Natural Governing Parties

Conservatives are remarkably similar these days -- on both sides of the Atlantic. Andy Beckett writes in The Guardian:

"Politics is sometimes … about finding out how to change the rules of the game,” wrote the Anglo-American political philosopher Raymond Geuss in 2008. The Conservatives are often good at this exercise. Despite rarely being very popular, competent or full of ideas, they’ve managed to stay in office for the last 10 years through a variety of unconventional manoeuvres: forming a coalition with the Liberal Democrats; changing the electoral cycle with the Fixed-term Parliaments Act; avoiding a hostile House of Commons by illegally proroguing parliament; and, most important of all, by calling a rare and risky referendum on EU membership, losing it, and then siding with the winners.

All this manoeuvring has been made easier by the fact that the Conservatives are seen as Britain’s natural rulers, even by many of their enemies. The Tory reputation for pragmatism – you could call it shamelessness – also helps them. To much of rightwing Britain, an acceptable version of Conservatism is whatever Conservative governments say it is.

It's that assumption that conservatives are a natural governing elite that is central to the problems we face -- because the unspoken corollary is that the system can't be changed:

The usual response from non-Tories to such brazen gaming of our political system is to feel appalled, frustrated or helpless – or to argue that Britain needs a more watertight constitution, which would supposedly make such manipulation impossible. But creating a constitution that constrains Britain’s most powerful party is an ambitious goal. In the shorter term, liberals and leftists might be better off taking on board the Conservatives’ insight that the current political system is malleable, and make some alterations to it of their own.

Sometimes the system does change:

Very occasionally, non-Tory governments have done that. In 1911, after a Tory-dominated House of Lords had blocked the Liberal chancellor David Lloyd George’s radically redistributive 1909 “people’s budget”, his government pushed through the Parliament Act, which removed the Lords’ power to veto legislation.

Decades later, Tony Blair’s government was the first Labour one to enact many significant constitutional reforms: removing most hereditary peers from the Lords, introducing proportional representation for European elections, and devolving power to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and a handful of elected mayors. All of these were welcome erosions of the old, centralised, often Tory-friendly way of doing things. But the beneficiaries have often been parties other than Labour. The SNP used devolution – and the 2014 independence referendum granted by the Conservatives – to become Scotland’s dominant party, at Labour’s expense. And the most powerful politician Blair’s devolution has produced is the former mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

In the US, another country with a political system that the right has gamed for decades, there’s more awareness among leftists and centrists that this has taken place, and more readiness to consider aggressive responses, such as expanding the Senate and supreme court to reduce their conservative biases. The existing political rules have lost much of their legitimacy: even the Economist magazine, usually cautiously centrist in its US coverage, argued in 2018 that American democracy had become a “tyranny of the minority”, with “a built-in bias towards rural Republicans”. It’s harder to imagine an establishment publication here being prepared to say that our political system is tilted too far rightwards. Believing that we do democracy fairly – which for many Britons means allowing the left an occasional win – is still an ingrained national habit.

We have reached the point when "natural governing parties" must be sent to the dustbin of history.

Image: Triumph IAS