Poor Lord Wensleydale: A Beginner's Guide to the British Constitution with Robert Saunders

Hello and welcome to Conventions, a podcast about the history of constitutions brought to you by the Quill Project at Pembroke College, Oxford. My name's Grace Malin and I'll be your host. A common side effect of being someone who likes to talk about the US Constitution to Americans but in an English accent is getting a lot of questions relating to British constitutionalism. Does Britain have a constitution? Is Britain federal, like the United States? Is freedom of speech guaranteed in Britain when we don't have a First Amendment? I often feel ill-equipped to talk about the similarities and differences between the British and American constitutions, so today Nicholas and I have invited Robert Saunders, reader in Modern British History at Queen Mary University of London, to help us work through what makes Britain's constitution unique and what challenges it faces in a turbulent period for UK politics and government. Robert, thank you so much for coming on the Conventions podcast. Thanks for inviting me, it's very good to be on. And Nicholas, thank you for coming back, as you always do, to lend your expertise. It's great to be back, thanks Grace. OK, well my first question then is for Robert and I'm always interested to know, particularly in an era when constitutional history sometimes seems a little bit boring to some of the current generation of students, how did you get to be interested in British constitutional history? It's something that you've written about and something that you continue to sort of comment on in the public sphere as well, so how did you get interested in that? Well I didn't dream of becoming a constitutional historian when I was a teenager, in that sense it was accidental, but I've always been really drawn to the history of ideas and I've always been drawn to great ideological collisions and the way in which big arguments and big debates work themselves out politically. And of course there are no more fundamental questions in politics than where does power lie? Where does authority come from? What is a state? What is the nature of political authority? How do we entrench our liberties? So constitutional history doesn't have to be about dry and dusty documents, it is about women chaining themselves to railings, it's forged in civil wars and battles and revolutions and great parliamentary debates and outdoor demonstrations. It is sometimes about dry and dusty documents and that matters because those documents have a kind of magical power, that these are the words that capture within them the nature of our rights and our liberties, they exert a kind of force field that can either protect our freedoms or can obstruct movements for change. So constitutional documents matter, but they matter because they are part of a kind of living fabric of arguments and dissents and disagreements. That was a rousing call to constitutional history if ever I heard one, thank you very much. So to get back to something a little bit more technical perhaps, but not very, one of the reasons we get this question does Britain even have a constitution and to link to your dry and dusty documents as well, we get this question does Britain even have a constitution and one of the reasons we get that question is of course because Britain's constitution is quote unquote unwritten and this is something that particularly Americans are very, that's something that they know about the UK's constitution that differentiates it from the American constitution. My question though, do we exaggerate the extent to which the UK's constitution is unwritten or are documents still really important to understanding British constitutionalism? I think it's true to say that parts of the UK constitution are written down. You can pull out the statutes that created the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and that then amended its powers. You can find in legislation rules about things like the length of parliaments and the conduct of elections, but I think it is also true to say that large parts of the British constitution are unwritten and I think that does matter in at least two key respects. One is that it's not all written down in one place. You cannot go into a bookshop and say give me the British constitution and I think that is important in terms of the relationship between citizens and the state. Secondly, where it is written, it doesn't have any special legal status. Our constitutional law has the same status as laws relating to dog taxes or the regulation of betting shops. The basic principles of our constitution in that sense can be changed by exactly the same constitutional process as you would repeal a dog tax or impose a tax on drink. I think there's another twist to that question as well Grace, which is that countries with written constitutions, including the United States, often exaggerate the extent to which their constitutional arrangements are written down and are collated. Plenty of the American constitutional order is in fact contained in statute, such as the size of the Supreme Court, for example, or the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Plenty of the rest of their constitution is in fact governed by convention as well, such as the precise way in which the executive will consult the Senate for advice on appointments and advice on treaties, which is to say hardly at all until a vote is taken. And so plenty of what Americans think of as their constitutional order is in fact either in statute as well or unwritten entirely. So I think there's a great temptation to exaggerate the extent to which the American constitution as a whole is written, and therefore a great potential to exaggerate the extent to which constitutional change doesn't happen every single year in the United States as conventions evolve in just the same way as they evolve in Britain. So I think the question cuts both ways in some ways. I think that's a really interesting point and a really interesting point of comparison, because this was also something, one reason that I've sort of been afraid to engage with the history of British constitutionalism is it feels complex and it feels like there's so much, and you'd have to go into so many different areas and think about so many different historical stages to fully grasp the development of that constitution, but at the same time this is also true of the United States as you say, handing out pocket constitutions doesn't necessarily equal constitutional literacy in the way that we might expect because that three and a half thousand words really doesn't capture if you're, as Nicholas is fond of saying, if you're an alien who comes down from Mars and lands in America and somebody hands you a pocket constitution, do you now understand how American government works? Well, well, no, you don't. And so for Nicholas, I did have a follow up question, which is to do with writtenness again, and Robert will may have some thoughts on this as well. As I've said, you know, this issue of writtenness is a really common way to sort of distinguish between the UK and the US constitutions, did Americans intend this when they were coming up with their constitutions, they say, well, something that's going to be really important to us as a nation is codification of our constitutional law. The Americans in a sense had to have some kind of written constitution after the revolution for their different states, because they had been governed by charters and they needed something to replace those documents to provide authority for new states. So in a sense, they needed a written text of some kind, precisely because the authority of their existing colonial governments had come from written documents, and so it would have been very odd not to have anything. So they needed something. They rapidly settle on this idea, though, of having some kind of convention process that is separate from the ordinary process of legislation, that the voters in Massachusetts rejected their first attempt at a revolutionary constitution precisely because it had been written by the legislature and not sufficiently distinguished from a sort of ordinary session of the legislature. And so that idea in America that in order to give some institutional reality to the idea of popular sovereignty and delegated powers to government, that idea really did take hold in the form of the idea of having a sort of constitutional convention to write this text and not simply leaving it to the legislative assembly. That said, they did also start to think that this idea of having a written text did distinguish them from Europe quite sharply and started to talk, as the Federalist does, of the idea of government through reflection and choice, or systems of government created through a process of reflection and choice, rather than relying on accident and force, as the Federalist says. And so the Americans came to think that one of the things that had distinguished them after the revolution from the British evolution of government was that they had thought carefully about the structure of their institutions and had codified them through a process of debate and ratification, whereas the British had not done that. So I think they started by being forced to write written texts, but very rapidly came to see that as a virtue and something that was distinctive. And it's perhaps worth adding from a British perspective that, until quite late in the 19th century, a lot of Britons really did think that they had a written constitution and they thought, in fact, what was unusual about Britain compared to other European powers was that it had a constitution and that you could point to Magna Carta and you could point to the various acts of union and you could say that these were the doctrines of the Constitution. And particularly for groups that were excluded from Parliament, the idea that there were constraints on what Parliament could do was also really powerful. So in the 1870s, when Josephine Butler was campaigning against the Contagious Diseases Act, really appalling legislation, she argued that not only that these were bad laws, but that they were not really laws at all. And she insisted that there are laws that are contrary to law and that because these breached Magna Carta, they did not have at least the moral force and possibly not also the legal force of law. So that kind of modern sense that you might have some kind of constitutional court that strikes down legislation was quite deeply entrenched in the 19th century and that only really changes once you get a much more activist Parliament that is legislating on such a scale that in practice it is constantly breaching Magna Carta or refining the Act of Union or disestablishing the Irish Church or whatever it may be. And that view starts to become untenable because the practice of politics now suggests that Parliament can in fact repeal or replace any statutes. That's very striking to hear, particularly sort of as an Americanist because there is that sense and I hope I'm not getting this wrong, Nicholas, is it James Otis who writes a pamphlet where he basically makes the argument that, you know, well, Parliament will just have to repeal any legislation, which is contrary to the constitution because, you know, that's the way it has to work in Britain and it's also interesting from the American perspective that writtenness doesn't have to be codification in that traditional sense, like one of my favourite documents is Eliot's Debates, which is a four-volume or five-volume text that has lots of different like quote-unquote constitutional texts that are not the constitution itself but are known to inform the workings of America, the foundations of American government. That's very striking. But alongside this writtenness question, one of the aspects of British constitutionalism that I confess I don't fully understand is this idea of a convention. So when we were coming up with the title for the podcast, thought it'd be quite a fun pun, Americans have constitutional conventions where everybody gets together and writes a constitution, Britons have constitutional conventions in a slightly different sense. So how are these conventions or am I correct in saying that they can also be called customs of the British constitution? How are they enforced? And how has the creation of a Supreme Court affected the way that we think about custom or convention in the British constitution? Well, we have to remember, first of all, that until again the late 19th century, the distinction between custom and convention on the one hand and law on the other was perhaps less of a gulf than it might appear to us today because Britain was operating a common law system in which the law itself is founded on precedence and the law itself is founded on what did the court decide 200, 300 or 400 years earlier and you build up this body of law which can change and it can evolve but is nonetheless rooted in continuous practice across time. So whereas nowadays to say that something is lawful but unconstitutional suggests a great chasm between those two, I think that was less the case in the 19th century. In terms of how these customs were enforced, sometimes it was by institutions. So there's a wonderful example in 1856, what's called the Wensley Dale case, where Queen Victoria created a life pier. So rather than creating a hereditary pier, someone who would sit in the House of Lords just for the span of their own life. Now Monarchs had done this in the past but they hadn't done it for hundreds of years so it was regarded as no longer being part of Britain's constitutional practice, it was regarded as a convention that had expired. The Crown had the lawful right to do it but it's breached a convention that the House of Lords should be broadly independent of Crown control. So the House of Lords simply barred the gates and refused to let him in and for an entire session they simply refused to admit poor Lord Wensley Dale into the House of Lords until eventually the Crown relented and gave him a hereditary pierage and then he was admitted. So sometimes there were institutional defences. But more broadly, it was done by I think the power of political opinion and the power of political criticism, a sense that these conventions really mattered and that you had to be on a hair trigger for executives and Monarchs and Prime Ministers who were trying to break and breach those conventions. And that I think is perhaps where the really big change in British politics has come, that you had a political society that was founded on the idea of a revolution and not just a revolution but a glorious revolution in 1688 and that resisting tyranny, resisting governments that tried to break the rules, was fundamental to Englishness and to the practice of English politics. Whereas I think increasingly we think in more legalistic terms, if there isn't a law that says you can't do it and it must be alright, so the kind of internal defences have been washed away. I think it's also true isn't it Robert, and I'd love your opinion on this, that people broadly are much less educated in the traditions and forms of the British constitution. It's a much less part of a sort of general education now than it was, so that people entering politics probably haven't had a kind of education that has really emphasised tradition and custom and constitutional law in quite the same way. Yes I think that's absolutely right. I think a key argument against a historically based constitution is that it's quite difficult to make that work if you have a historically illiterate governing class. Again going back to the 19th century, the leading politicians of that period, the Lord John Russell's, the Gladstones and so on, were soaked in constitutional history. They wrote books about the glorious revolution and the civil wars, and of course that told a certain skewed version of that history, but it meant that history and politics were in constant dialogue. I don't think the current generation of politicians, broadly speaking, really knows what happened the day before yesterday, and so because of that there is a growing tendency to think in purely legalistic terms. And to go back to your previous question Grace, I don't think institutionally the creation of a supreme court actually changes a great deal, but it does perhaps mark a shift in mindsets that we now look to the law, not as the last line of constitutional defence, but as the first line of constitutional defence, because in a sense we can't look to history and to historical memory any longer to perform that role. I think all I add to that which I completely agree with is that the same is true in America that although much more is codified and much more is written down and easily consulted, if people are ignorant of general legal and constitutional education, they come to read words in quite unusual and different ways from previous generations and so come to think of their constitutional texts quite differently. I can't believe that Robert and Nicholas have both just implied that Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are not great historians of Britain and don't have a really deep understanding of the British constitutional tradition, I confess that I'm quite shocked, I'm quite shocked that you don't feel that way. I do think this question of political culture is really important though, I think and something that I've been dealing with myself, thinking about the law and spending a lot of time reading statute books and then realising that it's political culture that is actually driving the way that certainly in the founding era of the United States that Americans are thinking about how should federalism work, how does our constitution actually work and a lot of that is to do with political culture and essentially interpersonal relations and that is quite a scary thought that that ends up being the barrier to a lot of very dangerous behaviour. I think a really big change or something that there's been a lot of commentary on certainly in the last few years has been the introduction of the referendum into British politics or the sort of explosion of the referendum onto the scene with Brexit and with the Scottish independence referendum and Robert you've written a book about a referendum on Europe and I would like to hear your thoughts on how you think, to what extent you feel that the referendum is compatible with the British constitution? Well I think whether we like it or not the referendum is now integral to the British constitution that we've now had three UK wide referendums in the last 50 odd years and we've had something like 14 major referendums affecting one or other part of the United Kingdom so even if we took the view of people like Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher that referendums were a terrible thing that genie is out of the bottle and it's not going to go back in again so referendums are part of the British constitution now but I think what we haven't done is had a really serious debate about how we use them productively so firstly we haven't evolved any real conventions or customs about when we hold referendums or why we hold referendums or who gets to decide when referendums happen and that I think creates a really dangerous constitutional situation because you look at the situation in Scotland at the moment and it was broad acceptance that the route to Scottish independence is via a referendum and yet number 10 is insisting that it will effectively never grant such a referendum so you've got this mighty constitutional weapon which we seem now to have decided is more powerful than Parliament's is more powerful than general elections but it becomes the subject of party warfare rather than the instrument by which we resolve conflicts within the party system so I think we need to do a better job of establishing when we have referendums who decides who gets to vote and what the other criteria might be so that we try to lift this a little bit out of the the kind of swamp of party warfare and then secondly we haven't really thought about how we make the referendum work with the grain of Parliament rather than against it we saw from 2016 to 2019 really a masterclass in how not to use a referendum in which the referendum issued an instruction which Parliament broadly accepted had to follow that we were going to leave the EU but it gave no instruction whatsoever on how we were going to leave the EU on what the terms of that might be so we had an instruction but we had no map that was sent we must leave the EU we had a mandate for that but we had no mandate for any of the doors by which we might actually have walked out and I think we could perhaps learn something by going back to an earlier period here in that the referendum really first came into British political discussion in the late 19th century and the reason for that was that there was a sense that the barriers to precipitate constitutional legislation were disappearing so in 1832 if you want to pass the Great Reform Act you have to win the support of a House of Commons that the executive does not control you have to get it through a House of Lords that has an independent power of veto and no life peerages and you have to have the support of the monarch so passing this is really tough it takes two years and a major political crisis by the end of the 19th century the monarch has disappeared politically the House of Lords is in retreat and will shortly use Lutitz veto the party system is becoming more powerful so executives are increasingly dominant over the House so suddenly actually you can repeal the Magna Carta or you can repeal the active union in a way you couldn't before so the referendum emerged as what Dicey called the people's veto the idea that parliament chooses to act but then you have a check and then the people decide whether they want this or not which is exactly the opposite to what we did in 2016 where we put the referendum at the start of the process and then ask parliament to clear up the mess rather than saying right this is how parliament wants to leave the EU do you now endorse this? I think that's a really good point that should be much more powerfully and often made that most though not all of previous referendums before 2016 had been to confirm a very definite plan of action or not and that the 2016 referendum wasn't but one of the interesting quirks there and I think it shows as well the limits of written law and codification the act that created the referendum for 2016 was very clear in the letter of the law that it was merely an advisory referendum and in fact it was a small part of the campaign but it was part of the campaign to persuade people to vote one way or another was to say this is merely an advisory referendum it doesn't in and of itself necessarily have any legal force but of course as soon as the vote had happened by the slimmest of margins it was as if none of the other checks and balances of the constitution had any force at all because members of parliament immediately signed up to a doctrine that said that whatever their personal opinions on the wisdom of a particular course of action they would nevertheless treat the 2016 result as if it had the force of a constitutional command which is very peculiar and I think that's a reminder that we shouldn't put too much faith in paper safeguards because they are literally that there are a lot of people who will in retrospect say we should have had more securities in 2016 there should have been a requirement for a super majority it should have insisted it be 60 40 well can you imagine what would have happened in 2016 if there had been a majority vote to leave but by some kind of little protection in the referendum act we didn't have to act on that I think the political consequences of that would have been absolutely devastating so what the referendum showed us was the power of an idea and the power of a set of assumptions about the referendum and I don't think that attempts to wrap that around with legal limits unless they are hallowed by centuries of precedent is really going to get you very far so my follow up in a sense obviously one of the interesting things about about both the Scottish independence referendum and the Brexit referendum is that they have sort of caused or relied upon really important shifts in sort of partisan alignment in the UK and and one of the things that we sometimes get referenced to from the current government is this idea that it might be that they want to enact constitutional reforms which I have to say strikes fear into my heart and are both of the major parties equally comfortable with the idea of using constitutional reform to sort of gain a partisan advantage well in some ways both parties have tried to use the referendum in the same way which is to address a split within their own governing coalition so in 1975 when Britain had its first national referendum on whether it should be part of the European community or not the reason for this was that the Labour Party was desperately divided on the issue of Europe and so it was as if the European issue was like a ticking bomb sitting on the cabinet table so you pick it up and throw it over the fence and ask the electorate to deal with it instead and I think you could make a very similar case in 2016 that the Conservative Party had reached a point where it simply could not have a unified policy on Europe anymore so you pick up the bomb and you again chuck it over to the electorate and ask them to sort it out for you and in 1975 that broadly worked because the electorate gave the answer that the government was expecting and in 2016 it really didn't and has rewritten the party system ever since I'm not sure that one party is intrinsically more constitutionally radical than the other although I think you could make a case that the party that has been most constitutionally irresponsible historically has actually been the Conservative Party and the paradigm example of that would be the Ulster Crisis between 1912 and 1914 where the Conservative front bench was supplying weapons to a paramilitary army the Conservative leader Andrew Bonnellore was making speeches saying there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities when the future Lord Chancellor was talking about ministers swinging from the lampposts of London and there's perhaps a psychological element there in that the Conservative Party believes it is the party of the constitution that the constitution is intrinsically a conservative possession and so therefore can do whatever it wants with it whereas Labour has in a sense throughout the 20th century been trying to prove its constitutional credentials to prove that it isn't a Soviet party that it's not a kind of Eastern block party and has in some respects perhaps been excessively differential towards Britain's parliamentary traditions. There are some easy parallels to the structure of the party system in other countries but I think I'm going to leave those unspoken for the purposes of this podcast. Yes, the supplying of weapons and the swinging from lampposts certainly evoked certain sort of recent recent events in the in the United States but it's sort of interesting to look back to yes the Conservative and Unionist Party in its heyday. So I think we've talked about some big questions and I'm going to end with the two biggest questions of all for both of you take as much time as you need number one what are the biggest constitutional problems facing the UK today we've touched on several big shifts or changes or things that are are sort of pressing in UK constitutionalism and then the second question and really the question that that just comes up again and again and again is is the solution to all of our constitutional problems having a written constitution okay I'll have a go I think I could talk for hours about what's wrong with the British Constitution but in terms of the most pressing problems I think it is the lack of constraints on the executive the ability of the leadership of a party that can win control of the House of Commons on as little as 35% of the vote to do almost anything it likes without constraints and the present government I think is particularly determined to expand that power and to try to dismantle constraints upon what it can do and I think the issue there actually isn't just about the politics or the personalities of the current government it's a deeper structural problem in British politics which is that we are increasingly stuck between two different models of democracy so historically Britain was a parliamentary democracy but it is trying to behave increasingly like a presidential democracy so we have dismantled many of the powers of parliament to hold a government to account we have in all sorts of ways lifted the prime minister and the executive above parliamentary control we increasingly treat general elections as if they are presidential races we have televised debates to pick Britain's next prime minister so we're acting and thinking in increasingly presidential terms so we talk about designated survivors when a prime minister becomes ill but we haven't erected any of the safeguards of an actual presidential constitution so the prime minister is not directly elected doesn't have to win that kind of mandate can be put in power simply by party members we don't have a separate legislature with its own authority that might be controlled by a different party the prime minister is not constrained by a written constitution which is interpreted by a constitutional court so we've got this kind of quasi-presidential system emerging which doesn't have the safeguards for parliamentary system or the safeguards of a presidential system so for me that's the big problem that we've got to try to resolve now is a written constitution the solution I think there are merits to a written constitution there is something to be said for having a source of authority that sits above the government of the day and which in a clear and understandable form brings together the liberties of the people and sets out the constraints on what governments can and cannot do and the rules of the game whether it's a solution for Britain in the short term I'm much more skeptical about firstly if there is one thing that's definitely worse than having no constitution it's having a bad constitution that's then difficult to change and liberal progressives like me tend to assume that if we had a written constitution it would have all the things that we want in it but it's just as possible that it would in trench first pass the post that it would make clear that government can shut down parliament whenever it chooses to do so and we do all sorts of terrible things like that that we then couldn't change another type of constitution that's clearly bad is one that doesn't command widespread consent Britain is a fantastically divided country I don't know how we generate a constitution that we all agree is fair and that none of us think is rigged in the interests of one group or other and if you end up for a written constitution that's perhaps passed by 52 to 48 percent in a referendum then you're in a really nightmarish situation in which the constitution itself becomes the focus of attack rather than the means by which we resolve our problems and then finally I think that having a written constitution or the debate about a written constitution often acts as kind of displacement activity for tackling the things that are wrong with our politics now so whenever another minister breaks the ministerial codes or whenever there's another scandal about party funding people always write on my Twitter feed we need a written constitution and then having said that they go back to whatever they were doing before well we're not going to get a written constitution in the short term so what are we going to do now we do actually have the powers broadly speaking to tackle things like corruption in public life we the electorates have things that we can do about the current state of politics and I think the priority should be on doing those things on trying to mobilise the electorate rather than simply looking across the vast vista of history and saying well in the year 2290 when we have a written constitution this will all have gone away I think one of the things that people get confused is the difference between having a written constitution and creating a political culture and a political culture emerged in Britain and in America that was very important for the growth of democracy that contained propositions such as one shouldn't lie in places like parliament one shouldn't mislead parliament that's a very important sort of part of political culture you know if one is caught misleading parliament one's position is untenable how quaint that idea seems now and yet for generations of British politicians although perhaps a smaller period of time than we might imagine that really did command respect as a proposition likewise one shouldn't beat each other up at elections electoral violence is not acceptable again you know that was part of British political culture for a long period I think it still is but in many parts of the world that's become a bit of a shaky proposition as well and a written constitution doesn't create political culture and historians are not very good at explaining what creates political culture I mean Robert and I are both in a ways of historians of political thought but I don't know that there is a big field about political culture that really has a good understanding of how that broader political culture is created and how one might go about actively creating sort of good political cultures and helpful political cultures on the constitutional problems facing the country one problem I think we need to think about more is when we talk about devolving powers to local areas which both parties in different ways have thought about a lot and often so champion as the answer to ills let's just give more power to local governments of different kinds or regional governments are we then happy to have different outcomes from decision making because devolved authority means that you will have different outcomes you devolve say spending on the on the NHS to local areas local areas will choose different priorities I'm not sure that we're very comfortable actually with that kind of idea and it's and it's something that we don't think about enough as we tinker with where at which level of government different decisions are made some of this has to do as well with with parliament's willingness to simply not debate legislation in detail on the details of legislation and pass things off to secondary legislation and other ways of making decisions about what the law should be so I think part of what's implicit in what Robert said is a plea for parliament actually to be more active and engaged with the business of writing laws which one might think was its its core job and for which it has far more time than parliament's in the past actually but again that's something we see globally that legislative assemblies are increasingly not spending their time looking at the detail of legislation as for your question about whether a written constitution would help any modern process to write a written constitution would want to include the entrenchment of policy as well as the entrenchment of process and whether or not it would then command widespread support might be very much to do with whether particular people felt that they had managed to entrench the policy preferences that they have in a written constitution there's an enormous trend across the modern era of constitutions containing more and more that is about policy preference than about process across time and all written texts need interpretation and if you have a written text that requires interpretation and you don't happen to like the particular interpretation given to it by the body that has been appointed or has appointed itself as its guardian then it can become very difficult to change those interpretations so I actually think there becomes a problem with accountability sometimes as more and more is moved into the sphere of a written constitution and yet it becomes harder and harder to control the interpretation of that text and for those reasons I think for Britain right now a written constitution really wouldn't solve anything very much and I completely agree with Robert that the process of writing one would be a really terrible ordeal to go through in a divided country. I'm cheering Nicholas on there when he talks about political culture because I think this is absolutely crucial I was reading a wonderful speech by Gladstone the other day where he said the real security for liberty they are the securities that are written in the hearts and minds of men and as long as we update that to men and women then I think that's absolutely right that if we want a politics that cares about things like truthfulness and integrity and not paying large sums of money to your friends and allies we are only going to get that if the electorate cares about that and if the electorate starts to punish people who do not tell them the truth or who in other ways corrupt the democratic process and as Nicholas said it's very difficult to explain historically why that appears to exist more powerfully in some periods than in others I think in the 19th century you might talk about the rise of evangelicalism and that's a force that isn't going to help us politically anymore but perhaps another element that was important then was the consciousness of the fragility of free government the sense that actually having free government was rare and unusual if you were standing in Britain in the 1860s and you looked out across the world you looked across the Atlantic and you saw a United States and collapsed into civil war you looked across Europe and you saw France under a military dictator you saw Russia under the czar you saw all kinds of other states under feudal monarchs who had rolled back freedoms so the sense that free government wasn't the natural state of politics it was something really unusual that required constant vigilance and constant protection was very powerful and we've lost that radically I think particularly in the post 1989 world now it may be that as we start to look around the world and we start to look at what's happening in places like Hungary and Poland or we look at the scenes that took place in January around the capital building in United States that perhaps we start to rebuild a sense that actually democracy can pass that we can lose freedoms that have been won as well as building them and that we as citizens have responsibilities to our institutions not simply rights that we expect to extract from them. I don't think there is a better note on which we could possibly end thank you so much Robert and Nicholas for this really fascinating conversation. Thank you for listening to conventions. I'm Grace Mallon and I was joined by Nicholas Cole director of the Quill project and Robert Saunders reader in modern British history at Queen Mary University of London. His most recent book Yes to Europe in 1975 referendum and 70s Britain is published by Cambridge University Press. Next time we're joined by the political scientist Robinson Woodward Burns who will be telling us about his new book on the ways state constitutions stabilise American politics and discussing why statehood for the District of Columbia is such a contentious issue. [BLANK_AUDIO]