Credit: by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
Edmund Burke famously insisted that voters use their judgment to elect Members of Parliament so that the Members of Parliament, in turn, could use their own judgment to decide the weighty matters of the day. In other words, once elected MPs are free to decide whatever they please irrespective of the views of their constituents.
In practice, of course, most MPs are likely to seek re-election and so would be foolish to deviate too far from the way their constituents see things. But the settled way we have come to understand the role of an MP is that s/he is an independent agent, and not merely an extension of the collective will of their constituents.
Before Brexit, it was mostly only constitutional anoraks that concerned themselves with such matters. But the results of the 2016 referendum, when broken down into votes by constituency, has exposed where a gap has opened up between the view of the MP and the view of his or her constituents.
Yvette Cooper, for example, was a prominent Remainer, yet 70% of the people of her constituency – Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford – voted to leave the European Union. Under the Burkean understanding of being an MP, she is quite free to try and derail Brexit against the wishes of her constituents. And here, she has much support: “The first duty of a member of Parliament is to do what he thinks is right and necessary for the honour and safety of Great Britain,” claimed Winston Churchill. “His second duty is to his constituents, of whom he is the representative not the delegate. Burke’s famous declaration on this is well known.”
The Burkean philosophy on MPs not being delegates but representatives has now become the standard line for expressing the relationship between MPs and the people who voted for them. But we shouldn’t be too comfortable with it. Burke was a terrible constituency MP. He visited his Bristol seat infrequently, and he disagreed with the city’s merchants over opening up trade to the Irish. So when Burke told the voters of his Bristol seat on the day of his election in 1774 that “your representative owes you … his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving, you if he sacrifices it to your opinion” he was, in a fancy way, telling them to get stuffed – that he would vote however he likes.
It may not be a great surprise that as re-election approached he came to realise he had no hope of winning again. Voters don’t like being told their views don’t count for much. And it says something about Burke’s attitude towards voters that, after losing his Bristol seat, he went off to secure a rotten borough under the patronage of Marquis of Rockingham; one that did not require the need to have – or to listen to – pesky voters. “Bidders in an auction of popularity” was how Burke dismissed politicians and the vulgarity of elections.
Burke was no great fan of democracy. He was terrified at the prospect of a French revolution coming to Britain to destroy the established social order of church and nobility. Burke believed that government should be the preserve of the “natural aristocracy”. And he had little time for the views of uneducated, common people whom he thought could be easily swayed by the those who would appeal to their emotions and their prejudices.
This Burkean line, of course, is remarkably similar to a view that has often been repeated by Remainers – that poor, simple, ordinary people didn’t really know what they were doing when they voted to leave because they were being manipulated by demagogues and liars.
It is extraordinary that a man who finds democracy so distasteful has become the go-to person for an understanding of the relationship between an MP and their constituents. English democracy didn’t begin this way. The first proper conversations about democracy in this country are often thought to have taken place during the Putney Debates of 1647.
The revolutionaries who met in Putney’s Church of St Mary the Virgin to discuss what the country might look like after the tyrant King had been ousted envisaged a much more direct form of democracy, including annual elections for MPs. Legitimate power comes up from the people; morally, it is a bottom up thing. And chopping the head off a king – 370 years ago this week – is as arresting an image of the rejection of top down governance as it is possible to imagine. From here on, only the people are sovereign. That was the idea.
But the sort of direct democracy imagined by the Levellers at the Putney debates was never going to be acceptable to those with an established interest in running the country. Those arguing against the Leveller position claimed that it was irresponsible to give the vote to people without property, and thus without a proper stake in the country. And a version of this argument has echoed down the centuries, with the established order continually looking for ways to mute the full consequences of the democratic instinct.
Burke’s idea of representative democracy is another, albeit subtle, version of that counter revolutionary move against the idea that the people are sovereign.
Fast forward to our current political quagmire. On the 9th June 2015, the House of Commons voted by 544 votes to 53 to have a referendum on our membership of the EU. In other words, the Commons itself agreed by a huge majority to have an exercise in direct democracy to break the Parliamentary log-jam over Europe. And what many MPs initially accepted at least was that such an exercise, albeit it advisory and no legally binding, nonetheless morally trumped the representative ‘think for yourself’ functions of an MP. Going into the lobby in early 2017 to vote for the triggering of Article 50, many MPs felt obliged to act more like delegates, ventriloquising the people’s will. And many deeply resented it.
What Brexit has exposed is how much our supposedly democratic system is weighted against democracy itself. When an exercise of direct democracy is conducted within a representative system, the representatives generally don’t like it. For the very idea of representative government still contains a sort of Burkean snobbishness about the general will.
The battle over whether Brexit will be implemented is not just a battle about Brexit per se, it is also a battle about who is boss: the people or MPs. Brexit may be an exercise in repatriating power from Europe to Westminster. But it is also a reminder that the moral source of political authority lies ultimately with the people and not with politicians.
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SubscribeTata Steel turning our virgin steel plants into tin can recycling centres and building a battery factory, all subsidised by the taxpayer for a ‘green’ ideology. A sad indictment of what this country has become.
“……. in these atomised times, of an associational life based on shared interests, fun, and a kind of everyday camaraderie.” Simply having fun and enjoying life. Long may it continue.
I really enjoyed this essay. Good stuff. Land Rover is definitely a status symbol in Canada, not a work vehicle.
I need to change a front signal light bulb in my 2016 Dodge Ram. I might have to bring it to the dealer. It’s so damn complicated and I need a ridiculous socket wrench extension. I knew something was up when the YouTube vid was 10 minutes long.
“a story of manufacturing prowess unlocked by foreign capital”
And the tragedy of that story for Britain is that there was always plenty of domestic capital to unlock that manufacturing prowess, it’s just that so much of it was being allocated to perennially more expensive houses – one of the least productive assets a nation can accumulate, but one of the least risky for shiftless bankers to lend against.
And that happened during 2 1/2 decades where the low birth rate meant house prices should have fallen. Without 400k+ net immigration a year since 2003 we would have had flat or falling house prices and people could have invested excess money into the productive sector.
We still could!
Perhaps it’s a delicious irony that the Parsi compradors of Bombay like the Tatas first flourished on account of the East India Company’s opium trade with China in Bombay.
They are now ruling the roost in twenty first century Britain.
From steel to car making.
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Parsis+of+India+and+the+opium+trade+in+China.-a0210368290
Britain and America both made the decision to adopt free trade policies that helped greatly reduce world poverty.
This was accomplished at the cost of obliterating their industrial base, and enriching a newly obstreperous China.
It’s also impossible to manufacture ships, planes, and weapons when you have no factories.
Banks and software companies can do a lot of good. But a nation needs an industrial base to survive, particularly in a hostile world.
I agree. It was a hugely selfish decision to obliterate manufacturing.
“.. luxury goods are not a promising basis for a modern economy ..”.
Oh I don’t know, LVMH is bigger than the rest of the Paris stock exchange put together.
I think the take away from this article is not the cars, but the people. The industry and creative energy of self selected hobbies seem to support groups of energized joyful people. Definitely a path worth following.
All I can remember is sitting in the back of a land rover, on metal, with a bunch of kids and fistfuls of halters, being driven up the Downs, to be unloaded and catching the ponies and riding them back down to the yard, bareback, leading one or two, often cantering, no helmets. That is what land rovers mean to me.
(Circa 1958).
A great article, thank you, it brought make fond memories.
I owned a series 2A and series 3 Landy, awesome vehicles that would go anywhere, slowly! I used to regularly drive my 3 from Cirencester to Reading and use the hard shoulder on the M4 so as not to slow down lorries.
The 2A had a split windscreen with wipers that barely worked and had individual motors that had to be spun to get the wipers working. The door locks were shot, and I used a hasp and staple and padlock to lock the doors. I once left it open in a car park, the car wasn’t stolen but the Mars bar on the seat was!
I wouldn’t touch, nor could afford, a modern one, and have used Isuzu for many years, but they too are not as good as they used to be.
Rather than stand for ‘manufacturing prowess,’ these gas-guzzling, road-hogging pieces of crap are an excellent way to identify people whose brains have been practically embalmed with money (to borrow a phrase from William S Burroughs) or are just so insanely foolish they’re willing to spend half their pay leasing one. The designers and marketers of these things are even more culpable. I’m tired of having local air quality destroyed for my children by stupid people who want the ‘status’ of a monster SUV, or — as a cyclist (the bicycle is how real tough guys travel) — having my already limited road space even further limited. The problem is even more urgent in Canada where, according to the IEA, people drive the least fuel-efficient vehicles of anywhere on the planet, and almost none of these vehicles are necessary — that is, almost never used for their purported off-road capability. Well, Canada is especially stupid…
The modern Landrover sits very lightly on the planet because of its superb modern engineering. The old ones, which I prefer, last so long that that largely compensates for the inefficiency at the exhaust pipe
Lightly on the planet indeed! A comparison of the 2024 Defender hybrid versus the 2024 Toyota Corolla shows it uses twice as much fuel. Then there are the extra resources needed to make it because it’s so huge, and then the extra wear on public roads due to the same.
The Range Rover is the most stolen vehicle in the UK, insurance will set you back on average £6k.
No it’s not, no it isn’t. How many Range Rovers were stolen in the UK last year? 11. Eleven.
But that reputation is a great excuse for increased insurance costs!!
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been disgusted by people complaining about gas prices. People say gas prices are too high but I look around and see people driving Escalades, Navigators, Explorers, and even people in trailer parks with their Rangers and F150’s and I think actually they’re not high enough. Some people just drive around as a form of recreation, which strikes me as basically lighting money on fire to watch it burn. I suppose back before the Internet there wasn’t much to do out in the countryside. Perhaps this behavior finally dies off with the boomer generation.