Watching the ongoing negotiations to settle the hung parliament that was the result of the General Election has been really interesting. Not just because it’s been some kind of long-running political soap opera, but because it feels in a lot of ways like I’ve been watching my PhD thesis dance out of the Roman Republic and into modern political debate – and that’s simultaneously very exciting and quite terrifying. For those that don’t know, I work on the political and constitutional history of the Roman Republic and my thesis proposed the idea that the unwritten constitution of the Roman Republic wasn’t locked down but evolved and changed through what was said about it, the interpretations that were presented and (ultimately) accepted at Rome. I’m not going to go into the gory details of that here, since I’m working out how I want to get the thing published (I’m plotting for a book, but that’ll take a few years work, so there’s a potential article too, possibly) – but suffice it to say that the theoretical stuff started with Foucault’s arguments about the way that knowledge is formed through discourse, and picked up ideas about the negotiation of ideology and on the reproduction of social structures, and ending up somewhere near Sunstein’s argument that all constitutions are developed and implemented through a process of interpretation. Basically, the argument is that a society’s understanding of their unwritten constitution emerges through what is said about it – in politics, in the media, in pretty much every possible space where discourse takes place (though the knowledge builds up in a very complex way, obviously). Now, I deal with this idea in the Roman Republic – but obviously one of the points of working with theory is to think about a broader applicability. And I think you can see some of this, with various interpretations of the constitution, taking place in the public discourse about the British constitution over the last week as our MPs have been negotiating a new government and the media has been commentating on it, and we’ve all been responding to it (a lot my interest in this has spun of the responses to some of this discourse on Twitter).
So if we’re serious about making British government work and keep the British constitution functioning, then it’s probably worth thinking about the main issues and tropes in the discourse and how they’re being talked about as we try and work out where we go next. Otherwise the constitution’s going to change without us really being involved, and we might not like where it ends up – we might not like where it’s ended up right now. What follows are some of my ideas about some of the main strands of discourse that have come up a lot in the last week – the phrases ‘Unelected Prime Minister’, ‘Vote X, get Y’, ‘Behind Closed Doors’, plus Hung Parliaments, Electoral Reform and Fixed-Term Parliaments. As a disclaimer first, I am not by any means any kind of expert in the British Constitution (I just ordered a few books to help me improve my knowledge, but I managed to send them to the address where I can only pick them up in six weeks, and not the one I’ll be at in three weeks, which says something about the chaos of my brain in the last few days). Read more...
