11. MONARCHY IN THE UK - Is This What Democracy Looks Like?
In a few days it seems highly likely that Boris Johnson will become the next Prime Minister of Great Britain without having been elected. In my lifetime he will be the fourth such Prime Minister I can remember entering Downing Street without an election. John Major was first, then Gordon Brown, one for each of the major political parties. Then Theresa May, and now, soon, Boris. Each time the opposition leaders called the appointment a betrayal of democracy, calling for an immediate general election, as I’m sure Jeremy Corbin will be doing after Johnson takes office. Yet, as we can see, when they are in power, both Labour and Conservative governments have been quite happy maintaining their control with an unelected successor taking the place of an outgoing Prime Minister. The four mentioned in my lifetime are four Prime Ministers out of only seven I have lived through - over fifty percent of my lifetime Prime Ministers have not won their initial Premiership in a general election!
This is the point when I complain that the country therefore isn’t a democracy, right? That a country with an unelected leader at the helm fails its democracy test at the very first hurdle.
Not quite. As a self-declared anarchist, whose PhD thesis (government funded through the AHRC, ironically) argued that all external government is illegitimate and that true democracy, authentic democracy, can only exist in an anarchist utopia without any government at all, my feelings about contemporary, so-called representative, democracies not being truly democratic are longstanding and unmoved by the latest transient dramas of Westminster. And in many ways I can see the vaguely democratic argument for all three unelected Prime Ministers: their predecessor in each case had to go, and as the people’s representative of a party voted for on an agreed manifesto, it was enacting the “people’s will” to continue out the term of that party’s election victory by putting in place a successor voted on by the party itself as a proxy for the people. It’s imperfect and clumsy, but not altogether undemocratic if the people of the country agree on this as the mechanism for mid-election replacement. (And in the UK, with this being the third one in nearly forty years, it does rather seem as if a precedent has been set). Representative democracy is already a poor compromise of the ideal of authentic democracy; once we’ve already accepted something lesser, why not keep chipping away?
For a political radical like me, therefore, the idea that the UK is not really a democracy is old news. But what I find interesting about the case of Boris Johnson is that so many of my fellow citizens who are not political radicals are once again coming face to face with the proposition that their democratic country may not actually be as democratic as they once thought, despite the fact that - politically radical or not - Britain cannot possibly be a democracy because it is in fact, and always has been, a monarchy.
People always get upset when I say this. Of course Britain is a democracy despite the existence of our royal family, they say. The Queen has no real power. She’s just symbolic. It’s just for show. Which is all good and well - and very likely true: if the Queen tried to enact or block a law there would likely be an uprising. But it still remains the case that we adhere to the pantomime of monarchy every moment the royal family continues to hold its status. Whether its the Queen opening Parliament, her audiences with Prime ministers, bills requiring royal assent, or the aristocrats in the House of Lords, the monarch’s fingerprints are all over our so-called democracy. And it cannot be true that a country is both a legitimate monarchy and a legitimate democracy at the same time because each idea has a completely contrasting notion of the source of sovereignty.
Monarchy believes sovereignty lies in the crown.
Democracy believes sovereignty lies in the will of the people.
In the former, a single monarch rules based on their own intrinsic authority, in the latter each person has authority over themselves, with political authority coming only from the shared public expression of a population’s individual wills and the consent of the people to give some authority to an elected external power.
Either the monarch is sovereign or the people are. It cannot be both.
And so a monarchist democracy is an anachronism; a fallacy. And while we could be a legitimate democracy in which the people have chosen through election to maintain a hollowed out public monarchy for display and tourism purposes, or a legitimate monarchy, in which a monarch has allowed the people to have the superficial appearance of elections and some sort of showing of having a say in what they want (which may or may not be listened to), we cannot have both.
As far as I am aware, we have not had a recent referendum on the monarchy in the UK where the people have agreed to its existence. And the Queen is still required for any law to pass, for a Prime Minister to take office, and for Parliament to be in session. The evidence therefore suggests that, in the UK, we remain a monarchy, first and foremost, and have yet to ever pretend to be a legitimate democracy at all.
I’m sure a general election will be called soon once Mr Johnson gets to number ten, but even without my radical anarchist misgivings about what currently passes for democracy here in the UK, it will take far more than another general election for the monarchy of the UK to truly become democratic. Another unelected Prime Minister is the least of our worries.
AUTHOR: D.McKee