How Democratic is the British Political System

[p017] HOW DEMOCRATIC IS THE BRITISH POLITICAL SYSTEM ? Parliament may be “the central point”, as Mr. Bevan writes, but it is only one of the stones in the government structure. The rest of the institutions making up our political system—the House of Lords, the Monarchy, the State Church, the swollen bureaucracy, the police, M.I.5, the judicial system, the Army, and the Big Business press have incomparably less claim to democratic functions. The House of Lords—that non-elected chamber com- posed in the vast majority of landlords and industrial magnates—survives in our government like a vermiform appendix bequeathed from feudalism. As Mr. Bevan knows, “political discussions in the House of Lords are concen- trated expressions of group prejudice” (p. 101). He warns against new dangers which may emanate from this obsolete Upper House as the result of the nationalisations. “It has become the practice to make the chairman of the Boards of nationalised industries peers. Thus you have a gradual concentration of economic power in the House of Lords”. (p. 99). Labour certainly did not intend to disperse the power of the monopolists in order to substitute “a gradual concentration of economic power” among titled bureaucrats. Mr. Bevan reveals that “if a member of the House of Commons wishes to question any part of the administration of a nationalised industry, he must write to one of their lordships, and if he is not satisfied, he cannot raise the issue in the House of Commons.” (p. 99). Thus we learn from him that neither the workers nor their political 15

[p018] representatives are masters of the nationalised industries. they must petition like humble tenants for an administrative accounting—which their Lordships are not required to give! The Tories want to “strengthen the Second Chamber under the respectable guise of ‘reforming’ it,” (p. 100) says Mr. Bevan. As a first step they propose to restore the University Seats. Mr. Bevan is rightly opposed to this “retreat from democracy” and insists that well enough be let alone. “Our present political institutions are adequate for all our purposes.” (p. 102). But a thoroughgoing democracy would quickly do away with this useless and potentially dangerous assembly of landlords and industrial magnates, in favour of a single House with unrestricted legislative powers. Above the House of Lords rises the Throne. This hereditary and expensive relic of mediaevalism can equally well be pensioned off and dispensed with, despite Churchill’s creed that an ideal democracy must wear a crown on its head. In times of stress the monarchy, too, can become a rallying point for reactionary forces, as our revolutionary forebears found out. We hold with them that, to be really democratic, a people’s government must be a republic. In other republics the Church is separated from the State; the two are not joined together as in England. The fusion of Church and State today characterises the most reactionary of regimes, such as the undisguised dictatorships of Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal. Of course, the official church in Britain does not play the same sinister role in England as in those Catholic countries, but the state support it enjoys cannot be justified on any democratic grounds. Cabinets and governments may come and go, but the high civil servants remain from one administration to the next. These bureaucrats constantly increase in numbers and in powers as the state intervenes in more and more spheres _ and expands its functions. This conservatised section of the government machinery, full of prejudices against Labour, will surely have to be renovated from top to bottom 16

[p019] and subjected to constant check and control by the working class before it can be considered halfway democratic. The State is more than Parliament, the House of Lords, the Monarchy and the civil servants; it also includes the Jawcourts, the police and the prisons. These form part of the organised apparatus of compulsion at the disposal of the ruling class. The courts and the police are not only used against striking workers, as the dockers can testify. They also help to enforce all the sacred rights of capitalist property such as the right to extract wealth from the labour of the working class and spend it without regard for the welfare of society. This kind of force, to be sure, is considered lawful under the present system. But is it just ? And is it used justly ? And what relation has it to democracy ? “A free press is an essential condition for the functioning of a democracy,” (p. 165) writes Mr. Bevan. He then goes on to demonstrate with facts and figures how unfree the press is today. He points out that the capitalist United States “with one-fifteenth of the world’s population, con- sumed in 1950 well over two-thirds of the world newsprint supplies. It had increased its average pre-war consumption per head by 50 per cent, while the United Kingdom suffered a decrease of more than 50 per cent ... Over the past year the price of paper has gone up' 100 per cent .. . the consequences of all this for Britain are further aggravated by the concentration of newspaper ownership in fewer hands and by the huge circulation of the national dailies and weeklies.” (pp. 164-5). He concludes that “these figures bear no other inter- pretation than that democracy is being strangled more effectively by the normal operations of the capitalist system than by the military threat of Soviet Communism.” (p. 165). This is a harsh, but true, verdict. Our avenues of informa- tion are choked and poisoned by the monopolies exercised over the press by the American billionaires and the British © publishing magnates. Consequently, says Mr. Bevan, “the British people have never been less informed about what 17

[p020] is happening in the rest of the world.” (p. 166). One of the matters on which they are most uninformed— or misinformed—is the overseas activities of Britain’s armed forces and the real attitude of the colonial peoples toward their intervention. This professional army conscripted by Act of Parliament is now engaged in slaughtering the in- habitants of Korea, Malaya, Egypt and Africa, who want for themselves a few of the freedoms so eloquently lauded in Britain. As the British High Commissioner, General Templer, has just called to our attention in Malaya, this “democratic” army is being used as the most brutal instru- _ ment for colonial subjugation and as an international police force for imperialism. Two conclusions can.be drawn from this brief survey of British democracy as it actually exists. First, this demo- cracy retains some extremely antiquated features and undemocratic institutions. Second, even in the purely political sphere it is very remote from perfection. Many more moves will have to be taken to purify its nature and a wide gulf will have to be crossed before this restricted democracy, in which the capitalists and imperialists exercise their dictatorship behind the scenes, cedes before a genuine democracy of the working class.