Global Changemakers

They were billed as presidential style debates. An import from the US, whose would-be leaders have sparred on television since a young, tanned Jack Kennedy surprisingly routed the more experienced Richard Nixon in 1960.  But nobody could have predicted that in the hours after the first Prime Ministerial debate in UK electoral history, the genial Nick Clegg of the perennial third party, the Liberal Democrats, would halt David Cameron’s previously inevitable march to Downing Street, and blow the election wide open into a multi-party race. As Britain geared up for the second debate a week later on foreign policy, a Liberal Democrat strongpoint, the party was up a full ten points, with some polls even putting them in front. Even though a poll just before the second debate puts Nick Clegg’s party on 34%, 3 points ahead of the Conservatives; according to the BBC’s election calculator, that would give the Liberal Democrats 151 seats, far short of the 326 seats needed to form a government.

It was one hundred years ago that the Liberals last won a British election, under Herbert Asquith, when the electoral system consisted wholly of top hat wearing, property owning men, who could buy multiple votes in differing counties for a tenner. Things have moved on a touch; all British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens can vote, although prisoners and EU citizens are still barred from voting in UK general elections, and we also just celebrated 20 years of a televised House of Commons! But despite all of this fancy modernisation – universal suffrage and watching Parliament and party leader debates on TV – the actual way we elect governments in this country has barely changed since the last Liberal Government in 1910. In fact it hardly differs from the Parliamentary system of government that emerged in the 1600s. In some ways, the theory was better then than the practice is now.

What set the British system apart in those days was our unique system of shared, separated government. Rather than the divine absolute kingship of the French or the volatile alliances of Princes in the Holy Roman Empire, England, and then Britain after the Union of 1707, had a separated system of powers. The monarch held the executive power, which was checked by the legislative and power of the purse of the House of Commons, whose potential for populism was in turn moderated by the unelected, aristocratic House of Lords. This was the system that influenced the great American Revolutionary thinkers, men like Thomas Paine and the Founding Fathers who created a government constituted in very British concepts of rights and liberties, with a very real separation of powers between the President, the Congress and the Supreme Court. Although the US President commands the military, there is little he can do with it if the Congress refuses to fund a war, just as the British system was designed to prevent the King from fighting petty wars for his own fiefdoms in France, if Parliament thought it not in the national interest.
 
But as Britain democratised, power shifted from the unelected monarch to the nominally elected House of Commons. The effect of this however was that the separation of powers that had existed between the monarch, the aristocracy and the people; disappeared and became amalgamated in the office of Prime Minister, who took on all of the executive power previously held by the monarch. It is the Prime Minister who tells the Queen when to dissolve Parliament, or what new taxes to raise or when to deploy troops to war. In the British system, the Prime Minister will by definition be leader of the majority party in the Commons, and due to the harsh system of party whips and the party leadership controlling promotions and demotions of Ministers, the Prime Minister is all but guaranteed to get whatever he wants passed.

In fact in the last thirty years, Parliament has defeated the government barely half a dozen times. It used to be that radical or unpopular plans would be defeated in the House of Lords, composed of hundreds of land owners and their descendants, old bishops, big donors to the major parties and peppered with a handful of the great and the good. It was the last Liberal government that destroyed the remaining vestiges of the separation of powers in the British System through the passage of the Parliament Act in 1911, which rendered the Lords effectively useless. After the Chancellor David Lloyd George presented a radical, welfare state budget in 1909, which was defeated in the Conservative dominated Lords; Britain was engulfed in a crisis of government that dwarfed even the expenses scandal of today. To end the impasse, the Liberals passed the Parliament Act, curtailing the Lords powers and allowing the Commons to overrule the Lords after three failed attempts. They managed to get this through by convincing the King to threaten to flood the Lords with 500 new Liberal peers if it wasn’t passed. Separation of Powers indeed.

The British Prime Minister must be one of the most powerful leaders in the entire democratic world. What other country has all the executive and legislative powers concentrated in one single person? Even Britain’s courts are run out of the Ministry of Justice, whose head will be a Prime Ministerial ally, the one and only criteria for ministerial appointments. It’s about time you might think that we had these leader debates on TV, seeing how much power we will be giving to one person.

Although, no one actually elects the Prime Minister. The candidates are chosen by members of that political party, although in the case of Gordon Brown, he had a coronation when no one else dared to run against him. In a British election, the only vote you have is who you want your local MP to be. There are 650 one member constituencies, with the person who wins the most votes becoming the MP. The party with the most MP’s then forms the Government.

Hopefully with the debates throwing the polls open, more Brits might see how little control the voter has over deciding the government. Quite conceivably, the Liberal Democrats could lead the polls, the Conservatives could win the most votes (as they already did in 2005), and we could still end up with Gordon Brown as Prime Minister on May 7th. Whilst others see the introduction of the debates as the Americanisation of our politics, it is hardly a drop in the ocean of how much our system needs to change, and America is a pretty good example to look to, seeing how that system was influenced and shaped so much by the British.

I would like to vote for those that invented the written constitution; the direct election of our leaders; the power for voters to recall poorly performing officials; the system of completely open public primaries to decide on candidates for office; and the concept of the separation of powers. I would vote for someone that recognised the need to update our system as this country’s top priority, but I don’t think they are standing in my constituency.

- Nick Henderson