THE UK has been increasingly sliding towards populism since the Brexit referendum and checks and balances on the government’s power are being eroded, a top political expert has warned.
Alison Young, the Sir David Williams Professor of Public Law at the University of Cambridge, said that certain “constitutional guardrails” – such as the expectation that ministers should resign if found to have misled parliament – did not seem to apply any more.
“It's hard to keep track of these standards because we see most of them in constitutional conventions,” Young (below) explained.
“The more you have aspects that we previously would have seen as breaching conventions going unpunished, the more we start removing these standards.
“When it comes to things like misleading the House … we do have examples of people even inadvertently misleading the House as a minister and then resigning. But this just doesn't seem to be the case anymore and that's the problem."
Young, who will take over as public law commissioner at the Law Commission in 2024, added: “How far are these ‘constitutional guardrails’, these internal standards of behaviour, actually checking the actions of those in power?
“If those in power don't see these as standards they need to follow anymore, then it becomes very, very hard to hold them to account.”
Durham University’s Aileen McHarg, another professor of public law, also warned that the British constitution’s reliance on convention seemed to be becoming inadequate.
Responding to the news that the Scottish Government would not challenge the UK’s block on its gender reform bill, McHarg wrote: “One thing that events of the past five/six years have clearly shown is that relying on convention and political understandings to temper the legal powers of the UK institutions simply does not provide adequate protection against the undermining of devolution.”
Young argued that appeals to the “will of the people” had grown increasingly frequent and were being used to circumvent checks and balances on the decisions of the elected government.
The professor, who also serves as a legal advisor to the House of Lords Constitution Committee, pointed to the idea of an “elective dictatorship”.
She said: “I think we've been seeing this [erosion of checks on governmental power] for a very long time, but what really struck me about the post-Brexit constitution was the extent to which this was being almost lauded as a good thing.
“[There’s an idea that] we don't need these checks and balances because the government has been voted in, it has its mandate to go away and implement its manifesto. And so, in some sense, any form of check and balance is contrary to what the people want.”
Asked if she thought the slide towards populism had increased since Brexit, Young said: “Yes, very much so. I think it's been the impact of the Brexit referendum because it did split the country so drastically.
“It became almost like a political talisman … I think that has started triggering this idea of ‘there's only one view of what people want’ and that’s what you’re going to follow.”
Young’s ideas are explored more fully in her newly published book Unchecked Power? How Recent Constitutional Reforms Are Threatening UK Democracy.
She said it is the first time she has penned a “trade book”, explaining: “It's a kind of odd label, but it essentially means it's aimed at the general public.”
Asked why she had decided to write it, the professor said: “It came from talking to people. I felt I needed, after lockdown, to try and join a gym and it was talking to people there who, once they asked me about what I did, would say, well, what does this [political event] mean?
“It just made me realise that people are interested, they want to know what's going on. But we don't necessarily as a country educate people more generally on how politics works, how the country works, how the constitution works. You do get people in England who don't understand what devolution means because it's just not taught.
“It just made me realise that if you want a system in which leaders of whatever political persuasion are held to account, then you need to make sure that the general public understands how the constitution works.”
Professor Alison Young’s book Unchecked Power? How Recent Constitutional Reforms Are Threatening UK Democracy is available at https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/unchecked-power.
She has also written a blog post on the topic for University College London’s Constitution Unit. You can read it here.
