A week ago I was sent The Party’s Over: Blueprint for a very English Revolution to review for Fourth World Review. Keith Sutherland the author is an interesting chap…Executive Editor of the Journal of Consciousness Studies and praised by Robert Hazell of the Editorial Advisory Board of Societas as ‘the Hazlitt of our age’. Here is what I wrote.

Keith Sutherland fears that David Beckham and Richard Branson have taken over the governance of England and mentions Max Beloff’s comparison of Tony Blair’s Third Way with Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Ten years ago Sutherland was commissioned to edit The Rape of the Constitution and chose to include Tony Benn’s essay ‘How Democratic is Britain?’ In this essay Benn updated Bagehot’s 1867 summary of the ‘dignified’ and ‘efficient’ elements in the English constitution and the power of The Cabinet. ‘Today,’ wrote Benn, ‘the House of Commons is the dignified part…there to excite and preserve the reverence of the population…while the powers of the Crown controlled by the Prime Minister are the efficient part by which government works and rules.’

James Stuart Mill once observed that the country’s constitutional problem was the monopoly exercised by the monarchy and the aristocracy and this caused Macaulay to remark in 1832 that ‘…the House of Commons was more the Council of the Government than the Defender of the People.’ But, as Sutherland comments…and as Kohr explains in his essay The Four Radicalisms…extension of the suffrage by the Victorians though sensible in its day could not empower people because ‘once the political cake has grown past a critical size each voter’s slice becomes so small as to be causally irrelevant.’ Echoes here of an understanding of Papworth’s Ten Laws of Political Dynamics.

By 2001 in Elective Dictatorship: the Unholy Trinity of the British Constitution Sutherland had realised the game was up. Any reverence the population might once have felt for Parliament and Politicians had disappeared under Blair’s abuse. Sutherland’s radical conversion continues in The Party’s Over. Scepticism about Democracy sits deep in our English Political Tradition. It began in Plato’s Republic when Socrates remarks that ‘A system of government that is not based on knowledge and competence and puts power in the hands of rhetoricians is a corrupt and decadent system.’ What are Spin Controllers, Public Relation Firms and Dodgy Dossiers if not rhetoricians and their devices?

Sutherland has taken to heart Michael Oakeshott’s essays on The Masses in Representative Democracy and On the Relation of Philosophy Poetry and Reality. He also makes favourable mention of Montesquieu whose analysis of the key concept of Relative Power was updated by Leopold Kohr in Breakdown of Nations (1955) and of the long-forgotten pamphleteer James Harrington…a contemporary of Hobbes…who was thrown into the Tower of London for sedition. ‘I would like to think,’ writes Sutherland, ‘that this essay is just an updated version of the Aristotle-Harrington vision.’ The metaphor of the political cake began with Harrington.

Sutherland wants to see an aristocracy of wisdom and talent…Lords Advocates…presenting the arguments to a Jury of Commoners…the Oxford Union’s debating format with good men and true instead of a rabble of students. Abolishing political parties would be a necessary reform. As less than one percent of the population are actively engaged in party political activities public subsidy should be removed instead of being wasted on billboard electioneering and television commercials. The genius of the British Constitution,’ writes Sutherland, ‘has been the ability at certain times in history to meld all three estates into one while retaining the independence of all three.’ Elsewhere he remarks that British institutions are rarely abolished but continue in theory…and in ceremonial practice…shorn of their essential functions. ‘Names remain in constant use but they represent different things.’

Here are Sutherland’s final words. The political party is an anachronism and the notion of a democratic mandate is without foundation. The dominant position of the political party should be replaced with a modern system of representation based on the way juries are selected. The British constitution understood ‘efficiently’ is an elected dictatorship and the answer is not to seek to separate powers and functions in the American way but to ‘reinterpret our own constitution more literally.’ Well and good as far as it goes. But in Keith Sutherland’s next book I hope he will go further because the English must resist attempts to impose a European Constitution upon this Sceptered Isle and revisit King John’s Magna Carta of 1215...not the one signed by Henry III in 1225 which omitted many clauses.

Mistakenly Sutherland lists Crown, Lords and Commons as the Three Estates. Our Lords Temporal are the Monarchy and its aristocratic landed structures of counties and townships. Our Lords Spiritual are the Church of England which has the freedom to choose the details of its spiritual faith…the key divide is between those who believe ‘this is not all there is’ and the Materialists and Atheists who do.

Monarchy, Church and Parliament are the Three Estates and an alliance between the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and our future King Charles III will be crucial if we are to get to where Keith Sutherland wants us to go. Halford Mackinder got it right a century ago when he remarked in Democratic Ideals & Reality that the real political battle is always between Locality and Outside Interests.