We hear an awful lot about how Brexit is breaking the UK constitution, written though uncodified as it is. It certainly seems that way: politicians are running amok regardless of party discipline, the minority government is pushing the limits of what the executive and parliament can do, MPs are abandoning their parties altogether, the parties themselves don’t reflect the split of the central issue in current politics and the Speaker is pushing the boundaries of his own position in trying to keep a hold on it all. Surely this is a political and constitutional crisis?
Except that isn’t quite true. The UK in a Changing Europe podcast recently did an episode interviewing Dr. Brigid Fowler, Senior Researcher at the Hansard Society, on precisely this subject and she had some rather useful insights which we could all do with knowing as we try to determine exactly how much we should worry about whether our political system is going to tear itself apart at the seams. So here’s a quick breakdown on the definitions of these three ideas and why, though we may be in a political crisis, we aren’t yet in a constitutional one.
Politics, policy and the constitution all seem to the average layperson to be essentially the same thing seen from different angles. They all fit within the same general bubble of ‘politics’. So the main thing we need to do here is differentiate policy and the constitution from politics and identify the specific role of politics within the political field.
Politics vs Policy
The first distinction we need to make in order to differentiate them is between politics and policy. This is perhaps best seen through the eight-hour (?!) Cabinet meeting held by Theresa May on Tuesday. Though it was described as simply a ‘Cabinet meeting’ in the majority of media reports, the actual schedule originally broke it down into three hours of politics, without Civil Servants or phones, and two hours of policy, with the original intended end point being 2pm, having begun at 9am.
So what’s the difference? It is perhaps best described this way: politics is the opinion phase. Political parties and movements congregate and coalesce around a commonality of opinion or viewpoint on a particular issue or range of issues. Policy is the implementation of those views in a practical manner. So when Theresa May and her cabinet intended to sit for three hours of politics and two hours of policy, that essentially represents three hours of deciding their viewpoint and coordinating it in competition with others, followed by two hours of putting that into practical effect with regards to specific governance.
Similarly, in a Civil Service context, departments are specifically required to design policy in accordance with the political aims of their minster. They do not decide the politics – it is for the democratically-elected MP to represent the majority viewpoint of the people – but they do decide how to most practically put it into effect. Thereby, Civil Servants should not act politically, but they do need to be aware of the political landscape and how to accommodate and foresee political viewpoints.
Politics vs the Constitution
This might seem like the point where things become a bit more tricky, but in reality this is actually slightly more straightforward. The main venue for understanding this difference is the chamber of the House of Commons itself, in which MPs debate and the Speaker presides.
As you will be well aware if you’ve ever watched any debates in parliament, the foundation of debate etiquette is that MPs advocate political views within a very specific framework. They must always address the Speaker, the neutral figure, when making their points. When referring to another MP, they should use their official title as “the Member for their Constituency” (i.e. the Member for West Dorset, as Oliver Lewin is known). Alternatively, they can say the Honourable or Right Honourable Lady or Gentleman. Similar rules exist around where front and backbench ministers sit, giving way to interruptions during speeches and phrases such as “would the honourable lady agree with me when I say…”. Many, many others exist within the framework of parliament, politics and government more generally.
What differentiates these is fairly clear: the content MPs say, the motivation with which they say it and the degree of support it commands in the House is politics; the rules governing how they say it are the constitution. The UK constitution is a highly complex entity. It is written but uncodified, by which we mean it exists in writing but not in one single document. Instead, the UK constitution is formed of hundreds of conventions, laws, Acts of Parliament and other official documents which have entered into the rules governing how politics is conducted in this country.
So when Dr. Brigid Fowler says, as she did in the recent podcast episode, that the constitution is not yet broken, she means that in a strict sense the rules are still being adhered to. People still use agreed voting systems, address each other in the proper manner (generally respectful and indirect), follow the convention of speeches and giving way and pass things by parliamentary majority (or whatever the relevant threshold is). Government and Opposition parties still have official leaders who engage in Prime Minister’s Questions. They still adhere to the rules on how to elect those leaders. The act of even a few MPs leaving their parties or being deselected, as Dominic Grieve encountered recently, is still relatively taboo. The situation is similar for parliament’s indicative votes: it took almost three years for MPs to reach the point of pushing this constitutional precedent and is still being undertaken with significant scrutiny and caution as the debates on each Business Motion demonstrate.
Politics
What has broken down, Dr. Fowler suggests, is party loyalty and the party system. The party system is fundamentally a political entity, being as it is a method of effectively organising around opinions and viewpoints on how to run society. The party leaders are not listening to the view of their party as a whole and in response the alienated sections of those parties are looking for different ways to advocate their views on the most important political issue of this generation.
Suffice to say, Dr. Fowler’s clarification does provide some reassurance that UK politics is still functioning, at least on a constitutional level. The real question, constitutionally, is whether we need to update our guidance for the modern era of politics. It may well be that this is one outcome of the tests Brexit has placed upon both the constitution and politics in the UK. The rules guiding how different constitutional elements of the UK’s political system behave, what they can do and how they can do it have clearly proven to be insufficient.
Significant blame here is laid at the feet of the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act which was brought in to stabilise the Conservative-Liberal Coalition government. This is on the basis that it removed the ability for Prime Ministers to time General Elections politically, either to gain a mandate from the country, recognise defeat or to threaten their MPs into line. Whether or not this is the only culprit, sincere consideration needs to be given to the novel measures which have been necessary to break the deadlock in the Brexit crisis and how the UK constitution can be updated to avoid this in future.
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