(Director, Institute for Government, 18 June 2024)

– Scotland’s 21st century democracy, UK-style!

By stewartb

A comment piece by the Director of the Institute for Government (IfG) – the London-based, centrist think tank close to the Westminster and Whitehall establishment – got me thinking about the democracy and associated agency we in Scotland experience within the Union.

We are only too well aware that Scotland’s electorate is in a small minority in this Union; that Scotland now has a diminished number of elected members in the Union parliament; that we have a modern history of prolonged periods of rule by a party a majority in Scotland rejected; that in resourcing Scotland’s key public services, as the Scottish Government has long known, “all roads lead to Westminster” (attribution: Wes Streeting, Labour Party, May 2024).

The IfG article raises important, additional issues regarding the workings of UK parliamentary democracy that impacts Scotland. However, in this damning assessment its author verges on resignation or fatalism – this is just how the UK is!

Source: White, H. (18 June) The Conservatives’ supermajority warnings do not add up – What does a large government majority really mean for the House of Commons?’

(https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/conservatives-supermajority-warnings )

Perhaps this IfG piece made a particular impression reading it just after the UK’s likely next prime minister announced that he will NOT engage in negotiations over Scotland’s right even to hold a democratic event to decide its constitutional future. Not even if it is the will of a majority of the electorate in Scotland to do so. It is logically, straightforwardly impossible to square THAT attitude with democracy within a voluntary Union!

‘Supermajority’

The IfG article addresses claims that a ‘supermajority’ for the Labour Party in the upcoming General Election will be bad for UK democracy, specifically that such a large majority will ‘lead to a sudden dramatic loss in the effectiveness of parliamentary scrutiny.’ In short, the IfG Director’s contention is that the size of the majority in the House of Commons – ‘enormous or merely substantial’ – is NOT the fundamental issue. Rather ‘the more significant factor for democracy is the attitude a government takes to the role of parliament and the value of scrutiny’.  (my emphasis)

So we the citizens have to rely on an ‘attitude’? Is this another facet of the constitutional historian Peter Hennessy’s ‘good chaps theory of government’?

Source: Blick and Hennessy (2019) Good Chaps No More? Safeguarding the Constitution in Stressful Times. Report of The Constitution Society. (https://consoc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/FINAL-Blick-Hennessy-Good-Chaps-No-More.pdf )

These authors state: “if general standards of good behaviour among senior UK politicians can no longer be taken for granted, then neither can the sustenance of key constitutional principles’ – and this is important because? Crucially: “Unlike nearly every other democracy in the world, we (the UK) lack a ‘written’ or ‘codified’ constitution. The UK has, therefore, no single text setting out the core principles, institutions and procedures of the system, protected from casual alteration by amendment procedures, and enforceable by the judiciary. Instead, in the UK, we have trusted politicians to behave themselves. We have long assumed that those who rise to high office will be ‘good chaps’, knowing what the unwritten rules are and wanting to adhere to them.”

Back to the IfG Director’s article: below is a summary of the main observations:

• there is an acknowledgement of that: ‘the rules and processes of the Commons place responsibilities on an official opposition that are tricky for a much diminished parliamentary party to meet’
• Westminster’s first-past-the-post system is based on an assumption that it will deliver enough opposition MPs to fill all the roles required – ‘shadowing government ministers, chairing and sitting on select committees and so on’
• a much diminished official opposition would suffer from a loss of state provided ‘short money’ allocated to opposition parties to support them in their constitutional role. The determination of short money relies heavily on the number of seats won.

However, and not withstanding the above, White argues: ‘There is little difference between an 80-seat and 200-seat majority in parliament’ and opines ‘the Conservative argument that a Labour supermajority would lead to a sudden dramatic loss in the effectiveness of parliamentary scrutiny is untrue.’

However, her reasoning offers little reassurance:

• the rules of the House of Commons have always provided significant advantages to the party of government – ‘being one of the most executive-dominated parliaments in the world’
• effective parliamentary scrutiny has declined over the past decade, offering the following examples:
  • ‘Theresa May decided not to give parliament a meaningful role in the decision on what a Brexit deal should look like. Even with a slim and then non-existent majority she was able to proceed – ultimately to her own detriment – without allowing meaningful scrutiny of her plans, at one stage refusing to allow inconvenient opposition or backbench debates in the Commons for a period of over five months’

• ‘Boris Johnson secured a much larger majority and immediately adopted the attitude that nobody should be able to oppose his parliamentary plans. His ministers refused to entertain even the smallest amendments to bills and some were extremely reluctant to appear before select committees.’

• Johnson also used secondary legislation to pass numerous measures without the possibility of parliamentary opposition. ‘In practice his opposition came more from within his own party than other parties.’

On the likely ‘attitude’ of a Labour government to parliamentary scrutiny, White asks:

• ‘Will Keir Starmer ensure ministers turn up to be grilled by select committees?
  • ‘Will he allow time for challenging debate over Labour’s legislative plans, including the idea of changing the voting rules?’
  • ‘Will ministers shift the balance back from secondary to primary legislation, even where the previous government has handed it the tools to proceed without allowing MPs a say?’

By implication, the answers to all of these important questions will be down solely to the ‘attitude’ adopted by the next PM. The IfG Director concludes: ‘It is the attitude that the next government takes to the role of parliament that will actually make the difference, however large the majority it secures’.

End note

Let me end by juxtaposing pithy observations made recently by two of the UK establishment’s (including the BBC’s) favoured expert, independent think tanks – the IfG and the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

Firstly, to repeat, there are the words of the IfG’s Director describing the UK parliament: ‘one of the most executive-dominated parliaments in the world’.

Secondly, from a recent IFS review of ‘levelling up’, we learn that the UK is: ’one of the most geographically unequal countries in the developed world, ranking near the top of the league table on most measures of regional inequality. There are substantial and deep-seated gaps within the UK in employment, income, poverty, skills, happiness, health and many other outcomes.’*

And now,to add to the other better known democratic deficits and constraints on the agency of Scotland’s electorate and Scotland’s government, we’re being advised by the IfG’s Director that upon the ‘attitude’ of a UK PM rests the ability of Scotland’s 57 MPs (out of a total of 650 in the Commons) to hold a majority government in Westminster to account on behalf of their constituents.  Scotland’s 21st century democracy, UK-style!

*Institute for Fiscal Studies (2024, p.4) – https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-06/How-do-the-last-five-years-measure-on-levelling-up.pdf