Pages tagged "EexitUK"
Brexit has reopened two constitutional conflicts which must be resolved
Article by Jonathan Clark
The British have, typically, little interest in constitutional law. Unlike the French, who regularly rewrite their constitution in revolutions or attempts to prevent revolutions, the British tend to assume that little changes and that all is well. Alas, the constitutional problems accumulate nevertheless. Dominic Grieve was right in a recent Commons debate to say that there are areas of the British constitution that need clearer definition. But what exactly are they? Why is the Brexit question so difficult to resolve through the familiar Westminster machinery?
The big issues of constitutional conflict are so fraught because they happen in legal grey areas, in which agreement and definition have never emerged. Today there are two such major areas, though many minor ones.
The first is the question of sovereignty: where does ultimate authority reside? It is many centuries since any significant number of people claimed that it resided with the person of the monarch alone. But the decline of that image was followed by the growing popularity of another, ‘the Crown in Parliament’, that is, the monarch, the Lords and the Commons acting together. This image never went away, but was upstaged by the doctrine of the lawyer A. V. Dicey (1835-1922) that ‘Parliament’ (meaning, increasingly, the House of Commons) was sovereign. Yet from the Reform Bill of 1832 into the 20th century, successive rounds of franchise extension strengthened another old idea, that the ultimate authority lay with ‘the People’, however defined.
From 1973, when the UK joined the EEC, it slowly became evident that the answer was ‘none of the above’: ultimate authority lay with Brussels. Parliament rubber-stamped increasing amounts of secondary legislation from an evolving super-state. In 2019, departure from the EU would remove that layer of command. This prospect inevitably reopens an old debate, which had never really been settled: was Parliament or the People finally supreme? Its re-emergence reminds us that Dicey’s doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty was the opinion of one commentator only. That opinion partly corresponded to contemporary practice, partly not.
Today, the tide is everywhere running in the opposite direction. Deference and duty daily fade; the key word everywhere is ‘choice’, and this means the choices of the many, not just the few. The transformation of communications places steadily more power in the hands of a steadily more educated, better informed ‘People’. But this trend has been matched by another, seen across the West in recent decades and at all levels: in increasingly complex societies, the executive has everywhere grown more powerful vis-a-vis the legislature. Political scientists have largely ignored this tide, but it has swept forwards nevertheless. It means that two powerful social forces now collide. Across western democracies, ‘ordinary people’ find means of complaining that they are ignored by elites who ‘just don’t get it’; elites decry ‘populism’ and exalt the opinion of ‘experts’, expressed to within one decimal point in forecasts of outcomes 15 years hence.
This collision reopens a second, equally old, question. What is a Member of Parliament: a delegate, or a representative? Edmund Burke famously outlined the case for the second: MPs, once elected, represent the nation as a whole; they owe the nation their best judgment; they are in nobody’s pocket. But another idea is just as old, and equally honourable: MPs are sent to Westminster by their electors to redress the electors’ grievances, and are accountable to them. Against Burke, we can set another intellectual, Andrew Marvell, MP for Hull in 1659-78, who was paid by his constituents and regularly reported back to them. Understandably, Burke’s high-sounding doctrine proved the more popular among MPs. But after he framed it, his constituents in Bristol threw him out for favouring Irish commercial interests over theirs, and he represented thereafter only his patron’s pocket borough.
Both ideas in their pure form are unacceptable. But how the balance between the two is to be struck can never be quantified or defined, and a crisis like the present makes the impossibility of a definition clear. ‘The People’ voted by 52 to 48 for Leave, and a larger percentage now says ‘just get on with it’; but about five-sixths of the House of Commons are for Remain.
Among Conservative MPs, something under 100 are evidently for Leave; of the other 200 or so, over half are on the Government payroll in one capacity or another, and more would like to be. So profound a dissociation between elite and popular opinion is rare. Worse still, public opinion polls and the growing practice of referenda quantify the problem as never before; the issue is easily expressed in binary terms (Leave or Remain); and the arguments have been fully rehearsed. Other countries show similar problems of relations between the many and the few, but in the UK these are brought to a focus. Since the constitution has failed to resolve them, public debate is full of expressions of elite contempt for the ignorant, prejudiced, xenophobic, racialist populace on the one hand; of popular contempt for the self-serving, condescending, out-of-touch Establishment on the other.
Before 1914, Conservative peers making technical points over a budget were manoeuvred by Lloyd George into a constitutional confrontation that could be memorably summed up as ‘Peers versus the People’. In this clash, the peers could only lose. Now, the Remainers have been manoeuvred into a constitutional confrontation that, if it goes much further, will be labelled ‘Parliament versus the People’. In such a conflict it can only be Parliament that will lose. In that event, the damage would be considerable.
These great questions of constitutional definition are seldom solved; rather, the issues are defused by building next to them a new practice. The present challenge is to accommodate that new arrival in the political arena, the referendum, and to turn it into a clearly specified, moderate, and constructive institution, as it is in Switzerland. Those concerned about daily policy should think again about a subject, once salient in university History departments but now everywhere disparaged: constitutional history.
Northern Ireland for UK Cabinet Ministers and Other
The English Democrats campaign for an Independent England. We are committed to government of the people, by the people, for the people. Those with power to affect our way of life must be answerable to the people. Democracy is much more than the ability to choose, from time to time, between broadly similar parties which compete amongst themselves for power. Real democracy is measured by the ability of the people to manage their political, economic, physical, and cultural environment.
Please read this interesting article from British politics and policy at LSE.
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Northern Ireland for English Cabinet Ministers and other beginners
Posted: 19 Nov 2018 04:00 PM PST
Brexit has exposed much confusion about the history and processes of Northern Ireland, both among the public and government ministers. In an effort to provide some clarity, Sean Swan offers an overview.
Given the importance of the Irish border in the Brexit negotiations, the lack of knowledge about Northern Ireland displayed by senior English politicians is depressing. Perhaps the ultimate example of this was when Northern Ireland secretary, Karen Bradley, admitted that she:
didn’t understand things like when elections are fought, for example, in Northern Ireland – people who are Nationalists don’t vote for Unionist parties and vice versa. So, the parties fight for election within their own community.
The 2018 Annual Future of England Survey was conducted in each nation of the UK. It contained a question on national independence. 41% of Scots agreed with the statement “Scotland should become an independent country”; 19% of the Welsh agreed that Wales should be independent, and a similar 19% of the English thought that England should be independent. The response in Northern Ireland to the question should it be independent showed that only 4% agreed that it should – but 44% thought it should form part of a united Ireland and 43% thought it should remain part of the UK. This is unsurprising. Northern Ireland, unlike England, Scotland or Wales, is not a nation. It is home to two competing national identities. This is Northern Ireland’s first dirty little secret; its second flows from this – the real border runs not so much between Ireland and the Republic as along the 20 foot high walls – euphemistically named ‘peace lines’ – separating Nationalist and Unionist areas in Belfast and other parts of Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland has its origins in Unionist resistance to Irish Home Rule in the 1880s. That resistance quickly crystallised around the northern province of Ulster, where there was a Unionist majority. ‘Unionists’ were mainly Protestant descendants of those English and lowland Scots with whom James IV & I had planted Ulster in the early 17th century. The Catholic/Protestant division in Northern Ireland is thus not religious per se, rather religion serves as a cultural marker distinguishing ‘natives’ from ‘settlers’ (who speak the same language and are the same colour).
The aim of Ulster opposition to Home Rule was to either prevent it, or at worse, to prevent it being applied to Ulster. Following a series of failed Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893, the Home Rule crisis of 1912-4 and the 1916 Rising, the 1920 Government of Ireland Act (also known as the fourth Home Rule Bill), was designed to bring Home Rule to Ireland, but with two separate parliaments: one for the 26 southern counties and one for six of the nine counties of Ulster. It became a dead-letter as regards the south as it was overtaken by the Irish War of Independence, the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the creation of the Irish Free State – a self-governing dominion within the Empire.
Ironically, the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, designed to deal with Irish Home Rule thus came to apply only to the Unionist area. Northern Ireland was created to be the largest area of the province of Ulster in which Unionists would have a secure majority, which turned out to be six of Ulster’s nine counties. This yielded a Unionist majority of roughly two to one, though many border areas and NI’s second city actually contained Nationalist majorities – who did not want to be part of NI. Part of NI’s tragedy is that it originated from Unionist opposition to Home Rule but, as a ‘Unionist state’, was ‘territorially over bounded’. It controlled six counties but only had a majority in four and a half of them.
For fifty years Northern Ireland existed as a semi-detached region of the UK. Ulster Unionists had not asked for a separate parliament, but a parliament they got. The British political parties did not organise there and Northern Ireland was kept at arms’ length from the politics of the British state. The only form of politics possible within the devolved parliament was the constitutional question and Unionist policing of a large dissident Nationalist minority. Elections were regularly held but elections in Northern Ireland were never anything more than sectarian headcounts. Despite elections, the government of Northern Ireland never changed. It was always Unionist.
Gerrymandering, particularly in Derry city which had a Nationalist majority, was almost a structural imperative. It was the only way in which Unionists could politically control areas in which they were a minority. Because the local election franchise was restricted to householders, giving somebody a house also meant giving them the vote. This provided a powerful incentive for discrimination in the allocation of local authority housing.
This situation was challenged by the civil rights mobilisation in the late 1960s. The movement challenged structures on which Unionist hegemony in Northern Ireland relied, and led to a Unionist backlash which rapidly degenerated into the Troubles. Truly horrible things happened during the Troubles – Bloody Sunday, the Kingsmill massacre, the Shankill Butchers, the Birmingham and Guildford bombings, the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, and random sectarian assassinations.
The Troubles were ended by a peace process which culminated in and was sealed by, the Good Friday Agreement. A large part of the Agreement consists of mechanisms to prevent discrimination. The Assembly created by the Agreement operates on a power-sharing basis; it is not controlled by a majority party; and seats in the Executive are allocated on the basis of party strength. This creates a form of forced coalition government. Members elected to this Assembly must designate as either ‘Nationalist’, ‘Unionist’ or ‘other’. Certain key votes require a minimum of support from both those designated as ‘Unionists’ and those designated as ‘Nationalists’. All of this is designed to deal with the issue of potential discrimination at the individual or community level.
Another important part of the Agreement deals with the key constitutional issue. Northern Ireland remains a part of the UK for as long as a majority so desires. Should that seem to have changed, a referendum will be held to give the people the choice between remaining in the UK or joining a united Ireland. Northern Ireland is thus conditionally part of the UK. At the individual level, both Dublin and London guarantee the rights of individuals in Northern Ireland to be, and to be recognised as being, British citizens, Irish citizens, or both. And this would not change even if Northern Ireland became part of united Ireland. This is important because it recognises the fact that there are two separate national allegiances in Northern Ireland.
The Agreement also created North/South institutions connecting Northern Ireland and the Republic (the North/South Ministerial Council) and linking the Republic and the UK (the British-Irish Council). Such institutions obviously blur the distinction between the UK and the Republic as much as they do the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The core of the Agreement was thus a blurring of all sorts of borders. It represents a form of post-Westphalian sovereignty in which the distinction between being an Irish or British citizen, whether within Northern Ireland or within these islands, was more symbolic than of any practical significance. This was in harmony with the general thrust of developments within the EU. Obviously, the existence of a common EU citizenship further blurred distinctions. Brexit, with its emphasis on borders, was always going to pose problems for Northern Ireland.
In terms of democracy or economic prosperity, there is little to choose between the Republic of Ireland and the UK. The 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit ranks Ireland as the joint 6th most democratic country in the world and the UK as 14th. In terms of prosperity, the UN Human Development Index ranks Ireland as 4th most developed and the UK as 14th. Not only can it no longer be argued that ‘Home rule is Rome Rule’, but Northern Ireland is today much closer to a model of ‘Rome Rule’ than is the Republic. Abortion and equal marriage remain banned there – though the reason for this currently has more to do with Protestant fundamentalism than Catholicism. Nor can it be maintained that Nationalists today suffer significant discrimination in Northern Ireland.
Whether Northern Ireland is part of the UK or of a united Ireland thus makes little difference in terms of prosperity or rights. What is at issue is symbolism and identity. What makes all this extra problematic is the fact that there is now no majority in Northern Ireland. The 2011 census showed that those of Catholic background comprise 45% of the population and those of a Protestant background 48%. Similarly, latest opinion polls showed 44% in favour of a united Ireland and 43% in favour or remaining in the UK. The real borders in Northern Ireland may run along the peace lines, but the symbolically significant border remains the one between North and South. The need to keep that border ‘soft’, ambiguous and invisible should be obvious and not have to be endlessly re-made.
The case for ‘special status’ for Northern Ireland rests on the reality that Northern Ireland is, and always was, different. Those who argue that giving Northern Ireland special status would strengthen the case of the Scots who want their own special status and a closer relationship with the EU, need to explain why Scotland should not have that right. Scotland, like Northern Ireland, voted to Remain. Brexit is an English obsession. Those who wish to maintain the existence of the UK state would be better advised allowing for and facilitating the real differences that exist between the UK’s component parts than in trying to force an Anglo-centric uniformity on everybody else. Of course, it would help if they knew just a little bit more about Scotland and Northern Ireland. Here’s a clue: Finchley is in England, not in Northern Ireland or Scotland.
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About the Author
Sean Swan is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at Gonzaga University.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Featured image credit: Pixabay/CC0 licence.