You have been expelled from politics Don't be fooled by calls for PR

It is also the case that politics since 1955 has come to be wholly dominated by opinion polling, to the extent that a great deal of policy is devised by governments to fit in with what the polls say. This is a practical form of daily representation, going far beyond what would have been conceivable to earlier generations. Imagine, for instance, what would be happening at the moment, were we still in the position we were in the 19th or early-20th centuries. Would our politicians be anything like as sure of victory or defeat as they currently seem to be? Would we even be having a general election at the moment, and might Boris Johnson still be Prime Minister?

In reality, however, today’s emphasis polling masks the fact that the general public has played no active part in these decisions; rather, a bloodless and abstract form of representation has replaced the old practices of mass action by citizens which once were used to bring about political change. People can lobby, demonstrate and be activists in other ways, but they cannot take part in the difficult business of decision-making — that is restricted to a small sample of the population.

So far has the assumption wormed its way into people’s heads that it now seems natural to give the vote to 16-year-olds even if they cannot be members of Parliament (allowing them to be members was proposed in Scotland, but nothing came of). Contrast this with what happened when women and working men were given the vote: they almost immediately became eligible themselves to be legislators, and it would have seemed ridiculous to those generations of politicians to have the one without the other. What’s different now is that our background assumptions about representation have shifted, such that elections now look like superior (or possibly inferior) opinion polls — and why shouldn’t everyone with opinions (which especially includes teenagers) have the vote?

Schemes for proportional representation have the same character. PR is often presented as a better form of representation in a parliamentary system than first-past-the-post, but it shares with sortition and opinion polling the feature that an essential decision — the question of who shall form a government — is largely taken out of the hands of the voters and given to their representatives. This was precisely the objection to PR in what is still the most thorough examination of the subject, the report of a Royal Commission in 1910, at a time when many alternatives to the existing British constitution were being touted, including the use of referendums. The Report decided against introducing PR on the grounds that:

“A general election is in fact considered by a large portion of the electorate of this country as practically a referendum on the question which of two Governments shall be returned to power. The view may be right or wrong, but it has to be taken account of in any discussion which turns on the composition of the House of Commons.”

This was a profound observation, with many implications. One of them is that there is a responsibility on great parties to avoid becoming narrow factions, and to present themselves as plausible governments. Another is that there is also a responsibility on citizens who want to think of themselves as legislators to treat their vote as genuinely a contribution to the creation of a government, and not merely as the expression of their feelings. This was the distinction Max Weber made between the ethics of responsibility and the ethics of conviction. As he said, real politics requires the former, a willingness to make difficult choices: “the strong and slow boring of hard boards”. But if we have left those choices to other people, we can be politically irresponsible — with consequences which are all too visible today.

A third implication (though it has seldom been recognised) arises from the fact that in the conditions of modern politics — and arguably those of 1910 — the electorate above all votes for a prime minister. It is the prime minister who personally appoints the government, after all, and whose power rests on MPs who are whipped and committed to a party manifesto. In this respect, the referendum-like character of a general election has been wholly disregarded, and, as we have often seen, prime ministers can be replaced without any fresh recourse to the public.

But what is the point of asking people who they want to have as prime minister, and then disregarding the answer without putting the question to them again? It is clear why MPs and party managers like the ability to do so, but it can be seen as another and very important instance of passive representation: the voters stand idly by while a matter on which they had once given a great deal of thought is decided anew by their representatives.

Like the populists in America, the European Left used to demand that their populations should be allowed to take an active role in politics. The British Social Democrat Federation’s programme in 1884, for example, included “LEGISLATION by the PEOPLE, in such wise that no project of Law shall become legally binding till accepted by the Majority of the People”, while the German Social Democrats at Erfurt in 1891 called for “Authorities to be elected by the people; to be responsible and bound”.

Left Parliamentarians, such as the nascent Labour Party in Britain, were able to disregard these calls only because they believed (along with the 1910 Report) that general elections, at least in Britain, were already referendums of a kind, in which the voters were exercising a genuine power to choose a government, though with many reservations in practice. But they were in complete agreement with the more radical Left that citizens should be thought of as active participants in their politics, behaving like legislators themselves and not as the passive subjects of representative systems. The age of mass parties, which lasted more or less down to the Seventies, was testimony to this: the general population was arrayed on two sides, like the members in the House of Commons, and saw itself as taking a real part in the contests there.

This world has disappeared, killed by a variety of forces, including supranational institutions such as the EU and the disappearance of an old kind of solidarity among fellow citizens, as the circumstances of people’s lives and work have changed. With communities more atomised and removed from power, it is hard to imagine any familiar Left-wing party calling for an increase in active participation on the part of the population, rather than for increasingly elaborate forms of passive representation.

The response to the Brexit vote in 2016 was a particularly stark illustration of this. The Heath government had pushed through the constitutionally far-reaching membership of the EEC on a slim majority (eight on the second reading of the Bill), and with a manifesto which had merely said that “our sole commitment is to negotiate; no more no less”. Partly for internal party reasons, but also for old-fashioned Left reasons of principle, Labour committed itself to a referendum on the issue, obliging any future government to extricate itself from the EEC through the same means. But as we saw in between 2016 and 2019, a large swathe of the governing classes could not stand the idea that they should be given specific instructions by the electorate.

In the end, Brexit was saved in 2019 by a very traditional (and democratic) means: a general election, understood as another referendum. But the politician most associated with this triumph was then removed without any appeal to the electorate — and largely because his colleagues quailed in the face of opinion polls. Citizen juries, votes for 16-years-olds and PR are all now high on the agenda of many political parties, and some of them are extremely likely to be implemented in the near future. Systems of passive representation seem, despite Brexit, to have won the struggle against active participation.

It is widely recognised that this general election is marked by an almost unprecedented degree of hostility to both major parties on the part of the electorate. But who can be surprised at this, given that they were offered the chance of real and active democracy only to have it snatched away from them — and this time, perhaps, for good?