masters and the rich tradition and the closeness to animals and nature it offers supporters.  Nature would be better served however if hunting were given back its historic role of humanely controlling the fox.  

Ring-fence Defence of the Realm

Of all areas of Government spending, defence is the one area that suffered during the years of Labour mismanagement.  Despite fighting two wars at once, in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Government continued on a peacetime budget, stretched our armed forces to breaking point and failed to honour the military covenant.  This disastrous approach led to the defeat in Basra and the British public’s dramatic change in its view of foreign intervention – whereas once most of the public saw Britain as a force for good when it intervened militarily abroad, after Blair’s foreign adventures, the public no longer seems to believe that we will intervene for the right reasons or make things better when we do intervene.

Whether this failure by the Exchequer to fund our forces in the frontline had anything to do with the Chancellor’s hostility to a prime minister so keen on exercising the Royal Prerogative to send our troops abroad and as a means of spiting his political rival cannot be proved.  In all other areas of public expenditure Gordon Brown was profligate in his spending of taxpayers’ money and government debt.

With the election of the Coalition Government we have seen drastic defence cuts as part of an overall policy of reducing the large deficit incurred by Labour.  Sadly, as defence saw serious under-funding during the Labour years this means that in effect the defence budget is being hit harder than other budgets, particularly the NHS, which saw lavish spending under Labour.

Of course with our aging population there is a strong case that the NHS should be exempt from spending cuts.  On the other hand, with recent scandals in the NHS it is also clear that spending large amounts of money on the health service does not necessarily ensure a better service for the patient.  Of course, it does expand the number of people working in the public sector, who thereby need government expenditure to remain high to keep them in work.

There is something slightly difficult in trying to justify why departments that did very well out of Labour should receive special treatment when defence is in real terms being hardest hit.  While defence expenditure is not a means of creating or protecting employment, it is very troubling to see those who have risked their lives for us being made redundant.  With regard to the impact of cuts on dockyards such as Portsmouth, while it cannot be argued that money should simply be spent to keep the workforce in work, it can be argued that it is not in the national interest to lose skills that may be necessary in the future.

Meanwhile, the undoubtedly politically-courageous policy of ring-fencing international aid has been zealously adhered to.  It is a courageous policy because it would clearly be very unpopular in a recession to spend taxpayers’ money on poverty abroad rather than at home.

Of course the British public are rightly generous when emergencies such as the recent disaster in the Philippines occur.  Indeed it is right that in such an exigent situation Government money is spent as a means of relieving the suffering of our fellow humans.  That is not the sort of international aid that the British public distrust.  They rather distrust regular payments of their tax money to countries with expanding economies and corrupt governments.  One would have to move in very rarefied circles indeed to believe that such a policy would be popular.

Ring-fencing international aid was therefore no election gimmick.  It is rather a clear foreign policy, which aims to influence by so-called soft power and to head off problems such as anti-Western terrorism by paying money to countries that dislike us.

The British public has less reservation about defence expenditure and the reason is perhaps that
defence of the realm is the first duty of the State.  It is a public good, which cannot be provided by private companies for profit.  It works as a result of an altruistic concept of patriotism. 

It is unlike other public services in that it is not about delivering a service to each of us as individuals, but all of us as a nation.  It cannot therefore benefit from an internal market, whereas other public services can often learn from some aspects of the market.

Defence expenditure is paying for an insurance policy against unforeseen threats.  While the Government no doubt identified important new threats through its strategic defence review, when threats become manifest they have often been unforeseen.  Would we have necessarily forecast the invasion of the Falklands as a threat, when we were more worried about a nuclear Soviet Union?  Would we have foreseen the threat of Islamism?  Judging by the State’s tolerance of Islamic extremists who fomented discontent, hatred and sedition in the 1990s, probably not.

So while it is regrettable to see such a drastic reduction in our professional armed forces (with the Army shrinking by 20,000 men) and a planned reliance on the amateur (in the best sense of the word) element of the TA, it is also worrying.  With Ship-building ceasing at Portsmouth, no aircraft carriers until 2030 and the cutting back of regiments such as the Royal Fusiliers, Britain seems to have embarked on a change in its historic role that has even worried the United States.  This could be as serious a turning point as our withdrawal from the East of the Suez Canal.

The Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, is an honourable politician.  For example, unlike many politicians, he took a principled stand on the issue of same-sex marriage.  One of his greatest skills is his business acumen.  It is important that he remembers though, that the Armed Forces do not operate like a business, but according to older values.  Cost-cutting is necessary across departments, but defence is the department that should be cut least.  Changing Britain’s world role must be about our national interest and values, not just the bottom line.  

     

Special Relationship on the Rocks?

Despite the number of MPs who were critical and despite public opinion no one actually expected that Britain would let down the United States over Syria.  Since loss of Empire it has been the assumption of British politics that a world role can only be achieved through supporting as closely as possible the United States in international affairs.

Apart from fighting together against different manifestations of German militarism in two world wars, the key examples of the Special Relationship are the sharing of intelligence and the basing of nuclear missiles in this country.  The importance of intelligence sharing and the trust between the two nations on intelligence should not be under-estimated.  The agreement between John F. Kennedy and Harold Macmillan that Britain would have American Polaris missiles, which would be part of a multilateral deterrent albeit fitted with British warheads was a fundamental building block of the post-war relationship.  

The so-called Nassau Agreement followed the nadir in the Anglo-American relationship - the Suez Crisis.  Due to the United States undermining an Anglo-French and Israeli strike against Colonel Nasser’s Egyptian regime, Britain not only lost a Prime Minister, but was seen to have lost its ability to be a global player without the United States.

In the context of Suez or indeed Britain’s refusal to join America’s action in Vietnam, perhaps this recent refusal to back any U.S.  air-strikes in Syria looks less serious.  However, it could be indicative of a recent gradual change in Britain’s world role and its relationship with the United States.

First it must be accepted that the Special Relationship is important to Great Britain.  Our reliability to the United States means we gain influence as the most trusted partner.  While our interests are not identical they often coincide.  We hold similar values of democracy, the rule of law and freedom.  Both nations are on the whole a force for good in the world.  Whereas France has defined its continuing global role in terms of independence from U.S. foreign policy, the United Kingdom has relied on closeness to the United States.  To abandon such an approach would mean starting again from scratch.

The Special Relationship is special to both partners.  The United States relies on British intelligence and vice versa.  A common language, linked history (particularly the shared history of two world wars and the Cold War) and similar legal system all lead to a similar world-view.  For many individual Americans there is a strong emotional affinity with the Old Country.  The strong personal chemistry between our leaders:  Churchill and Roosevelt, Kennedy and Macmillan, Mrs Thatcher and Reagan, Blair and Bush have also ensured a close alliance.

On the other hand, as demonstrated by the American approach to Suez, the cancellation of Skybolt and indeed the invasion of Grenada during the high-point of the Special Relationship when Reagan and Mrs Thatcher were out the helm, America will look after its own interests first.  That should not surprise us.  It is the duty of a state’s government to pursue the national interest.  Likewise the British should always look first and foremost to their national interest.

The current strain in the Special Relationship goes back to when Blair stretched it to breaking point in his involvement in the Iraq War.  Not only did Blair gamble on the future of our Armed Forces, by fighting a war on a peacetime budget (leading to the defeat in Basra),  but he gambled on the future acceptance by the British public of the Special Relationship.  Because Blair unquestioningly almost slavishly supported bad American policy, he actually undermined the future of close cooperation. 

Now there is a most unpropitious situation.  The Oval Office is occupied by a President with little interest in Europe – a man who sent back the bust of Sir Winston Churchill.  Indeed it is sometimes doubtful Obama believes in America let alone its relationship with old allies.  Meanwhile the British Government has drastically cut the nation’s military capacity, leading to concerns from the United States as to whether its closest ally would in future be able to support it..  Notwithstanding this, Great Britain, but for the Iraqi experience, would probably have supported the strike on Syria. 

It would be fair to say Britain has sacrificed a lot for the Special Relationship.  Would France have stood idly by if the sort of oppression carried out by Mugabe in Zimbabwe had taken place in one of its former colonies?  Instead, when Mugabe was committing his worst abuses, Britain spent blood and treasure on the ill-fated Iraqi adventure.

Notwithstanding this, the Special Relationship has probably been better for both nations than worse.  The Special Relationship saw off Nazism and Communism.  Despite the current lack of confidence in the Anglo-Saxon economic model, the world is moving towards free markets.  Anglo-Saxon values have defeated various manifestations of totalitarianism and have shown the core values that underpin our societies are robust.

Britain rightly can grumble about Suez, the delay of the U.S. entry into the world wars, the ambiguity of the U.S. response to the Falklands crisis and Grenada (who can imagine Blair having the strength of conviction to confront Reagan in the way Margaret Thatcher did?).  This is outweighed though by the fact that thanks to American might, we are not dominated by a Socialist Russia or a Nazi Germany.  Furthermore America may grumble about lack of support in Syria, but it should be thankful for unambiguous British support in the Cold War, our intelligence sharing and the dependability and expertise of our Armed Forces.  The world as a whole can be thankful that apart from the aberration of the second Iraq War, the Special Relationship has been a force for good and a force for freedom and order in world affairs.  It is important it survives.

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.