The British Constitution
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘The British Constitution’
A rowdy but good-humoured crowd gathered in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to protest against electoral malpractice and Government cronyism.
As the Nineteenth Century opened, workers in England’s rapidly growing industrial centres were driving national prosperity. But they had few MPs to represent them, electoral malpractice was rife and most of them were not allowed to vote anyway. The feeling that Government was a hostile enemy from whom neither justice nor sympathy could be expected was only confirmed in August 1819.
Politicians who demand that everyone in the country unite behind their vision of society are standing in the way of real progress.
In the 1680s, many feared that after Charles II died his brother James would take England and Scotland into a European league of Roman Catholic kingdoms, led by Louis XIV of France. Algernon Sidney could not see how countries and peoples so diverse could possibly require the same laws, or how anyone would think such hidebound uniformity could lead to progress.
Chinese merchant Lien Chi tells a colleague that English liberties have little to do with elections, taxes and regulations.
In a fictional ‘letter’, supposedly by Chinese merchant Lien Chi, Oliver Goldsmith argued that England felt more free than other countries because minor transgressions were winked at until they become too great for safety. On the Continent they maybe had simpler laws and more democracy, but they also had more meddlesome, self-righteous and prying governments.
If officials in the Raj ever forgot who their boss was, they would bring the whole government down about their ears.
In Kipling’s short story, Aurelian McGoggin, a British bureaucrat, has been boring everyone in Shimla with his conviction that there is neither God nor Hereafter, so we can only worry along somehow for the good of Humanity. In a tongue-in-cheek aside, Kipling gave a Raj-shaped twist to an argument that had been made by political thinkers from Moses to Alexis de Tocqueville.
Events in Italy and Austria seemed to be bringing the day ever closer when a European democracy would vote herself into oblivion.
The United Kingdom is not a simple democracy; she is a democratic and parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Just as well, thought Irish historian and Unionist MP William Lecky. The kind of democracy they had on the Continent pandered to grievance groups, extremists and slick campaign strategists, and he feared it would soon become a screen for dictatorship.
As William Lecky watched the rapid spread of socialism across the European Continent, he was struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu.
For William Lecky, a contemporary of Karl Marx, ‘Socialism’ meant a politics in which the things that were properly the responsibility of individuals and families were snatched away and dictated by the supposedly wiser Government. Such a politics, he said, was no different to the tyrannies of the past; it merely replaced the arrogance of king or sultan with the arrogance of the politburo.