The Crisis Deepens
The Westminster Parliament is in freefall, Brexit looms, the constitution is splintering, the end is upon us
As the novelist said: the past isn’t dead, its not even past. Cromwell, long undead in Ireland, now stalks the gloomy corridors of Westminster again.
The Sunday Times reports that there is a plot afoot. This one seems innocuous — a small matter of suspending Standing Order 14 of the House of Commons:
14 -(1) Save as provided in this order, government business shall have precedence at every sitting.
This little thing, I think, is the tip of the shark fin breaking the water for the first time: the last crisis, the last turn for the UK. The dark shadow will soon be upon us.
If your immediate reaction to that last paragraph is to stop reading this, I entirely sympathise.
We have been stewing in rhetoric, in hyperbole, in claim and counter-claim too long. Everyday another boy cries Wolfgang.
I will endeavour to make my point as dryly as possible.
Looking around the world there are a range of constitutional arrangements in functioning democracies. They share principles, but differ on how those principles are implemented.
At the core is the notion of separation of powers, different state institutions have different responsibilities, checks and balances.
In the United States the President appoints the government, but either the Senate or the House can write legislation. For a law to be passed it must be agreed by all three, or if the President vetos it, it can be passed by a super-majority.
In the Scottish Parliament the government has a monopoly on the introduction of supply bills (think money, taxes) but the committees and the government share the introduction of normal legislation.
In practice, due to lack of policy support for the chamber, the Executive dominates.
At Westminster the government controls the timetable and has a monopoly on the introduction of bills. There are small exceptions, like Private Members’ Bills, but they still depend on the goodwill of the Government who can timetable them out.
The suspension of Standing Order 14 ‘simply’ switches the UK constitution from one valid, supported, mature democratic mode to another valid, supported, mature democratic mode, and on the surface it appears innocuous. But think about that again.
Countries establish their constitution with a foundational event, in a foundational document. These things are widely celebrated with national holidays, and even songs.
This is not normal.
Switching constitutional modes is not like changing your trousers or switching a light on, it bleeds out into all the mechanisms of government: the second, revising, chamber; the parliamentary committees; the other national parliaments; the relationship of civil service to executive and legislature; the policy making process; the structure of political parties; on and rolling on.
This is why constitutional processes are slow and deliberate. Government is rebarbative and oppositional, constitution making is consensual.
The UK is properly an aconstitutional country, we have a written constitution, but no written mechanism to change it.
The rate of constitutional change has been phenomenal — but each change is an ad-hoc patch not a fix — done to get this or that party out of a hole.
Devolution was done on the edges, without changing the centre.
After the 2014 Indyref David Cameron casually impregnated Westminster with an English domestic parliament via EVEL (English Votes For English Laws).
Then Brexit followed — reopening an old constitutional sore — Northern Ireland.
2014 remains unfinished business — we in the SNP are pushing our demands.
As it stands we have a 2 year Queen’s speech entirely devoted to Brexit. Westminster, which is also the English domestic parliament, has no English domestic legislation — that bears worth repeating,
There are no plans for English domestic legislation for two years.
Westminster ministers are a mixture of UK ministers (the Foreign Secretary) and English Ministers (the Health Secretary). The Brexit bill gives them all powers to have direct rule by decree on all things touched by Brexit.
They say history never repeats but it rhymes. Well the Brexit Act rhymes with the Temporary Provisions (Northern Ireland) Act 1972 which prorogued Stormont.
Brexit is profoundly shaped by Britain’s imperial past — tariffs dominate our discussion because they resonate with a national narrative of greatness — they mattered when the UK mattered a lot more than it does now.
Similarly the absence of constitutionalism — the lack of any notion that a constitution is a contract between government and governed — shapes this crisis.
The 17th century doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty shapes the mind, Cromwell walks. And so it seems natural, right and just that some MPs can cook up a plan to reboot the UK and we, the public, learn about it three days before. The defining event of the turn to Parliamentary Sovereignty is forgotten —that it took a Civil War.
In the lobbies, and on social media Cromwell’s voice whispers:
Fin
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Postscript
Traditionally SNP articles like this would end on a flourish about how our parliament, based on popular sovereignty is superior to Westminster. I mean, it is, but it is worth recalling how popular sovereignty became the default world view in Scotland.
When the Constitutional Convention started in the 1980s it looked at rhetorical options to build its appeal on and rejected the two most British ones as outdated: 1913-style Empire-Britishness of the sort espoused by the DUP and 1945 People’s Britain.
It fell onto the doctrine of popular sovereignty by a process of elimination and not conviction. The much underrated Nigel Smith, who very much understood and believed in it, then drove this forward in his procedures of the Scottish Parliament, to great success.
We are not better than England, we just began addressing these issues earlier.
I am indebted to David Torrance, formerly a Scottish political journalist and now a research at the House of Commons for pointing this out to me.
