Evaluate the above statement and consider the extent to which you think it is true.

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“Arguments that the British Prime Minister is an elective dictator are arrant nonsense. The Prime Minister is constrained by his or her Cabinet colleagues, the will of Parliament and the decisions of the Judiciary. The British Constitution rests on the separation of power and the operation of the rule of law. The Prime Minister operates firmly within the particular constitutional arrangement in place for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.

Evaluate the above statement and consider the extent to which you think it is true.

Although not quite an oxymoron, the phrase “the British Constitution” may be perceived as something of a misnomer. The term “constitution” is generally understood as meaning a document or set of containing a full list of the rules which determine how the state shall be administered, and a comprehensive catalogue of the rights, freedoms and protections enjoyed by its citizens. There is no such document in existence in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland1. The reasons for this lack of codified constitution are many and various. I do not propose to discuss them.  A better term for the system in place in the UK is indeed “the constitutional arrangement” since it suggests that the constitutional principle is a fundamental part of the current system of government, implies that there is more involved than clear-cut legislation, and avoids the instinctive assumption that the rules involved are in some way set apart from the normal run of governmental decision-making.

The term “elective dictator” can be described, for present purposes, as an autocrat selected by the people: the Little Oxford English Dictionary gives “dictator” as “a ruler who has total power over a country,” and “elective” as “using or chosen by election”. A Prime Minister2 is defined simply as “the head of a government”. The role has, as briefly discussed below, evolved quite significantly from its earliest form to the present.

One of the key concepts behind the British system of government is the doctrine of Parliamentary supremacy3, and one of the key principles of this doctrine is the freedom of each Parliament to legislate as it pleases. It is not bound by its predecessors in any respect, and nor, theoretically, is it even bound by its own decisions: nothing that has been done is above being undone, nothing that has been said is beyond contradiction. There are no “higher” areas of law beyond the scope of Parliament’s power to alter, and no areas of law in which special protocols must be obeyed, unlike the constitutional laws of states bound by a codified Constitution in which there is a long and complex procedure for the amendment Constitutional legislation4. Rather than an exhaustive body of such legislation, the British constitutional arrangement consists of a combination of statutory instruments which are subject to change as and when Parliament desires, and conventions developed by custom and practice which are supposedly binding upon those in power. The doctrine of Parliamentary supremacy is such a convention; another, of rather more significance in a discussion of controls on the Prime Minister, is the separation of powers.

The doctrine of the separation of powers is intended to prevent democratic shortfall of the level that would be required to enable elective dictatorship. In theory, in a state governed on the model of separate executive, legislative and judicial authorities5 there could be no need to question “quis custodet custodes ipsos?”: each body would be placed to guard the limitations and powers of each of the others. The intention in such a system is that the body with the power to make law (the legislature) should be apart from that which applies it (the judiciary), and that both should be isolated from that which formulates the policy that becomes legislation and manages the administration of the state (the executive).

The British legislature has traditionally been bicameral; with the House of Commons and the House of Lords operating since the English Civil War as two comparably powerful arms of government. The House of Commons is a democratically elected body normally composed of representatives of one majority political party, that party’s main Opposition, and representatives of minority parties.  By virtue of the fact that the Prime Minister is the leader of the party which holds the most seats in the House of Commons, he6 has the potential to control this chamber: Members of Parliament belonging to the governing party may be constrained to cast their votes in support of the party’s proposals; this is the purpose of the whip system7. Whether or not the constraint of his party to vote according to his instructions is enough by itself to force a proposal through the House of Commons is as much a question of mathematics as political theory: if the majority party has a large enough majority, which is a theoretical possibility if not a particularly likely contingency, the application of the whip system will suffice to drive the House of Commons in the Prime Minister’s chosen direction; if the majority party does not by itself outnumber the Opposition and majority parties, it is generally the case that some of the minority parties will support the Government.

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The House of Lords is a non-elected body (at least in the sense that its members are not by the voting public) and therefore could in theory be largely independent of political considerations. In a state in which the Prime Minister controls the House of Commons, which, as leader of the majority party, he does, this gives the House of Lords the potential to be a significant check on his power. However, the House of Lords has been subordinate to the House of Commons since early last century, and no longer retains its power of veto over proposed legislation. ...

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