What is the greatest threat to British democracy? Zack Polanski’s call for ‘building a society’ that ‘doesn’t include’ people who ‘identify as right-wing’? Labour’s efforts to flood the Upper House with party apparatchiks? Islamist extremism?
The correct answer is Reform UK. That, at least, is the conclusion of a new book called What If Reform Wins by the Times reporter Peter Chappell. Before I get to its flaws, I should acknowledge it’s an enjoyable read, with plenty of deft, comic touches. It imagines that Reform wins a majority in June 2029, and then gives a blow-by-blow account of the constitutional crisis that follows, with the informal rules and conventions underpinning our democracy being stress-tested and found wanting. It ends 18 months later with Nigel Farage losing a vote of no confidence, by which time Argentina has invaded the Falklands, Bristol has been destroyed by flooding and – heaven forfend – Antiques Roadshow has been cancelled.
I daresay this is exactly how the deep state would respond if a radical political party won a general election
The premise of the book is that because Britain has an unwritten constitution, its parliamentary system is uniquely vulnerable to the wrong people winning an election. Chappell calls this the ‘good chaps’ theory of government – the view that our constitutional arrangements are contingent on political leaders, ministers and civil servants doing the right thing, with little in law to constrain them. Hence the chaos that unfolds when the bad boys of Brexit get their hands on the levers of power. Sir Keir Starmer’s ‘lawyers, journalists and doctors’ are replaced by ‘veterans, self-employed accountants, professional landlords, driving instructors, pub landlords, farmers and call-centre managers, as well as financiers and landowners’. Not ‘good chaps’, you see.
Rachel Reeves, we’re told, loses her seat to ‘a former blackjack dealer from Croydon’; the T-shirts Lee Anderson fires out of a cannon to celebrate his victory in Ashfield are made of polyester; the Daily Mail and the Sun enthusiastically endorse our new masters, while the Guardian publishes a special edition with black borders. But would democracy itself really be endangered just because the election winners are not People Like Us?
The policies and institutions Chappell regards as integral to our system of government are, for the most part, just the usual progressive bromides. ‘The current Labour government must do everything in its power to create protections for Britain’s informal constitution, the BBC and the energy transition while it is still able to do so,’ he writes. ‘It must make the argument for an immigration system which gives those in danger around the world a route to safety.’
If Reform installs its own people at the top of the civil service, leaves the ECHR, repeals the Human Rights Act, scraps the BBC licence fee and abandons net zero, having won a mandate to do exactly those things, it wouldn’t be an assault on democracy, but a manifestation of it. Gerrymandering our constitution, by contrast, which is what Chappell wants the government to do, would be anti-democratic.
But there’s a deeper flaw in the book. This apocalyptic scenario is supposed to illustrate the fatal weaknesses in our political system, showing just how vulnerable it is to a ‘hostile takeover’, and persuade all the ‘good chaps’ out there that we should abandon parliamentary sovereignty in favour of a written constitution.
But What If Reform Wins inadvertently makes the opposite case. In Chappell’s scenario, Farage and his barbarians are ejected by our body politic. The judiciary frustrates their efforts to take us out of the ECHR. The House of Lords obstructs their legislative programme. The Union is threatened since Reform’s high-handedness boosts the SNP. The vandals are sent packing after 18 months. Isn’t this our supposedly flawed system working exactly as Chappell would like? Why the need to overhaul it?
I should say that I found Chappell’s scenario, for all its shortcomings, pretty convincing. I daresay this is exactly how the deep state would respond if a radical political party won a general election and tried to enact a reforming agenda. Far from being susceptible to ‘elective dictatorship’, to use Lord Hailsham’s phrase, our particular form of government is silted up with far too many checks and balances, most of them with no democratic legitimacy. Parliamentary sovereignty is not something that needs further restraining; rather, we need to remove some of those constraints to re-establish that vital constitutional principle – and those of us who aren’t ‘good chaps’ owe the author of this book a debt of gratitude for making this point so eloquently.
Comments