“I think this is probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house, “ JFK told his dinner guests one night. Those present would probably have agreed – there were 49 Nobel Prize winners in attendance. The President, however, did not, for he finished his sentence with the words, “apart from those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone.” Cue laughter and lightly bruised egos.
Jefferson was certainly a polymath. Was he a genius? Who knows. It is a difficult term to define. One of those things which one knows when one sees it, but struggles to put into words. Whatever his personal qualities though, he certainly belonged to a group which collectively exemplified genius. The American Founders, from nothing, created a Constitution which survives, little changed, 250 years later. There aren’t that many people who can say that (Augustus being one and perhaps the only one). In the lifespan of the American Experiment, France has been a monarchy, a revolutionary dictatorship (not the official term), a Consulate, two Empires and Five Republics and, looking across the Channel, it’s not entirely clear they’ve got it right yet.
We could spend an entire book speculating about how their America became our America. It has a good climate and plentiful mineral wealth. It had, back then, plenty of room to expand. The unpleasantness of 1812 aside, it has no neighbours who can threaten it. But as a political entity, part of the credit must go to the way the Founders organised their system.
Fans of democracy, they were far from complete fans of democracy, having learned from their classical educations the dangers of an unchecked mob being able to get what it wants (one of the paradoxes of Ancient History is that, for all the Athenians were constantly wanging on about the greatness of their democratic system, none of our surviving Athenian sources seem particularly convinced by the decision-making abilities of the Athenian demos).
So the three Branches of Government are equal and can act as a check on each other. The raw vote in a Presidential Election is filtered through the Electoral College. The Senate acts as a counterweight to the House of Representatives, its longer terms theoretically insulating its members from the constant need to pacify their voters. By design, America has numerous institutional Sergeant Wilsons, popping up to say, “Are you sure that’s wise, sir?” before any piece of legislation hits the statute book.
For, if America’s Founders were intelligent, they were also wise. Wise enough to realise that they, and their successors, would not be right all the time and that the best place to deal with a mistake is before it is made. And wise enough to design a system which had the best chance of doing so.
It is unlikely, and I say this in a non-partisan way, that any recent British politician will be held in the same historical regard as Washington, Jefferson, Adams and chums. There will be no glossy Netflix series in a couple of centuries about Theresa May. Keir Starmer’s correspondence will not be treated with the reverence accorded to the Federalist Papers. Neither, to be fair, led lives of such drama. But Britain’s current government seems determined to unlearn the lessons the transatlantic rebels taught.
House of Lords reform is to the British left what chastity was to Saint Augustine. Always fervently desired, but never desired at that precise moment in time. The government has, to be fair, removed the hereditaries but gone no further, vague plans to replace the whole shebang being dropped in favour of stuffing it, as every government does, with a bunch of its own cronies. What is important is not that the institution scrutinise and improve legislation, but that it pass it quickly and unamended. Even non-government legislation is no longer fair game, as constitutionalists had always understood. As a recent letter from the Great and Good to their Noble Lordships about the assisted Dying Bill made clear, their job is to agree with the Commons.
No longer sitting in the Upper House, the Lord Chancellor (aka Justice Secretary) has proposed restricting the right to a jury trial and, which has attracted less notice, removing the right for a complete re-hearing in the magistrates’ courts.
As the country began to wind down for Christmas, the government announced it was minded to cancel a swathe of council elections. Cost and complexity made them difficult given the reorganisation of local government. Even the Electoral Commission felt compelled to raise an eyebrow at this, even if it did not go quite as far as Nigel Farage, who declared it was a sign we had become a “banana republic” (very formally, I think our Nige is wrong about this. Banana republics don’t cancel elections, they rig them. The fact that Presidente Keir is unwilling to go ahead and claim 97% of the vote is, paradoxically, a sign some scruples remain).
There is, of course, a common thread in all this. An independent(ish) House of Lords can and has told the government of the day that it is wrong and needs, like proud Edward’s army, to think again. Juries have an unfortunate habit of telling prosecutors that, whatever the legal formalities of a case, there is morality to consider too, and when there is a conflict, it should get the casting vote. Elections are the ultimate job appraisal for any politician.
One of these might be justifiable. Two might be too, but three points is a trend, and this trend suggests a governing class keen to insulate itself from feedback and carry on as it desires.
“The man in Whitehall really does know better” wrote Douglas Jay in 1937. Whether or not that was true then (most of the men in Whitehall were rather busy ignoring the unpleasant chap in Germany at the time), the history of the past few decades gives grounds for believing it is untrue now. He has, in recent memory, taken us into one war on a false prospectus, got us involved in another from which the Americans had to bail us out, overseen the largest miscarriage of justice in our history and not entirely shot the lights out over covid, while his chum on Threadneedle Street has failed to spot both the Financial Crisis and the recent bout of inflation.
Whether that reflects a change in the calibre of politician (Jay took a First at Oxford and was awarded a Fellowship of All Souls), their background (few if any have any experience in making correct decisions in chaotic systems) or just a more interconnected world making everything less stable (George Osborne, with his G7 colleagues, had to intervene in the currency markets after the Fukushima tsunami. His 18th century predecessor did nothing after the similarly devastating Cascadia Earthquake for the simple reason he knew nothing about it and so did not need to care), we cannot say. But what we can say is that, whichever combination of the above is true, sending Sergeant Wilson off to another platoon is unlikely to improve the performance of the Warmington on Sea Home Guard.
“The worst are full of passionate intensity” wrote Yeats. It would be unfair to accuse the political class of either passion, or much intensity. We have settled into a period of humdrum managerialism. But they suffer, all of them (assuming Conservative councils leap at the chance not to vote for Christmas), from something worse. An assumption that they are right. An assumption that the best of all possible worlds is one in which they are in charge and they get to do exactly what they want. And the worst of all possible worlds is one in which their opponents get a shot, where other actors get to suggest that maybe, just this time, they’ve got it wrong.
The American Founders knew how dangerous that was 250 years ago. But we learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.
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I would make one small change to the charges – “An assumption that they are right.” needs to be followed by, “and their belief that the plebs are ignorant and thus should not be given the opportunity to make their views known”.