The British Political System, by Andre Mathiot British Pressure Groups. Their Role in Relation to the House of Commons, by D.M. Stewart Anonymous Empire, by S.E. Finer

[p033] The British Political System, by André Mathiot (Hogarth Press, 30s.) British Pressure Groups. Their Role in Relation to the House of Commons, by D. M. Stewart (Oxford University Press, 30s.) Anonymous Empire, by S. E. Finer (Pall Mall Press, 12s. 6d.) André Mathiot is a reputable French academic political scientist. Envy and admiration have spurred him to ask why British governments are so much more stable than French ones. His answer is a readable and interesting popular course for Workers’ Educational Association classes on ‘British democ- racy’. Its foundations are the metaphysics of Morrison and Butler. This is not to be insulting. Mathiot explains how the two- party system over-represents the majority. This provides a firm basis for the Cabinet. The Cabinet takes control of Parliament—hence firm government. Like Voltaire’s Candide, Mathiot sees the world of British politics as the best of all possible worlds, and all is for the best in it. But platitudes really will not do. They obscure the assumptions on which they rest. Why is the two-party system stable, and why has it frozen all but the two parties out for the last thirty years? Because, says our Candide, Britain is lucky in having no dogmatic Conservatives. Because Britons have an inherent love of freedom. Because Britain is socially homogeneous. Because the monarchy ‘is important as an institution which, in a singular combination of dignity and familiarity, personifies the entire history of a nation proud of their glorious past’. These phrases explain nothing. It ought to be the scientist’s job to provide a basis for forecasting the future. Mathiot has not a word to say about the future of British parliamentarism (I do not use the question-begging word ‘democracy’ in this connexion). For instance, what about the Tory and Marxist critics of the British system? How can it come about that the Economist can write: ‘It has long been clear that the House is not making sensible use of its time. This has repelled the able and left the dull, and the silting up of the House with the dull has made it duller still’ (February 8, 1958)? Mathiot has no comment. Yet he himself points to the next step in the analysis— without realizing it. We ask what the future holds for this machine of government, encrusted with tradition and manned by incompetents. ‘On most major political issues there are no really fundamental differences .... In the course of centuries they have become tolerant.’ And he goes on to argue that the apparatus of each of the two parties curbs its ‘wild men’ and thus contributes to the compromise of parliamentary rule. It seems that no one has told him about the régime in the Labour Party, about Transport House’s lists A and B. How does this square with the ‘inherent love of freedom’? And what if extreme measures are necessary? What if Britain faces a situation in which mutual toleration and com- promise no longer permit problems to be even shelved, let alone solved? What if the employers say that wages and social services must be cut, and the people say that they must stay as they are? 62 July-August 1959 Again, what if the Daily Post-Bag out-shouts the Daily Reflector, and the Tories get another majority by trickery? Will that be a stable government when the people take action outside Parliament? Or, the better variant, when Labour gets. back with a big majority, what if the workers reject wage restraint at the hands of Wilson? In other words, what will happen when the two-party alchemy is no longer able to keep the decisive forces of the country from participating in politics? It would be contrary to all experience if there were not huge: new movements at a time when the employers are on the offensive against the workers. When the women workers, the youth, the middle class—the hitherto silent people—raise their voices will they always go home quietly and leave it all to the two-party system to patch up a bargain which irritates the workers without satisfying the employers? Once perhaps, but never again. And in these days to come no one will be more horrified than the Fabians, the purveyors of ‘democratic’ commonplaces, whose lectures lull the public into ignoring their future in times of social peace. Bourgeois democracy can exist nowadays only so long as the parties of the Left screen the parties of the Right, only so long as they damp down instead of organizing the political feeling of the inexperienced masses of the people. British parliamentarism has enjoyed fifty years of stability not because it is mystically endowed with strength through age, but because British capitalism has not yet declined as far as French capitalism; and equally important, British parliamentarism has more efficiently papered over the cracks. v Stewart’s book studies a very limited field and a peripheral one. Nuffield College seems to have thought worthy of two years’ study how the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals or the Lord’s Day Observance Society exert pressure on MPs. The book leaves out practically everything that serious students of politics would like to know. It says nothing about how the outlook of the MPs themselves, or of the higher administrators, is formed, or how the latter are selected to take responsible decisions. Surely the targets of pressure are relevant to the study? ; The book does not mention the Iron and Steel Federation, the Engineering Employers’ Federation or the Catholic hier- archy. It expressly warns: “This is a study of proper, recognized activities. There is nothing written here of the underhand’. Perhaps the author was right not to mention the struggles which determine really important policy decisions, but the result is to study the pettiest small change of the parliamentary game. Vv The best thing about Finer’s book is its title. It is not what it claims to be, a study of the ‘lobby’ in Britain. It is a very naive study of some superficial aspects of the representation in Parliament of special interests within capitalist society. The important questions about what goes on behind the scenes in Parliament require serious thought; this in turn requires a serious method of study. Professor Finer offers a table in which he has listed alphabetically the members of the 1955 Parliament, citing against each one or more organizations with which he has some relationship, and what the relationship is. For instance, one man appears as related to the National Council of Labour Colleges in the relation of voluntary tutor! This is where ‘research’ based on the social contract theory finishes up, when we start by assuming that the State expresses the aspirations of ‘all the people’. A more useful result might be obtained by starting from the Marxist hypothesis and testing whether the ‘democratic’ State is a complex of institut- ions through which the owners of great masses of capital at this time expect solutions to be reached to the political problems raised in the process of appropriating surplus values. ROBERT SHERWOOD

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