Even now, with Brexit consuming Parliament, the question of whether we are suffering a constitutional or a political crisis is important, write Anand Menon and Alan Wager. A general election might be enough to push a deal through the Commons, but it would not necessarily fix the greater problem: the damaged political legitimacy of Parliament.
What constitutes a political crisis? And when, and how, does a crisis of politics evolve into a crisis of the constitution? This might sound like an argument over semantics. Yet for political scientists, the distinction is an important one. This is because it can tell us what might happen next: a political crisis is solvable by politicians as gridlock – slowly – works its way through to a resolution. A constitutional crisis, on the other hand, suggests something more fundamental: a deeper contradiction in the system requiring an altogether different solution. One is (more or less) temporary, the other (potentially) permanent.
The case for Brexit as a temporary bug in the Westminster system can be made via counterfactuals. If the general election had not been held in 2017, Theresa May would be operating with a slim majority rather than as head of minority government. If different decisions on the direction of Brexit had been made at various forks in the road – particularly following the loss of this governing majority – then it is at least plausible to think the present situation might look very different. Reaching out in June 2017 to secure broader support for a softer Brexit than she had laid out before her ill-fated popular poll might have made all the difference. The point is that these are questions of statecraft, not a system failure.
Indeed, retrospective analysis of the legislative politics of the last two years shows that the minority government has, on the whole, managed to fumble along – up to now – as well as one might reasonably have expected. The last period of minority government in the 1970s led to an equivalent number of defeats and many of the same political tactics: pulling votes at the last minute, mass abstentions from the government and the politicisation of the whip’s office.
However, you have to reach further back, to 1924, for anywhere near comparable defeats as those suffered by May on her Brexit deal. But again, these defeats were the result of political parties realigning and the party system coming to terms with the rise of the Labour Party. They were a matter of the party system, not the political system.
There is also a problem in assessing the functioning of Westminster through its capacity to manage the issue of Europe. The last period of comparable governing turbulence to now was during John Major’s premiership. Then, as now, the issue of Europe and tight parliamentary arithmetic disrupted the normal flow of relations between government and parliament.
The difference now is that the EU issue has underlined and heightened a political cleavage in the electorate based on social values. The new post-Brexit politics is something that the Independent Group, and undoubtedly any future project headed by Nigel Farage, hope represents a political sea change.
Yet they may be disappointed. The result of the Brexit brouhaha might yet be a recreated political coalition on the centre-left that looks a lot like the pre-coalition Liberal Democrats, and the latest iteration of British Euroscepticism on the right. This would begin to look a lot more like the ebb and flow of conventional British politics than a dramatic reformulation. And the surest bet in British politics is that, when politicians attempt to redefine the political system, the electoral system reasserts itself.
It is when we look more closely at the rhetoric and actions of MPs that things become more worrying. Unworkable and unsustainable contradictions are the symptoms of a constitutional crisis. A breakdown of collective cabinet responsibility, which leads to cabinet ministers saying one thing to the House of Commons and then doing another. A Prime Minister who, at crunch time, decides to pit the office of Prime Minister against the Parliament from which she derives her political power. A Parliament made up of MPs who are unable to reconcile a desire to act as both delegate and representative.
Theresa May’s speech on 20 March appeared to be moving the politics of Brexit on from crisis management to a political blame game. The Prime Minister’s theme of anti-politics outraged MPs, but these rhetorical themes of collective failure and systematic breakdown are shared – one way or another – by Jeremy Corbyn, Chuka Umunna and Nigel Farage.
The realities of complex modern democracy sit uneasily alongside the idea of simple solutions. This friction creates a different type of constitutional crisis: a long-term undermining of political legitimacy among voters. And what all the polling shows is that the one thing that seems to unite voters is a sense that politicians are failing. Moreover, and for what it’s worth, surprisingly resistant to this blame game on the Brexit impasse so far is the EU: voters blame the government, followed by parliament, with the EU a distant third.
Perhaps the key determinant of whether the current crisis is political or constitutional is whether it can be resolved through an electoral event. If so, it is ephemeral. And a general election could, in theory, break the deadlock. A small swing towards the Labour Party could lead to a different minority government and another referendum. A Conservative leader advocating a different deal or no deal at all may get the numbers they need. However, any general election or referendum campaign is likely to be driven by recrimination. The danger is that we could, in trying to resolve a temporary political deadlock, talk ourselves into some longer term damage.
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Note: The above is taken from a longer report on Article 50 two years on. It was first published on LSE Brexit. Image: Wellcome Collection via Europeana (CC BY 4.0 licence)
Anand Menon is Professor at King’s College, London and Director of UK in a Changing Europe.
Alan Wager is Researcher at UK in a Changing Europe.
FPTP has been kind to the Conservatives because it ensured that they always faced a fractured anti-Conservative vote in any election. In 1945 the UK elected its first-ever majority Labour government. By 2019 the Conservatives had spent 44 year years in government and Labour, 30.
After the 2017 election, the Conservatives in another “coalition”—this time with the DUP—are in government with 3 million fewer votes than the parties on the Opposition benches. The odd form of democracy tolerated by the UK, and the USA, allows this however. Does this count as a constitutional crisis even if it’s not at all unusual in the UK? In 1997 Blair swept all before him even though 57% of the votes were anti-Labour. In the 1980s Thatcher did the same with, again, an average of around 57% voting against the Conservatives.
There is a (highly unlikely) political solution to the crisis arising from this big disconnect between votes and seats: in 2017 the Opposition parties could have formed a pre-election pact to try to get get round FPTP and, say, refuse to stand against another Opposition party in a constituency if it meant splitting the anti-Conservative vote.
The Conservatives, always strong supporters of FPTP, are now starting to find that their vote too is being fractured by the rise of the Brexit Party and (4 years ago) UKIP, just like Labour’s vote was fractured by the SNP, PC, Green and Lib Dem. FPTP is now finally starting to work against the Conservatives.
So how about a (highly unlikely) constitutional solution? The UK changes its voting system to Proportional Representation so that small parties can get their fair share with a small number of seats in the Commons which will allow their small voices to take part in parliamentary debates. There is a problem though. Unlike the USA, which doesn’t do referenda, the UK had a referendum on changing its voting system in 2011 where 28% of the electorate voted to retain FPTP. So we did.
Interesting and thoughtful essay. However, you fail to factor in the overarching influence of the Five Year Parliament Act. Is is this act that has allowed the current shambles to drift along like a slow cloud, in the absence of the act the ERG would never have taken so much risk. The huge defeat of TM’s bill would have triggered a General Election – quite simply – in the absence of the Five Year Act – we would almost certainly now be out of the EU.
It is a people crisis in the UK where political voting counts for nothing anymore. That is the point.
BREXIT – UK Members of Parliament do not know what they Vote For and ‘Why’ They ‘Never’ get it right, not even when a Majority of 17.4 million British voters wanted it and voted for it – https://worldinnovationfoundation.blogspot.com/2019/03/brexit-uk-members-of-parliament-who-do.html