The new parliament of the United Kingdom that assembled at Westminster on 17 December 2019 was a departure from the old in several respects. At its opening, the monarch dispensed with the ceremonial state coach, arriving by car for the occasion. There were more women MPs than ever before – 34 per cent compared to less than 5 per cent thirty-five years ago. A new Speaker, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, presided over the House of Commons, promising ‘humour and quiet words’ in place of his abrasive predecessor. Over in the House of Lords, the benches were full to the brim, the upper chamber now at its largest since its culling by Tony Blair's government in 1999. This was also the ‘get Brexit done’ parliament. The general election of the previous week had settled the great issue of contemporary British politics seemingly once and for all, ejecting almost 25 per cent of sitting MPs in the process.Footnote 1 One of the new parliament's first acts a few weeks later was to pass the Withdrawal Agreement Bill, giving effect to the ‘leave’ vote of the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union. So, as MPs settled into Westminster, their European counterparts – seventy-two UK MEPs – waved goodbye to Brussels. The cord (some would say the chain) that had linked the British to Europe since 1979 was finally cut. As it turned out, this new parliament did not last long in its conventional form. After only forty-five days of sitting it was locked down by the COVID-19 pandemic. From 21 April 2020, it was reduced to a chamber abiding by rules of ‘social distancing’, as short and as rump a parliament as its more famous ancestors. When it returns to normal, more disruption may follow. Both the Commons and the Lords are scheduled to move to separate temporary accommodation as part of the £4bn renovation project envisaged for the Palace of Westminster.
At such a turning point in the history of parliament – its present confused and its future uncertain – it is worth reaching into the past to identify some of the wider historical contexts into which the current turbulence might be placed. In different ways, a series of recent publications all attest to a revival of interest in the theory and practice of parliamentary representation in the modern era as a scholarly discipline.Footnote 2 Until lately, the subject lacked coherence. Scholarship has centred around three distinct traditions – the biographical, the theoretical, and the scientific. They have seldom been in dialogue. In the first place, there is the prosopographical approach, exemplified by the research of The history of parliament, which started out in the 1930s and which so far has published sixty volumes in fourteen sections ranging from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Here, the concept of biography stretches to include the lives of constituencies as well as MPs and peers, making for a gargantuan project sometimes criticized for missing the wood for the trees.Footnote 3 In the last decade, this tendency has begun to be corrected, with longer survey volumes emerging from The history, and more attention being paid to the modern period.Footnote 4 Still, the steady but protracted progress of The history has left a vacuum, only filled from time to time by breezy anecdotal histories of parliament.Footnote 5
Political theory has also been influential in the history of parliamentary representation. Scholars still routinely acknowledge several pioneering works from the late 1960s and 1970s on the idea of representative democracy.Footnote 6 These studies focused on the intellectual canon of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Abbé Sieyès, and the American founding fathers – observing a divergence between direct democracy (America, France) and indirect representation (Britain). Although there was some acknowledgement of later theorists, for example Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and Max Weber, these classic studies of representation were rooted in pre-modern history, exploring a series of texts that themselves were often obsessed with the working of democracy in antiquity. The lacunae here are obvious. Modern systems of parliamentary representation came after the golden age of democratic theory. Although a new wave of work has emerged in the last twenty years, centred on a reappraisal of the claims of democracy, much of it remains rooted in the pre-1800 era.Footnote 7
A third perspective on parliamentary representation comes from political science and public policy studies. Growing out of the post-war ‘Nuffield’ election surveys and their successors, as well as the vogue for comparative research on government that flourished in the 1960s, British social scientists produced a series of descriptive studies of elections, the electorate, and pressure groups.Footnote 8 In the 1980s and 1990s, this field became increasingly quantitative, taking its cue from the school of American ‘legislative studies’, now focused more on dynamics inside parliament, in particular, MPs’ recruitment and careers, their constituency service, and the machinery of legislation.Footnote 9 At first glance, this methodology seems unfamiliar territory for the historian. Political scientists and public policy scholars tend to be presentist. However, in recent years they have turned back to history. New historic data on division lists, political corruption, MPs’ backgrounds, and legislative outcomes have extended the chronological reach of legislative studies.Footnote 10 Additionally, the digitization of parliamentary records, including Hansard (the parliamentary debates) and the journals of the House of Commons, is expanding the possibilities of text mining and other forms of longitudinal research.Footnote 11 At the same time, the era of constitutional reform unleashed by Tony Blair's first administration of 1997–2001 pushed public policy research into deeper historical and comparative study, most notably with the creation of the Constitution Unit at University College London in 1996.Footnote 12 Consequently, much of the current thinking on the present and future of parliament is situated within a more historical context, a move paralleled by a substantial increase in historical briefing papers and statistics prepared by parliament's own information services.Footnote 13
I
This historical turn in political science and public policy, the resumption of interest in the political theory of representative democracy, and a leap forward into modernity by The history of parliament all bode well for the study of parliamentary representation. It is now easier to connect past and present. One institution that has benefited from this shift is the Palace of Westminster itself. Usually the preserve of architectural and art historians, and well served by volumes destined for the coffee-table, the history of the home of parliament over seven centuries has been transformed by new inter-disciplinary research.Footnote 14 We now know much more about the changing conglomeration of buildings and spaces that have occupied the site since the thirteenth century. This improved understanding of the form of parliament is enhancing awareness of its functions, not least those of the House of Commons, which moved into St Stephen's Chapel in 1548. New work on parliamentary ceremonial and procedure, on MPs’ behaviour, even on the sensory atmosphere of the debating chamber, are among the first fruits to fall from this new branch of study.Footnote 15
For the modern historian, analysis of the Palace of Westminster is dominated by the reconstruction undertaken by Charles Barry following the fire of 1834. Historians have always been fascinated by how Barry on the outside, and Augustus Pugin within, sought to instil a sense of continuity with the past in the new buildings, reconnecting the Palace with its medieval English origins, and ensuring that it continued to embody the mixed constitution in miniature, the Lords and Commons side by side, with a separate entrance and set of chambers reserved for the monarch.Footnote 16 Alongside this reinvention of tradition went some more practical considerations. By the 1820s, the business of parliament had outgrown its buildings. The addition of 100 Irish MPs from 1801 and oversight of a colonial empire that expanded from thirty to forty-five territories by the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, together with an exponential increase in local ‘improvement’ bills, as the British economy was transformed by the growth of commerce and industry, left parliament unfit for purpose as the national legislature.Footnote 17 In the years before the fire of 1834, there were several enquiries into how the Palace might be replaced by a legislature suited for a modern empire.Footnote 18
As much as Barry's and Pugin's designs invoked olden times, the building was replete with new technology, as Edward Gillin's closely researched monograph makes clear. Other historians have shown how experiments with ventilation and time management began in the temporary House of Commons, where MPs met between 1835 and 1851.Footnote 19 But it was the new Lords and Commons chambers that became an intensive ‘laboratory’ for trying out cutting-edge innovations in light, sound, and stone. The Victorian palace of science describes how Barry consulted with leading scientists of the day, such as Michael Faraday and George Airy (the Astronomer Royal); how he sought untried materials (cast iron and Anston stone from Yorkshire rather than the Portland variety beloved by most London architects); how he employed David Reid to overhaul the ventilation of the Palace, and allowed Goldsworthy Gurney to trial ‘Bude’ oil lamps. Ornamental did not mean impractical. The first of the new Palace's ornate steeples to go up was actually a ventilation tower. The main role for the clock tower, or ‘Big Ben’, which easily dwarfed the twin towers of Westminster Abbey nearby, was to be London's ‘premier time distributer’, its glass face lit up until midnight. Supporters of Barry's architectural ‘mechanics’, such as the radical MP, Joseph Hume, envisaged the new parliament as a ‘machine’, a utilitarian engine for doing the people's work.
Ultimately, Gillin is better at conveying Barry's aspirations, rather than his achievements. Yorkshire stone crumbled in the climes of London. Reid was sacked, Airy replaced, and, at first, the deafening chimes of Big Ben proved unpopular. But the ‘palace of science’ tag stuck. Electric lighting was trialled in the House of Commons by the Edison Company in 1883, ahead of the rest of the nation. Telegraphy (1852) and telephony (1880) were also fast-tracked.Footnote 20 And when Barry's edifice was partially destroyed by the blitz bombings of 1941, more experimentation followed, including the recording of debates by the BBC in the temporary chamber of the Commons, and the first use in the UK of reinforced concrete in the new chamber, completed in 1950, its innovative suspended design enabling many more offices and committee rooms to be added.Footnote 21 The spatial turn in the history of parliament is thus revealing a more dynamic Palace of Westminster. Behind the majestic exterior, new technology has continually developed to speed up business and connect with the outside world. Future research might tell us more. How, for example, the internal layout of the Palace has affected the behaviour and emotions of MPs and peers over time; and how parliament connects with its immediate environs in Westminster, Whitehall, and beyond.
II
The gothic setting of the Palace of Westminster not only disguises the modern engineering beneath, it also adds to the insular narrative that celebrates the British system as one of the oldest, the ‘mother of parliaments’ as the MP John Bright claimed in 1865.Footnote 22 In fact, the expansion of British parliamentary democracy in the Victorian era coincided with similar developments across much of the world. Important insights can be gleaned from a more global approach to the history of parliamentary representation, such as that developed recently in the special comparative issues of the flagship journal, Parliaments, Estates and Representation. From the liberal movements in the Hispanic world in the early part of the nineteenth century, through the creation of new national assemblies in western, southern, and central Europe during the era of the 1848 revolutions, onto the new legislatures of the American states and the Canadian provinces, and in Britain's settlement colonies too, parliaments became the norm. As Remieg Aerts and Joop van den Berg argue in their introduction to a wide-ranging collection of essays, the idea of parliament was transnational.Footnote 23 By the end of the nineteenth century, most of continental Europe had modified or rejected monarchical rule in favour of some form of representative government. The British parliament was one model, but the French and German versions were also admired. Many of these parliaments looked similar. They were neo-classical buildings with rotunda chambers, in which the seats were arranged in a semi-circle, with speeches being made from a central podium. In most cases, these new legislatures were not the product of popular revolution. Their democratic credentials arose from the fact that the third estate claimed its share in national government alongside the crown, the nobility, and the clergy. Sovereignty was contested, the people on the barricades may have been the means, but the claims of parliament were the end.Footnote 24 Looked at this wider context, the British case is closer to the European model than is often assumed.
The ideal of parliament identifies several distinguishing features of the transnational parliamentary phenomenon of the nineteenth century. Publicity of proceedings was cardinal. Jens Späth points to the Cortes of Cádiz (1810) as well as the short-lived Sicilian parliament at Naples (1812) as leading the way in publishing a daily record of their debates. These parliaments also broke with the confessional states of the ancien régime, recognizing the right to representation for all religions. Belgium's secular constitution of 1831 was a beacon of civil liberty in this respect. By the 1860s, most parliaments ended other disabilities, particularly of Jews. Above all, these were liberal parliaments, limiting the exercise of royal prerogative on the one hand, but curbing the excesses of democracy on the other. In his chapter on the Hungarian parliament in 1867, András Cieger describes how the lower house limited the power of the ‘king in parliament’. Elsewhere, the challenge to parliamentary authority came from below: from the people and those deputies who spoke in its name. Andreas Schulz's contribution on the German National Assembly of 1848 emphasizes how it was based on primary and secondary elections, to mitigate against the consequences of an ‘uneducated’ electorate. He also describes the rules drawn up inside the parliament to limit the length of speeches, so as to curb long-winded demagogues. Few of these European parliaments rushed into voting by ballot, only introducing the measure as an accompaniment to adult male suffrage, hoping to protect inexperienced voters from intimidation.Footnote 25
In Parliaments in time, Michael Koß adds another dimension to our understanding of this wave of new institutions, by looking at the body of rules that managed their time and business. In his comparative study of Britain, France, Germany, and Sweden, based on ninety different procedural changes across the four systems, he distinguishes between ‘talking’ and ‘working’ legislatures, a typology that has also been developed by Kari Palonen.Footnote 26 In the former, parliamentary procedures maximized time allowed for debate, but left to the executive overall control of the timetable. In the latter, legislation took priority, with the programme organized by subject. Insofar as these rules were agreed from within rather than imposed from above, they contributed towards ‘legislative democracy’. Broadly speaking, talking or deliberative parliaments developed in Britain and France, whilst more bureaucratic systems emerged in Germany and Sweden.
Both Koß and the contributors to The ideal of parliament bring out the resilience of parliamentarianism through the twentieth century despite war and authoritarianism. The interwar years were its darkest days. By 1939, the number of parliaments in Europe had halved, legislative overload and the extension of democracy weakening their efficiency.Footnote 27 Thomas Raithel offers Weimar Germany as the classic case. Increasing amounts of legislative authority were devolved to the central state, paving the way for the Führerprinzip of the Third Reich. Similarly, in the parliament of the new kingdom of Hungary, Kálmán Pócza describes a reaction against open debate, a clamour for specialist committees and yearning for the head of state (i.e. the king) to use veto powers. The nationality question added to the instability of the period. For example, Stephanie Zloch shows how one third of the new Polish parliament after 1918 were national minorities, in a tense competition with older representatives who had cut their teeth in the imperial parliaments of Prussia, Germany, Austria, and Russia. The ideal of parliament ends on a happier note. The final section of the book describes the rejuvenation of parliament after the end of the Second World War. In Austria, Germany, and Italy, Marie-Luise Recker documents how new constitutions minimized the power of the president, and restored the authority of the legislature, returning to nineteenth-century precedents. Even in communist states, parliaments could flex their muscle, despite one-party control. Adéla Gjuricǒvá points out how the Czech National Assembly became the centre of Alexander Dubček's challenge to the government in 1968, and how later in 1989–90 it stood up to Vaclav Havel's Civic Forum, ensuring that the velvet revolution had parliamentary endorsement. The editors of The ideal of parliament do not press the point brought out by other scholars, namely that the modern European parliament, which began life as the European Parliamentary Assembly in Luxembourg in 1958, is an unworthy successor to this long tradition of legislative democracy.Footnote 28
Placed within this spectrum of modern European parliaments, Britain sits somewhere in the middle. Westminster did of course look different. Barry eschewed the rotunda parliament, although many of the other schemes placed before parliament before and after the fire of 1834 did favour semi-circular design.Footnote 29 But in most other respects, the parallels across the nineteenth century are striking. Britain's reputation as a constitutional monarchy, in which the crown was not supposed to interfere in parliament, sometimes looks closer to the European experience. There was a near miss in 1831, when William IV held out against the reform bill, a stand-off between Lords and Commons in 1910 with Edward VII primed to intervene, and rumours of a ‘palace revolution’ to oust the Labour government in 1931.Footnote 30 Britain followed European precedents in giving greater publicity to parliamentary proceedings, although until 1905 there was no official record of the debates, with newspaper reporters relied on for copy. Statutes were publicly promulgated from 1835.Footnote 31 Parliamentary procedure was overhauled around the same time, with the government asserting its control over the legislative calendar.Footnote 32 Like most of their European counterparts, the British limited changes to the electoral system, taking the best part of a century to bring in full adult suffrage (1928), and, in the face of much opposition, only bringing in the secret ballot in 1872 as a preventive move, in order to purge corruption in elections in Ireland, and in local government in England.Footnote 33 Britain was off the pace in terms of religious disabilities. Catholics and dissenters were not emancipated until the late 1820s, Jews in 1858 (long after some of Britain's own colonies). Alone amongst modern parliaments, Westminster insisted on a religious oath from new MPs until 1888.Footnote 34 As on the continent, parliamentary verbosity was outlawed, with new rules introduced in 1841 limiting speeches on public petitions. At the same time, the Commons and the Lords honed a national reputation for ‘government by speaking’, based on the deliberative prowess of parliament.Footnote 35
In one respect, British parliamentarianism was quite unlike the European experience: its system of representation. Whereas most European parliaments were chosen by electoral colleges in single-member constituencies that corresponded to the main administrative divisions of the state, Britain, until well into the twentieth century, preserved its old medieval organization, differentiating between boroughs (burghs in Scotland) and counties. Double-member seats were retained, as were the conventions of plural voting. The peculiarities of Britain's territorial system of representation have been largely overlooked by modern historians, who focus on the expansion of the franchise, rather than the distribution of constituencies. The classical political theory of representation also assumes that modern liberalism put paid to older ways.Footnote 36 Yet suffrage reform was always only one part of the legislation comprising ‘representation of the people’. Until 1928, it was an axiom of British politics that although not everyone had the vote, everyone was represented in some way. Moreover, many people had more than one vote, a convention that survived until 1948. It is too easy to write this off as failing the test of democracy, without at least trying to understand how it was not only defended in theory, but also worked in practice.
III
Gregory Conti's monograph is the first full treatment of debates around mixed suffrages and virtual representation in the nineteenth century. Seminal studies of popular electoral culture have shown how political participation in Hanoverian and Victorian Britain went well beyond those who possessed the vote.Footnote 37 Historians of the ‘unreformed’ parliament (that is, before 1832) have also revealed how MPs served a range of interest groups and lobbies beyond their own constituency through indirect connections of residence and family, as well as via their financial and professional networks.Footnote 38 However, the theories that lay behind these practices have eluded study. In the first half of his book, Conti recovers a substantial tranche of Victorian political commentary devoted to explaining how the very lack of uniformity in the electoral system guaranteed its effective working. MPs from large working-class electorates such as Westminster ensured that the interests of poorer Britons elsewhere were looked after. Conversely, the propertied elites enjoyed more than one vote, so that they would not be dominated by the more numerous working classes. Virtual representation justified other anomalies. For example, enfranchising the relatively small river port of Sunderland meant that the shipping industry in other parts of the country was represented. Diversity in the electorate produced a more deliberative House of Commons as well, as MPs were not tied to the demands of one class of voter. Conti describes how a host of major figures – Walter Bagehot, W. R. Greg, the 3rd Earl Grey, Sir James Mackintosh, and Lord John Russell – supported by a cast of lesser-known writers – Henry Creasy, James Lorimer, Henry Pochin, and Augustus Stapleton – defended virtual representation from the advocates of more direct democracy, such as John Stuart Mill.
Conti also begins to unpack the idea of ‘interests’, that is to say, the principle that the Commons represented corporate groups or sectors such as agriculture, railways, manufacturing, and bankers, rather than individuals or classes. For Victorians, the distribution of parliamentary constituencies and seats was proportionate to the importance of a particular ‘interest’. For example, until 1885, the City of London, Britain's financial hub, returned four MPs. Although its electorate was of middling size, its MPs were supposed to serve the commercial needs of the rest of the country. How all this worked in practice remains unexplored. In the 1970s and 1980s, quantitative studies of parliamentary behaviour assembled a vast amount of data on MPs and their personal and constituency backgrounds, in order to measure party alignment around the time of the crises over the corn laws and home rule for Ireland.Footnote 39 All this statistical information is worth revisiting for a better understanding of how parliament represented ‘interests’. Instead of focusing on division lists (or ‘roll calls’), researchers might instead plot the links between MPs and legislation (and its accompaniments in the form of public petitions and service on committees).Footnote 40
Highly convincing on the persistence of virtual representation into the reform era of the 1860s, Conti is less persuasive when he turns to explain its nemesis: the idea of proportional representation. Other scholars, notably Floyd Parsons, have chronicled the popularity of Thomas Hare's scheme of proportional or ‘personal’ representation (PR), emphasizing how it developed as a critique of virtual representation. Hare was worried that minority views were left unrepresented by simple numerical majorities, a diagnosis that influenced John Stuart Mill.Footnote 41 However, Conti surely overstates the significance of PR as a game-changer. Hare's mathematical formulas went down badly. As Conti himself concedes, Hare's Treatise on the election of representatives, parliamentary and municipal (1859) was ‘far from limpid’, leaving readers with the impression that PR was ‘confused and overcomplicated’. Similarly, Mill's support for PR was seen as special pleading for an educated elite. PR fared better overseas in some of the smaller electorates of the British empire – for example, Queensland (1892), Tasmania (1909), and Malta (1921) – than it did at home. In the longer term, the campaign for PR in the UK only gained traction when the governing party of the day was dependent on a third party, for example, Ramsay MacDonald in 1929, James Callaghan in 1977, and David Cameron in 2010.
Moreover, the system of virtual representation proved more pervasive and enduring than Conti allows. Direct representation in the form of single-member constituencies did not arrive overnight in the mid-1880s as is sometimes assumed.Footnote 42 The Second Reform Act of 1867 had extended the principle of multi-member seats, adding a third member to the representation of Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester. After 1885, alongside an extensive reorganization of county constituencies, twenty-four parliamentary boroughs returning two MPs remained in England and Ireland, only phased out in 1918. A mixed and messy franchise lasted too. Whilst many old corrupt boroughs were disfranchised by the First Reform Act of 1832, old suffrages – the infamous freeman, ‘scot and lot’, and ‘pot-walloper’ franchises – continued during the lifetime of those registered under these qualifications at the time. Well into the 1860s, freeman voters in particular formed a sizeable part of the local electorate in medium-sized towns such as Chester, Coventry, and Preston.Footnote 43 Other features of virtual representation survived. Petitioning of parliament, which allowed the voices of non-electors to be heard, continued unabated into the early twentieth century, as much a part of the ammunition of the suffragette movement as it had been for temperance reformers and sabbatarians across the nineteenth century.Footnote 44 Virtual representation also enjoyed a new lease of life in the arguments of the anti-suffragists, insistent that fathers and husbands were proxy voters, indirectly representing the interests of their daughters and wives.Footnote 45
Similarly, plural voting did not die a death in the later nineteenth century. The principle that someone was entitled to a vote for each property that they owned or occupied remained sacrosanct until after the First World War. Even then, ‘one person, one vote’ did not extend to university graduates. Five more university constituencies were added to the representation in 1918 (Combined English universities, Combined Scottish universities, the National University of Ireland, Queen's University Belfast, and the University of Wales).Footnote 46 And in the one entirely new parliamentary system created within the UK between the thirteenth and the twentieth centuries – the parliament of Northern Ireland (1920–72) – plural voting was brought back in, insofar as business premises as well as household residences provided an electoral qualification until 1968.Footnote 47 Long after 1918, the British electoral system remained variegated. Only in 1948 was there a bonfire of all the election laws that dated back to the era of Simon de Montfort and Edward I. The Representation of the People Act of that year removed hundreds of old election statutes, putting in their place the main features of the system that exists until this day. County and urban representation converged into single member constituencies, and the university seats together with the ‘business vote’ of the City of London were abolished.Footnote 48 Seen in this way, modern British democracy is a relatively recent invention, the product of war and the expansion of central government in the twentieth century, rather than an organic growth of people power from the late eighteenth century. Instead of censuring the Victorians and Edwardians for clinging to the old ways of parliamentary representation, scholars need to learn more about how it operated successfully for so long.
IV
Parliaments could be neither ‘talking’ nor ‘working’ legislatures, to coin Michael Koß's useful distinction, without an agreed set of rules. In most parliamentary systems, a Speaker holds the ring, guided by conventions that have grown up over the years, and been codified to a varying extent. Neither the office nor the rules have attracted much attention. In Britain, the ‘bible’ of procedure is Thomas Erskine May's Treatise upon the law, privileges and proceedings of parliament, first published in 1844 and now in its 25th edition. A weighty and dry tome, the Treatise enjoyed the spotlight during the Brexit debates of 2019 when the Speaker John Bercow cited May in ruling that the Commons could not vote twice on a similar amendment.Footnote 49 Bercow also ensured that the Treatise became better known (if not actually read) by supporting its digitization. All this renewed interest coincided with the bicentenary of May's birth, commemorated in a wide-ranging volume, Essays on the history of parliamentary procedure.
The biographical portions of this collection describe how May dedicated his career to understanding and reforming the work of the Commons, particularly the machinery of legislation. May's was not the first attempt to synthesize and improve parliamentary procedure. In his chapter, Paul Seaward chronicles a long tradition of guides stretching back to the early eighteenth century, the most influential of which was that of John Hatsell, clerk of the Commons from 1768 to 1820.Footnote 50 Hatsell favoured following precedent. Clerks, and aspiring MPs, needed to be familiar with what the Commons had done in the past, and that meant mastering the daily record of the Commons, the Journal. May joined the Clerks’ Office in 1831, straight from school, serving an apprenticeship in the library of the Commons by re-indexing the Journal. Whilst May was schooled in the old ways, he was also a child of the new age of information. William McKay, who recounts May's life, does not mention the enormous amount of data about the workings of the Commons amassed by May. Lists of bills, committee attendance as well as laborious analyses of the frequency and length of MPs’ speeches and other aspects of the Commons timetable fill his own private notebooks from the period.Footnote 51 He campaigned for reform of the way the Commons worked, calling for a streamlining of Commons business. May favoured grouping bills according to topic, and also delegating the routine parts of legislation to standing committees.
As a manual of rules and etiquette, May's book quickly proved indispensable, cited as the ‘standard authority’ within a decade.Footnote 52 The rising authority of the Treatise was complemented by the ascent of the stature of the Speaker, particularly during the offices of Charles Shaw-Lefevre (1839–57) and Henry Brand (1872–84). In the new Palace, Barry set aside as much space for the Speaker's accommodation as he did for the Commons, yet the ceremonial and procedural functions of the office in the modern period await fuller analysis.Footnote 53 May's Treatise secured a wide audience overseas. A jointly written chapter in the volume describes May's influence in the colonies, notably New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. May became a one-man advisory service, replying to queries from speakers and clerks in the legislatures of the new world. Beyond the anglosphere, the Treatise also had an impact, being translated into German in 1860, with later Hungarian (1866) and Italian editions (1888) too. In the end, everyone else seems to have benefited from the success of the Treatise except May himself. His progress up the slippery pole of patronage in the clerks’ office was slow. He only became clerk of the Commons in 1870, after almost forty years’ service.
The ninth edition of the Treatise in 1883 was the last one published in May's lifetime. Thereafter, updating the rule-book became a collective endeavour. Much of the second half of this volume covers the history of parliamentary procedure since the late nineteenth century. We learn from Simon Patrick about the reform of standing orders in the 1850s and 1900s, neglected by historians. As Koß shows in his book, this was a key instrument in regulating the business of the legislature, and requires much fuller historical analysis. Of the current standing orders in the Commons, 40 per cent originate from before 1914.Footnote 54 The procedural reforms of the 1940s and 1960s are given due attention, particularly those forced through by Richard Crossman.Footnote 55 And the way in which the ‘centre of gravity’ of the Commons has shifted from the chamber to the committee room is highlighted by several of the contributors, including the editor, Paul Evans, as select committees have taken over many of the deliberative and interrogative tasks once performed within the Commons itself.Footnote 56 With one or two exceptions, the contributors to this belated festschrift for May are mainly clerks and former clerks of the House of Commons. Some of them place too much emphasis on the ‘working’ of parliament, and not enough on the ‘talking’ element, almost as though MPs are a tiresome obstacle in the way of 100 or so clerks wishing to go about their business. They would do well to recall May's own wariness of bureaucracy. ‘Ours is not a council of sages for framing laws, and planning amendments of the constitution; but a free and vigorous parliament, which watches over the destinies of an empire’, he concluded in his Constitutional history of England.Footnote 57 However, the volume unequivocally asserts the importance of procedure in understanding how parliament has changed over time. Indeed, the essays close out in a provocative fashion, with David Howarth making the case for parliament's own rules, the lex parliamenatria, having the same status as statute law. The question of who rules parliament is vexed, and, as we shall see, has been left unresolved by the Brexit crisis.
V
Unlike the Bible, May's Treatise left out women almost entirely. They only merited mention in a paragraph describing the infamous ‘grille’, that is the Ladies’ Gallery in the Commons, from which they were permitted to view proceedings on the benches below through a barred grate.Footnote 58 All that changed by the time of the thirteenth edition of the Treatise, published in 1924. With the extension of the suffrage in 1918 to all married women over the age of thirty, and the accompanying Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, women joined the Commons for the first time. A new paragraph was added to the Treatise.Footnote 59 More significantly, a new chapter opened in the history of parliamentary representation.
Currently a Labour MP herself, Rachel Reeves has written a compendious account of the first century of women MPs. One of several books published to mark the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, hers is an accessible and well-informed chronicle of the slow growth of what she calls the ‘sisterhood’ at Westminster.Footnote 60 Other historians, notably Brian Harrison and Pat Thane, have pointed to the glacial pace at which the Commons opened up to women. Despite a long tradition of women's political activism across the party spectrum in the UK in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, alongside almost a half-century of elected membership of local authorities such as education and poor law boards, it took women many decades to crack open parliament. In 1945, there were still only fourteen women in the Commons.Footnote 61 In fact, as Reeves shows, more than two-thirds of the total 491 women MPs since 1918 have been elected during and since new Labour's landslide of 1997. Not that this is another British exception. Most white Anglo-Saxon democracies struggled to make headway on equal representation once they had conceded equal suffrage. Scandinavian countries proved quicker to alter the gender balance of their legislatures, as did many of the new parliaments forged out of the peace negotiations at the end of the First World War, for example Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Latvia, and Poland.Footnote 62
Historians have described a combination of obstacles facing women as MPs in the UK. These include the persistence of the Victorian convention of ‘separate spheres’ whereby women were defined by their domestic role; the lack of positive discrimination in favour of women candidates; and the hostile masculine environment of the Commons itself, its atmosphere and working hours more like a men's club.Footnote 63 To this list might be added the legacy of ‘virtual representation’, emphasized by Conti, that is to say the convention that the Commons represented ‘interests’ not people, interests necessarily being defined in patriarchal terms.Footnote 64 Moreover, if, as the Aerts and Koß volumes suggest, the British parliament was more of a ‘speaking’ than a ‘working’ legislature, then the oratorical brilliance and theatrical performativity prized by the Commons were exclusively male attributes, learned in the classical curriculum of the elite schools and the older universities, and in many cases polished by legal careers.Footnote 65 ‘Government by speaking’, based on adversarial advocacy – the combative ‘cut and thrust’ of debate – compounded the challenges faced by new women entrants to the Commons.
Women at Westminster is peppered with anecdotes and stories that bear out the institutional bias against women that has long been a feature of parliament. Reeves shows how women MPs were more likely to be singled out by male parliamentarians and by the media for how they spoke and dressed, rather than for what they said or stood for. She brings out clearly the contradiction at the heart of the old Burkean ideal of representation, namely that women were expected to be in parliament on merit, not as a special or minority category, whilst at the same time once they were in the Commons they were usually directed to ‘women's’ issues (health, childcare, and education) in their backbench and frontbench duties. No surprise then that the one peak of power they conquered was the Ministry of Education and its successor departments. Women have been secretaries of state for education for twenty-four of the last hundred years.Footnote 66 Reeves's chronicle is also a positive account, emphasizing the extent to which it has been women MPs, often in cross-party co-operation, who have fundamentally changed British politics and society. The struggle for equal suffrage, equal guardianship after separation and divorce, the family allowance, equal pay, abortion on the British mainland (in the 1960s) and in Northern Ireland more recently, school nutrition, and many other measures, could not have been achieved without the pressure from within parliament from a long line of women MPs.
In Reeves's opinion, the turning point in the fortunes of women at Westminster came in 1997 with the decision by Tony Blair's Labour party to back all women short-lists. A decade or so later, David Cameron followed suit in a watered-down way with an ‘A-list’ of 100 eligible women candidates who were recommended for special consideration by constituency parties. It is not self-evident that these soft quotas made all the difference. Within a large political science literature, the jury is still out on both what better representation for women entails, and also on whether a ‘critical mass’ of women in the main parliamentary parties was required before quotas were introduced.Footnote 67 Seen in this way, the Blair reforms may have been as much about the transformation of Labour's notoriously masculine mentality as they were about parliament itself changing its ways.Footnote 68
Reeves understandably credits her own party with improving the lot of women at Westminster. Leading Labour ladies dominate her book, starting with Ellen Wilkinson, then moving onto Edith Summerskill, Barbara Castle, Jennie Lee, Shirley Williams, and Harriet Harman. On the Tory side, there seems less to say. Nancy Astor (the first woman to take a seat in the Commons) receives due attention. Later, Margaret Thatcher gets full coverage, although the tone is chillier here as Reeves documents the ‘iron lady's’ famous inability to work with other women. Nor is there much coverage of women from other parties, even though historically they have fielded a larger proportion of female candidates.Footnote 69 Eleanor Rathbone, perhaps the most effective independent MP of all time, is in the book, but nationalist MPs are largely excluded (nothing on the SNP's Ewings (Margaret and Winnie), or Margo MacDonald, and only en passant references to the independent Catholic socialist, Bernadette Devlin, and the Ulster Unionist party's Patricia McLaughlin). All of these women broke the mould in different ways. Likewise, women from the smaller UK mainland parties, such as Caroline Lucas of the Greens, are missed out altogether. Recent analysis of parliamentary debates across the twentieth century actually suggests that a more pro-active style of women's representation came before 1997 not after, when women were in a smaller minority.Footnote 70 More analysis of women as legislators between 1945, when Brian Harrison's analysis ends, and the 1990s, when quantitative analysis started up, is required for a fuller picture.
VI
Reeves's rose-coloured rollcall of women in parliament is confined to the House of Commons. Over in the Lords, the story is slightly different. Although the proportion of women in the upper chamber currently lags behind the lower at 28 per cent, change came relatively quickly after the Life Peerages Act of 1958, which ended male dominance of the Lords. Within ten years, double the number of female peers had been created compared to the number of women MPs elected in the ten years after 1918.Footnote 71 The House of Lords may seem an unlikely pacesetter in the history of constitutional change. Traditionally, the Lords has been seen as the most sluggish part of parliament, still intact despite more than a century of attempts at reform.Footnote 72
Philip Norton (Lord Norton of Louth) is both an academic political scientist and a member of the House of Lords (since 1998). He has always been drawn to the less fashionable parts of the British political system. From his early work on backbench MPs, to his more recent analyses of the cabinet and the courts, Norton has shown that the astute observer of the Palace of Westminster needs to go beyond Punch and Judy party politics to discover the moving parts of the British constitution.Footnote 73 In Reform of the House of Lords Norton leads us around the upper chamber, walking the reader through the arguments for and against changing who gets to join the Lords and what they do once they are there. Norton points out that most nations prefer single-chamber legislatures, bicameralism being the preference of larger states or federal systems. Numerically, this may be true. However, a handful of honourable exceptions aside – in Scandinavia, Portugal, Greece, and New Zealand – most older parliamentary democracies favour two chambers, not one.Footnote 74 The classic argument for their co-existence is that the second chamber or upper house allows for a different kind of representation than that afforded by the popularly elected lower house, and also means that legislation initiated in one chamber can be reviewed in the other. Norton demonstrates how the British House of Lords, especially in the last half-century, has been most adept in this latter function, not blocking but scrutinizing and improving the work of the Commons, an argument that is supported by the wider literature.Footnote 75 He also points out how, more recently, the traditional role of the House of Lords as a final court of appeal has been transformed by the 2005 legislation that established the Supreme Court as a separate institution (now housed in the Middlesex Guildhall), rather than a special function of the second chamber (that is, the ‘law lords’).Footnote 76 As a house of ‘reflection’, then, Norton gives his second home a relatively clean bill of health. More might have been said about legislation that originates in the House of Lords, now less important than it used to be. However, Norton's is a short book, and if there is an overwhelming case for Lords reform, it relates to its composition and not to its work.
In modern times, the size of the Lords has developed out of all proportion to its operations. On the eve of Tony Blair's famous decimation of the hereditary element in 1999, there were twice as many peers as MPs. Along with the spaces set aside for royalty on state occasions, the Lords still occupies more of the site of parliament than the Commons. As Reform of the House of Lords documents, there has been no shortage of attempts to change the way the Lords is selected. Norton himself comes down on the side of the ‘Wakeham’ solution of a partly elected, partly appointed Lords, but this, like most other proposals since 1958, has been resisted by the Commons, fearful of any challenge to its democratic mandate. Indeed, House of Lords reform is stuck in a groove. The arguments for creating a more representative chamber without interfering with the Commons have not moved on very much since the nineteenth century. It was a mid-Victorian former prime minister – Lord John Russell – who in 1869 first mooted life peerages as a means of refreshing the Lords, which then numbered 467. And it was a late Victorian viceroy-to-be, George Curzon, who in 1888 called for the Lords to be reduced from 500 to 322, comprising 200 hereditary peers who had already held public office, 50 life peers chosen by MPs, and 50 chosen by the crown, together with representatives from the colonies. Curzon likened his ‘senate’ to the upper houses of Italy, Spain, and Hungary.Footnote 77 But the membership of the Lords went unchanged. And in the twentieth century, like an untreated illness, the problem spread and became more complex.
By the time the Life Peerages Act was passed in 1958, the Lords had swelled to over 800. Instead of setting a limit on the number of new life peers, as both Russell and Curzon had proposed, no ceiling was applied. In this way, since 1958 life peerages have become a means of immense government patronage. Whereas new peerage creations were few and far between in the nineteenth century, by the 1970s governments were using the device to bolster their advantage in the Lords. During Harold Wilson's second administration of 1974–6, there were eighty-three new life peerages, or one every nine days, a rate almost equalled by the governments of both Tony Blair and David Cameron.Footnote 78 Thus, the problem of the composition of the House of Lords is a relatively recent one. Only since the 1970s has the executive come to dominate the Lords. This point is missed by most historians of Lords reform, who see Britain's upper chamber as a curious leftover from the Victorian and Edwardian era. In fact, whereas plenty has been written about the operations of the modern House of Lords (and its Hanoverian ancestor), how it worked in the half-century before the clipping of its wings in 1911 merits more research.Footnote 79 The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century upper chamber was much smaller, it had a representative rationale, and it both initiated and amended legislation. Compared to its modern counterpart, it made more sense, and needs to be better understood by way of comparison. The historical proceedings of the Lords now inhabit the same digital universe as those of the Commons. There is no need for them to be neglected.
VII
In the last decade, it is not the Lords but the Commons that has been seen as most in need of reform. The parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009 engulfed both houses of parliament, resulted in the imprisonment of five MPs and two peers and the resignation of the Commons Speaker. The scandal also killed off Prime Minister Gordon Brown's chances of returning for a second term of office in 2010. Emma Crewe and Andrew Walker's account of the episode is the best yet.Footnote 80 An extraordinary scandal combines an insider's account (Walker worked in the Fees Office in parliament) with an anthropologist's insights on how people behave in institutional contexts, a skill which Crewe has already put to good use in two highly original studies of parliamentarians.Footnote 81 Combining interviews (mainly anonymous) with those caught up in the scandal together with a close reconstruction of events, Crewe and Walker document how parliament came to be seen as public enemy number one.
Historically and compared to other countries, MPs in Britain have never been well paid. By the 1970s and 1980s, the disparity between the salaries of MPs and those of other professions had grown significantly.Footnote 82 Rather than hike up MPs’ pay at a time when belts were being tightened in the public sector, parliament extended the system of ‘Additional Cost Allowances’ to cover a whole range of out-goings associated with residing both in London and in the MPs’ constituency. In theory, MPs at the turn of the millennium could command a gross parliamentary income of £160,000 should they have chosen to compound their take home pay with their allowance. ACAs were lightly regulated by the parliament's Fees Office. Without slipping into investigative Watergate-style journalism, Crewe and Walker vividly capture the slow-burning drama that unfolded. They describe how the ‘ingredients of a perfect storm’ fell into place. Indefatigable reporters pounced on the Freedom of Information Act of 2000 to probe into parliamentary accounting. Then in 2007, in one of its final acts, Tony Blair's government supported a review that recommended a significant increase in MPs’ salaries and allowances. By the early summer of 2008, the persistence of the journalists paid off. The High Court ruled that all the relevant records must be released, just as the financial crisis of the autumn of 2008 broke. In April 2009, The Daily Telegraph secured a complete unredacted version of all the expenses claims, and for the next few months revelations about the dubious doings of MPs flooded the media.
An extraordinary scandal is sympathetic in tone. The authors intend neither an attack nor a defence of the culture of the Commons. Parliament does emerge as not only uncooperative, but also blind to the wider public mood, particularly once the recession kicked in. At the same time, Crewe and Walker are wary of a ‘cartoon version’ of MPs simply in it for themselves (that does not stop them including cartoons that reproduce such stereotypes). They offer some larger explanations of why the expenses affair tipped out of control. In modern times, they suggest, MPs are more under the spotlight, with less deference shown towards public figures. Echoing older work on ‘the rise of the career politician’, they point out that parliament is more of a vocation nowadays than a pro bono service, yet it has not been remunerated as such.Footnote 83 And they argue that the electorate hold unrealistic expectations of their MPs, assuming they are no different from anyone else, but also holding them to higher standard of probity. The expenses scandal, An extraordinary scandal concludes, simply caught out MPs who ‘were mainly guilty of ordinarily trying to do a decent job and in many cases getting into a spectacular ethical muddle’. Above all, they stress reassuringly, ‘examples of corruption in the last one hundred years are relatively rare’.
At one level, this is incontestable. The Victorians did a good job of cleansing the Commons of ‘old corruption’, mainly by clamping down on malpractice at elections.Footnote 84 They made it easier for the poor but worthy to enter parliament by abolishing the property qualification in 1858, and they rid parliament of the rich and feckless by barring bankrupts in 1871.Footnote 85 They also inherited a long list of people not eligible to stand for parliament. Even the encyclopaedic Erskine May complained of there being far too many ‘special disqualifications’ to enumerate, most of them connected with holding an office of profit under the crown.Footnote 86 By convention, MPs were also supposed to refrain from involvement in any parliamentary business in which they had a ‘pecuniary’ interest, and by an act of 1782 they were also prevented from being government contractors. However, there was never any compulsion to declare possible conflicts of interest or patronage, besides the inconvenience until 1926 of having to stand for re-election if appointed to ministerial office. Parliament policed itself throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, only relinquishing one of its judicial roles, the trial of controverted elections, to the courts (in 1868). The archaic rules on disqualification and contracting were not modernized until 1957. There was no listing of MPs’ outside interests until an informal ‘register’ was introduced in 1974.Footnote 87
In other words, historians are not in a position to say as yet whether MPs always followed the public interest ahead of their own. The limited research that has been undertaken on, for example, MPs and railway companies in the 1840s, or MPs with banking backgrounds in the 1880s and 1890s, reveals examples of what would now be called ‘insider trading’ or ‘log-rolling’.Footnote 88 We also know from other datasets and longitudinal studies that MPs with direct links to slavery and to large landed estates featured in parliament over several generations, and that single families monopolized the representation of some constituencies across three centuries.Footnote 89 The motive for private enrichment at public expense certainly existed, but were the opportunities taken? Moreover, the conventions of virtual representation demanded that members of parliament had close connections with the ‘interests’ that they represented. None of this means that corruption has a long history. Rather, it shows that more detailed analysis of MPs’ networks and their personal assets across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is necessary.
VIII
With the 2016 Brexit referendum, Britain seemed to put parliamentary representation on hold. Not only did parliament defer to the electorate in mandating the UK government over the future of Britain's membership of the European Union, but throughout the drawn-out discussions over the terms of Britain's withdrawal, parliament had to fight for its right to deliberate, requiring two rulings by the Supreme Court to ensure that MPs and peers had their say.Footnote 90 The Brexit crisis raised fundamental issues about where sovereignty lies in the British constitution, at what point direct democracy trumps delegated representation. Although not lacking a history of its own, the referendum in British politics has always seemed a marginal cause.Footnote 91 Now it has entered centre-stage. A new genre of academic punditry – a kind of ‘Brexpertise’ – has emerged to explain the crisis, particularly its constitutional aspects.Footnote 92 Two recent examples are Matt Qvortrup's collection of essays on referendums across history and around the world, and Andrew Blick's monograph, an insider's account of the Brexit crisis combined with a review of blueprints for constitutional reform across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Qvortrup observes that although ‘Europe is clearly in the grip of a sort of referendum mania’, referendums have a long history. He goes as far to dig out some from mid-sixteenth-century France, although the evidence is scanty. His book is on firmer ground in its description of the plebiscitary democracies that emerged in the new republics of France and the USA, but even here he skates over the citizens’ initiatives built into the constitutions of individual states such as Massachusetts, Kansas, and California. In the twentieth century, authoritarian regimes briefly appropriated the plebiscite. But Qvortrup shows how since the Second World War the referendum has become a common device in a variety of political situations. He offers some pertinent case-studies, such as Switzerland, and the long list of referendums in EU member states since 1972. Despite drawing on a large global dataset, there are some gaps. India has had six referendums since 1947, but none of them are mentioned, nor are any of the referendums that accompanied independence in other parts of the Commonwealth in the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 93 And for all the breadth of knowledge on display, Qvortrup's conclusions are lightweight. Brexit was a rational choice: people wanted sovereignty more than economic security. The rage for referendums, he suggests, reflects both populism and partisan dealignment (i.e. a more volatile electorate). Referendums are welcome as a dose of direct democracy, we are told, but beware ‘cynical’ politicians who use them to their advantage.
Stretching the constitution is a more substantial account of Brexit and its effects on parliament and other parts of the British political system. Blick likens Brexit to a ‘shock’, a term normally used by economists or earth scientists to explain irreversible structural change, although here the analogy is to a ‘self-inflicted wound’, like sticking a finger in a plug-socket. The first part of the book offers a detailed reconstruction of the Brexit debates in parliament before and after the Brexit vote. Blick draws on his own experiences in the Prime Minister's Office in 1999 and as a Commons researcher a decade or so later. A diligent sifter of statutes, committees, and memoranda (several of which are reproduced in the volume), he concludes that parliament went ahead with the referendum without ‘sufficient attention being devoted to its constitutional aspects’. These included, amongst others, its different impact across the four nations of the UK, free-for-all ‘remain’ and ‘leave’ campaigns that did not abide by the same rules as normal elections, and the confusion over whether the referendum result would be binding or subject to further consideration by parliament. The moral of the story is a familiar one: Brexit has exposed the fatal consequences of Britain lacking a written constitution.
In the rest of his book, Blick attempts to make good this deficiency by providing a digest of over a century of attempted reforms of the Westminster model: a constitution-in-waiting as it were. The parade of proposals includes most of the great and good: the Webbs on a ‘socialist commonwealth’, John St Loe Strachey on the referendum, Harold Laski on a more expert civil service, Bernard Crick on specialist committees and improved parliamentary research services, John Mackintosh on devolution, and Ivor Jennings on a European ‘federal union’. There are some odd choices too. Edward Goldsmith, the ecologist, is in, but not his younger brother James, whose Referendum party of the early 1990s was a key catalyst in the road to Brexit. There is Anthony Barnett's scheme of Lords Reform of 1999, but not the much more influential Charter 88 (of which Barnett was a founding member). Winston Churchill's suggestion of an ‘economic sub-parliament’ in June 1930 is discussed, without reference to Oswald Mosley's controversial plan for corporate government outlined earlier that same year. Room is found for H. G. Wells and Tony Benn on technology and constitutional innovation, but no space is given to the Speaker's Conference on Digital Democracy which reported in 2015 and which has already reaped dividends (for example, free online access to Hansard).
It is unclear how any of these proposals would have saved Britain from the ‘shock’ of Brexit. Few of the federal schemes outlined in Stretching the constitution would have interfered with the sovereignty of the Westminster parliament in the same way as membership of the European Union. Most of the proposals for referendums aimed at responding to legislation, not initiating it, as Brexit did. Many of the elaborate schemes for electoral reform described here were advocated during wartime, when normal democracy was suspended and inventive minds could dream of utopian solutions. Finally, the piecemeal tradition of procedural reform of the Commons and Lords recommended by Blick – for example, specialist standing committees, improved information services – is one that has always been within the capacity of parliament to implement, as the case-studies in the Erskine May volume attest.
One problem with parliamentary democracy that Blick's book is right to foreground is the creeping power of the executive. The Victorians convinced themselves that theirs was a ‘parliamentary government’. By the 1930s, that boast seemed hollow, and Laski and others lamented its demise. ‘Cabinet government’ seemed more apposite by the 1950s, to be superseded by ‘prime ministerial government’ in the early 1970s, before that too became redefined as the ‘presidentialization’ of the premiership twenty years later, around the time that Tony Blair came to power.Footnote 94 Here perhaps lies the real the shock of Brexit. As Blick notes, it was New Labour's Political Parties, Elections, and Referendums Act of 2000 that laid the foundations for the Brexit vote. No mention was made in that act about the role of parliament, nor was anything said about whether the outcome of the referendum would be binding. However, the advice given to Blair by the act's architect, Lord Nairne, was clear, and reflected the same course of action taken in the earlier vote on British membership of the European Economic Community in 1975. The fate of the referendum lay in the hands of the government of the day, with or without the consent of parliament.Footnote 95 The executive would decide. As Qvortrup points out, most governments win referendums of which they are the master. Brexit turned out differently, but the moral was the same. Not so much the triumph of the people's will over their elected representatives, as the reassertion of executive control over the legislature. As the UK battles against the pandemic, that control has been extended through the introduction of emergency powers usually reserved for wartime (the Coronavirus Act), a development repeated elsewhere across Europe and beyond.Footnote 96 Two centuries on from the emergence of legislative democracy around the world, much has changed, but the struggle over where sovereign power lies remains.
IX
Whilst the future of parliament is unclear, amidst the twin-shocks of Brexit and the pandemic, the history of parliamentary representation in the modern era is in good shape. We now know more about individual MPs and constituencies than ever before. The digitization of the records of parliament is expediting the kind of longitudinal analysis which was impossible back in the 1960s and 1970s. And the intellectual history and public policy literature around the idea of representation is enjoying a renaissance. Older interpretive paradigms still lurk, especially an obsession with ‘democratization’. There is also a tendency to view parliament mainly as an arena of partisanship rather than a legislative institution; and an insular prejudice that sets the British experience apart from the rest of Europe. In their different ways, these ten volumes show a discipline in a state of healthy flux, ripe and ready both for a new generation of research and a new synthesis of approach.
Open access
