His Majesty King Blair I

There’s something about war that does wonders for a nation’s international profile.

The United Kingdom is presently basking in the global spotlight in a way not seen since 1945. From Wellington to Washington, Darfur to Damascus, if Prime Minister Tony Blair’s enigmatically evangelical profile isn’t beaming from your television screens, chances are you’ve spied him shuttling through your locale.

Thanks to Blair’s assertive (or, if you prefer, subservient) role in Washington’s “war on terror”, Great Britain is up to its merry old tricks. The interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq may not have been imperial by design, but in Britain’s case, their legitimacy and attraction spring from a system well schooled in imperial ambition and perfectly suited to the task.

Britain is good at being “Great”, not so great at being “normal”, “average” or “humble”. A whole bargain bin-full of commentators have noted how, since helping save the world and thereby losing an Empire, the four nations of Britain have struggled to establish a new role for themselves. Having a war to fight, standing “shoulder-to-shoulder” with Washington, allows Britain to slip back into a neat-fitting, comfortable old jacket. Riddled with mothballs, sure, but dashingly handsome.

The trouble is, the natives are playing up. Blair’s globetrotting buoyancy belies a complicated and at times bizarre domestic strife. As ever fewer voters bother to turnout at the polls, more people took to the streets in protest at the Iraq intervention than ever before in Britain’s protracted history. Now several Members of Parliament (MPs) have joined forces with a collection of not-completely-brain-dead celebrities and tabled a motion for Blair’s impeachment. Baroness Helena Kennedy, a member of Blair’s party and leading human rights lawyer, explains how “Bush – who isn’t strong on the detail of the British constitution – treated [Blair] as President of Britain and Blair, reacting to that, made undertakings that weren’t his to make in a system of Cabinet government and that committed him to subsequent actions.”

openDemocracy writers assess the political character of Tony Blair and the political culture of his country:

Chris Abbott & John Sloboda, “The ‘Blair doctrine’ and after: five years of humanitarian intervention” (April 2004)

Godfrey Hodgson, “A comedy of errors: Tony Blair and America” (April 2004)

Helena Kennedy & Anthony Sampson, “What’s going wrong with Britain?” (May 2004)

Stuart Weir, “Democracy? Yes!” (July 2004)

“One nation under Blair: David Marquand interviewed” (September 2004)

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The “hidden wiring” of Britain’s ghostly constitution is once more of global interest. By accident, though with impeccable timing, Tony Blair’s 21st century, Washington-induced, combative top-of-the-world status is exposing the queer heart of British democracy.

Queer in the old-fashioned sense, of course. With British democracy, everything is old-fashioned. Despite American protestation, Britain claims the envied title of “world’s most geriatric democracy”. No less a statesman than Winston Churchill designated the deceptively diminutive House of Commons “the shrine of the world’s liberties”. In the “Mother of all Parliaments”, as the gothic Palace of Westminster is affectionately known, grown men parade about in elaborate wigs, snappy garters and eye-catching silk stockings. One of them goes by the name “Black Rod” and nobody bats an eyelid.

More than a president

As I collected thoughts for this article, Tony Blair was playing power-host to the new Palestinian prime minister, personally presiding over the fate of peace in the middle east.

Before that, Blair was saving Africa. Before saving Africa, he was saving the planet from climate meltdown. Before saving the planet, he was liberating Iraq. Before liberating Iraq, he was buzzing about on a whistle-stop post-9/11 international tour whipping up support for Washington’s war plans, holding together the fragile international community. He has helped save the Kosovans and successfully invaded Sierra Leone. Then there’s the forever tricky issue of Europe, within which Blair hopes to stake his place in history. As well as fathering babies, and governing a country, he’s also trying to bring the Olympics to London.

Blair is forever being described as “presidential”. Many American commentators, like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, have openly expressed their desire to see Tony Blair take up office in the White House. In the build-up to the US elections, a website was set up to promote Tony’s candidacy, www.blair2004.com. Unlike his predecessors, Blair holds mock-American press conferences – just him, a lectern, the Downing Street press corps, and, as a nauseating prop, a mug of milky tea to remind the electorate he’s hopelessly British. Sometimes Blair holds these Q&A; sessions in the Downing Street Rose Garden, prompting an existential crisis for Her Majesty’s 60 million British subjects.

But Blair is not presidential – this is a category mistake. Every American president envies the sweeping, scarcely opposed powers of the British Prime Minister. A president is subject to the kind of official checks and balances Blair has nightmares about. Blair’s powers are royal – not least in his use of the royal prerogative (“Ooh what a giveaway!”). His is more an absolutist than a feudal royalism, hence his current sympathy for King John. There is no formal separation of powers in UK. As the head of the executive the British prime minister leads the majority party in the legislature. And with that taken care of, he now barely bothers to show up. Busy as a beaver in Africa, Iraq, Palestine and Washington, Blair only attends between 6% and 8% of House of Commons votes. Parliament, able in theory to hold the prime minister to account, is treated as the irrelevance it is. Blair puts in the occasional appearance in the same way one makes the odd obligatory effort to see one’s gran.

Less than a democracy

This all transpires because Britain’s government acts as the Crown-in-Parliament. With the Crown (Queen Elizabeth II) unwelcome in the Commons chamber, her Government has inherited the ancient sovereign power to make and unmake law virtually at will (so long as it carries her signature). “Mr Blair has built the most centralised top-down system of government seen in peacetime in Britain since we had absolute Monarchs who believed they had a divine right to rule,” complains Leader of the Opposition Michael Howard. Well, he should know. Howard served under the mercurial Margaret Thatcher, who came to believe that to disagree with her was treason. Royalism now goes with the office.

As a matter of routine, Blair is condemned by opponents for making “a mockery of Parliament”. But his behaviour is entirely appropriate. The Prime Minister is using the powers of his office to full effect. He can do so because in actuality his office doesn’t exist, at least not in law. The powers of the Office of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom are as unwritten and open to exploitation as its informal constitution. Instead of the scope and reach of his powers being set out in a document, Blair can make up his job as he goes along, stretching convention to its limit, and beyond. The same goes for the entirety of Britain’s constitutional architecture. It is part “Black Rod” and part Tony Blair.

At once, Britain’s democracy is ancient and new, ritual and innovation, tradition and novelty. Its strangest feature is that by its nature all change is unprecedented yet everything is precedent. “The King is dead! Long live the King!” So goes Britain’s democratic history.

All this is so unclear that its chief practitioners can get away with yet more absurd mystifications. In a recent speech, adopting the well-worn and utterly stomach-turning “I’m just a regular guy” approach, Tony Blair likened his relationship with the British electorate to a marriage. “A lot of it is about me,” Blair said, surprising no one. “And it’s not a bad idea to think of it in terms of it being like any relationship: you, the British people and me, the person you chose as your Prime Minister.”

It gets worse.

“[A] thousand little things … irritate and grate, and then all of a sudden there you are, the British people, thinking ‘you’re not listening’ and I think ‘you’re not hearing me’. And before you know it you raise your voice. I raise mine. Some of you throw a bit of crockery. And now you, the British people, have to sit down and decide whether you want the relationship to continue.”

Not only is this yucky in the extreme, it’s barely honest. The British people never chose Tony Blair as their Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is a focal point for the electorate – his face is slapped across the billboards – but he is appointed by the Queen and selected by his party and his colleagues. Blair’s ruling Labour Party won a mere 40.7% of the vote in 2001. This translated as a monstrous 179-seat majority in Britain’s unbalanced parliament.

And this is where it gets truly frightening. Turnout at the election was just 59.4%. More people didn’t vote than voted for a Labour party that now wields untrammelled power over the entire history of Britain’s laws and the rights of its people.

This is unprecedented. Blair’s power, his party’s power, comes barely without limit, nor democratic consent. Never in the history of British democracy have more people chosen not to vote than voted for the resulting government. And the signs all point to turnout further dropping in the future.

Added to this, with his (strangely ill-defined) modernism, Blair has an unfettered contempt for “the system”. In practice, this means doing away with or plain ignoring all those “gentlemanly institutions” – the 19th century Civil Service, the hereditary Monarchy and Lords, the Army, the City, the legal establishment and the established Church – which historically acted as Great Britain’s form of checks and balances. The sense that executive power had gotten out of control began in the 1980s with Margaret “Iron Lady” Thatcher and led to the formation of popular and powerful campaigns for reform. But Blair is worse. Worse because he is not a Tory, and therefore not ultimately bound, like Thatcher, to the strictures of the establishment. His party drinks from the well of socialist centralisation, statist power and interventionist government. Blair is using established powers to push through his own “radical” monopolistic brand of royalism.

The wackiness and mystery of Britain’s constitutional democracy is exciting and fun until you realise there’s nothing to protect you from its absolutism. Governments use the logic of “unprecedented” to tighten their iron grip on the machinery of power. Proponents of reform must ask themselves whether one government’s iron grip is so “unprecedented” as to warrant a wholesale restructuring of the machinery.

Driving without rules

Britain is reluctant to have this debate with itself, and in some ways that’s perfectly understandable. For starters, the nation doesn’t do this kind of thing very well – to discuss oneself is a little too French. The British public cherish their privacy, not public debates. And as Lord Rees-Mogg suggests, with no single constitutional document, “we lack the culture of constitutional debate that is characteristic of the United States.” Except… Well, there was Putney, of course. And as novelist and former advisor to the Thatcher governments Ferdinand Mount has shown, Britain’s constitutional debate was once vigorous and proud, though put to sleep in the 1920s. Now, in Mount’s words: “The language of constitutional debate has atrophied and we have been left floundering in a world of pure pragmatism.”

In comparative terms, Britain’s has been a successful, peaceful history – and without doubt its adaptable, uncontested constitutional arrangement has something to do with this. Why change a system that has spawned such good fortune? And exactly which other nation would Britain ever seek to emulate? After enjoying what, in a 1997 constitutional debate in the Commons, former Prime Minister John Major affectionately called “one thousand years of British tradition”, should the people of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland really want to root their identities in the State? It’s hard to imagine. To have clung to liberty through ages of fascism, communism and revolution is a priceless achievement. For all the upheaval of the last 300 years, Britain’s political skeleton has remained pretty much unchanged.

On the other hand, the world’s best constitutions, from the United States to Germany to South Africa, were designed and inspired by Brits. There’s something about Britain, as George Orwell noted (helping to explain its appetite for Empire), that makes it a great exporter, but instinctively conservative about its internal composition.

No surprise for a nation that (in its English incarnation) recognised a writ of Habeas Corpus in the 12th century and established Magna Carta in 1215. Except – only in the last week, a hastily contrived Prevention of Terrorism Bill has threatened exactly those founding guarantors of liberty. Magna Carta “started the process by which royal power was delivered to the people,” explains leading human rights lawyer Geoffrey Bindman. Only to be reclaimed by Ministers of the Crown 800 years later? “Such arbitrary justice by a liberal modern state is wholly unsound”, wrote an apoplectic Simon Jenkins in the Times. Well, yes – but is the British state liberal and modern?

We are left with several curious anomalies. Blair, the one-time liberal lawyer, is now the royal authority who says, “Considerations of national security have to come before civil liberties, no matter how important those civil liberties are.” But as his terror bill suffers massive defeat in the House of Lords, and even his former Lord Chancellor and one-time mentor and boss Lord Irvine votes against him, it’s clear Blair has cut too deep and hit a raw nerve. The British spirit doesn’t go for divine right. The last bloke who really went for this idea got his head chopped off. Though whether the Lords is preserving the ancient interpretation and flexibility of Britain’s order or proving it’s time for something new is not quite clear.

The key question, and the reason this now matters so much, is this: what, in the 21st-first century, is the best guarantee of upholding Britain’s ancient liberties? The antique system that has allowed liberty its breathing space? Or, now that archaic system is so professionally abused, a new settlement that secures and codifies those liberties?

I’ve written this piece on the assumption that Britain will hold a general election in May. But this is just a guess. As there are no real rules, a British government can call an election whenever it fancies. By coincidence, this tends to be when the economy is booming, the polls look good, a national sports team is in the ascendancy, or a member of the opposition has been found in bed with a sheep.

The word in the Russian parliament is that the British public will have their say on 5 May. But it’s not our call. It’s King Blair’s.