My blog for Tuesday 14th November was devoted to a review of Keith Sutherland’s book The Party’s Over: Blueprint for a very English Revolution published last week in Fourth World Review (FWR141). In my review I took Sutherland to task for his listing of Crown, Lords and Commons as the Three Estates.
In my version of English History our three estates are Monarchy, Church and House of Communities. Our Lords Temporal include the social structures of the monarchy with its aristocratic landed organisation into counties, townships, bailiwicks, lathes and hundreds. Our Lords Spiritual embrace the Church of England which has the freedom to choose the details of its spiritual faith and is not bound by any past Parliament or Treaty to the Book of Common Prayer or King James' New Testament. Nowadays the key religious divide is between Materialists and Atheists...and the rest of us who ask ourselves 'Is that all there is?’...and answer 'No!'
If the English are to get to where Keith Sutherland wants them to go then Parliament needs to be put back in its place. The best way to do this is by an alliance between the other two estates represented by the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams and our future King Charles III...on the side of People and Place. 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.
Last Saturday Keith Sutherland responded on my blog to the charge that he had got it wrong about the estates. 'You're right,' he wrote, 'about the three medieval estates...Lords Temporal, Lords Spiritual and Commons. But an alternative modern view goes back to a document produced in 1642 when Charles I argued that the Constitution of England was a mixed one in which the three estates of king, lords and commons was balanced together. This is the Aristotelian principle that I try to develop in the book.' Sutherland then references the Cambridge Academic Michael Mendle...author of The Putney Debates and mentions specifically Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions.
Seventeenth Century English History is a boom industry...especially in the US...and Keith Sutherland is right to point to the scholarship behind the fluctuating definitions of the Idea of the Estates. But the practical problem is the need to broaden the English Political Debate. Conventional political options are incapable of solving 21st Century problems. It is as well to remind ourselves that each generation holds all the options and can rewrite the Constitutional Script if they wish to.
The Three Estates is an excellent place to start this debate...and why not bring the subject into Geography and History Curricula in our Secondary Schools? But any modern discussion must include the Fourth Estate with its PR Firms and Spin Controllers...as well as the Print and Electronic Media with its podcasts, blogs and internet channels. Schooling itself is just one channel among many in the Babble of the Fourth Estate.
Readers of the Guardian or the Independent or Anti-Globalisation Demonstrators will find Sutherland's book well worth reading as it does a first class job of stretching the political options within the Established Orthodoxy…an important step when an orthodoxy reaches the end of its appointed course.
Stretching the Consensus Paradigm is crucial if our English Politics are to progress in the 21st Century by Evolution. Revolutions may be unavoidable on occasions…and a Second English Civil War remains a possibility…but revolutions are best avoided because innocent people get hurt. Besides if History teaches us anything it is that no one ever knows where revolutions end up. They always take on a life of their own...with many unanticipated side-effects...most of them nasty.
I think there is a need for a reality check -- the problem being that our Lords Spiritual and Temporal are now viewed as part of the heritage industry and therefore no longer a legitimate part of our constitutional arrangements. The reason that I have put the reform of the Commons central to my model is because the democratic meme now trumps every argument.
Fortunately everyone now accepts that our voting arrangements no longer deliver democracy in any meaningful way; however random selection is widely seen as both fair and representative (in the statistical sense). Seeing as such a form of representation would not provide either stability or expertise, the revival of the other estates would be necessary to fill these functional gaps.
The point I'm trying to make is that you need to start with principles that are viewed as legitimate. An alliance between the Archbishop of Canterbury and the future King would be seen as a palace coup.
This argument is fleshed out in my letter in the current issue of Prospect, reproduced below:
www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=8154
Paul Skidmore (December) is right to criticise the feeble recommendations of the Power report, but his own "1 per cent solution" takes one's breath away. You would need to go back long before 1832 to find a narrower elite. As Skidmore's critics rightly point out, his "small core of committed people" will most likely involve the usual suspects.
As Prospect has previously highlighted, a more democratic approach would be to build on US experiments in deliberative democracy, where citizens' juries are appointed by random lot to vote on issues after hearing the competing arguments of informed advocates. Patricia Hewitt has used citizens' juries as an aid to decision-making in health matters and Harriet Harman has suggested they might be valuable in foreign affairs.
But why not go the whole hog and get rid of the rusty Victorian ballot box? My book, The Party's Over: Manifesto for a Very English Revolution, shows how an executive appointed on merit could be held to account by a randomly selected legislature, which would be statistically representative of the whole population.
Keith Sutherland
Exeter, Devon