Anthony King’s ‘Who Governs Britain?’ is a great guide to the UK political system, its component parts, and how each part of the system exerts influence on the governance of the country as a whole. It’s a short and very readable book rather than a textbook treatment of the subject.
King takes a chapter on each bit of the system but presents this in an unconventional way: the book starts with a chapter on ‘foreigners’ (i.e. the extent to which the UK’s governance is affected by international treaty obligations) and only gets around to talking about prime ministers in Chapter 11.
Explaining this choice, King writes:
The order in which the chapters are set out will probably strike some readers as idiosyncratic. They will be right. It is. The deliberate aim of the exercise…is to disturb the order in which these topics are customarily approached, an order [i.e. the traditional order] that in a curious way encourages readers to think along conventional lines when new times perhaps require a less conventional approach.
It’s an approach that works and the book is highly accessible and highly recommended. But one thing that struck me is that the book – published in 2015 – takes as its first two chapters the subjects of ‘foreigners’ and ‘partisans’. In many ways, the whole saga of Brexit reflects a conflict between these two influences on British politics – namely the EU, and the Eurosceptics rank-and-file party members in the Conservative Party.
On the EU, King has the following to say:
The most intimate and intense involvement of foreigners in the making of governmental decisions affecting British citizens dates from 1 January 1973, the day on which the UK joined what is now the European Union…
The Maastricht Treaty, finally ratified in 1993…[saw] the remit of the EU’s various institutions… extended to include influence upon, although not total control over, transport, education, consumer protection, public-health policy, policing, and immigration and asylum…
The impact of all this on the way in which Britain is governed – and by whom – has been enormous. For many purposes, though by no means all, heads of government and other ministers from other EU countries, and members of the European Commission, are now fully integrated into Britain’s governing institutions.
In summing up the impact of this – and other UK treaty obligations, the impact of international financial markets and the power of multinational firms to pick and choose their tax jurisdictions – King concludes:
The United Kingdom long ago lost most of its capacity to act independently*. Moreover, there is no way it can regain it.
One group of people that would agree with most of the first sentence above, and disagree vigorously with the second sentence are the ‘partisans’ / members of the Conservative Party. King notes that membership of the Conservative Party peaked at 2.8m during the early 1950s, and has since declined to (a self-reported number of) 150,000 as of the mid-2010s. King states that as of the mid-2010s ‘the Conservative Party was no longer a mass party: it had become a boutique party for the most ardent of the faithful’ (he also notes that Labour has not fared much better).
No one knows exactly what proportion of party members are also party activists, but the proportion is probably less than one in four and is unlikely to be as high as one in three… [this] would mean that during the mid-2010s Conservative activists across the country numbered, at most, in the order of 50,000.
The relatively small number of hardcore party members creates a dynamic where:
Party leaders, MPs, and candidates desperately need their party supporters to be a visible and audible presence in their constituencies… Party leaders also badly need their activists’ moral support. It is debilitating for an MP or candidate to have to deal for months on end with vocal and disgruntled members of their local party; and party leaders, even those at or near the top, go out of their way not to alienate the people they meet at party gatherings and address at party conferences… Sometimes they even feel the need to sacrifice their own judgement to [those of their members].
King continues:
The balance of power that exists in that relationship between leaders and followers has, if anything, shifted in party activists favour just as the latter’s total numbers on the ground have diminished. The main parties have become more internally democratic. As they have done so, the power of party members and activists within each of them has increased… It is party members who choose parliamentary candidates, and nowadays it is they who have the power to elect their party’s leader… and they are also able to influence their party’s rhetorical tone, its broad policy direction and sometimes even its stance on specific issues.
…What is clear is that on some significant issues large numbers of active Conservative party members hold more radical views that most of their party’s leaders and at the same time feel more strongly about them.
…In more recent years… [such issues have included]…drastically reducing net immigration and, of course, not only resisting further European integration but calling for Britain to withdraw from the EU altogether.
Clearly, the views of Tory members are not the only factor in the Brexit vote, but it is striking the extent to which their views have steered the course of British policy on the EU. Only 43% of Conservative MPs backed Brexit, compared to 58% of Conservative voters. The best data I can find on Conservative members is this – which doesn’t track referendum voting patterns but suggests that (as of early 2018) fewer than 10% of Conservative members surveyed back remaining in either the single market or customs union, which seems to suggest that Conservative members were significantly more pro-Leave than even typical Conservative voters.
The role of ‘partisans’ in the Brexit saga also plays out on the Labour side as well as the Conservative side. The role of Labour members in electing the relatively left-wing Jeremy Corbyn has played an important part in the fairly tame response to the weakness of the current Conservative position (with a wafer-thin majority in parliament thanks to an informal partnership with the DUP). The desire of Labour members to choose a more socialist leader has clearly limited the party’s mainstream electoral appeal, though it’s possible Corbyn could still end up as PM given the inherent instability / uncertainty in the political system at the moment.
Stepping back from Brexit for a second, all of this illustrates the outsized influence that small groups can have on large complex systems. In a recent article I talked about the role of the Cluniac monasteries – i.e. relatively small groups of people – in promoting Church reform in medieval Europe. When small groups do something we perceive as wrong, we bemoan ‘special interests’ and ‘extremists’, and when this works in our favour or a way we approve of we talk about ‘visionaries’.
Either way, an important dynamic in complex societies, systems, and organisations is the way that control over key bottlenecks (in this case, the role in making and unmaking Tory politicians), can create very significant change. Indeed, the EU itself is largely an elite project (albeit with substantial popular support).
King’s book talks about other points of pressure on the British political system, including the media, special interest groups and the judiciary, but if anything each of these chapters reinforces the point that small groups – often in conflict with each other – play a key role in British politics.
* It’s worth noting that King also recognises that most states are in a similar position, and even the US and China are far from constrained in their ability to act independently.
