Page 44 - History 2020

inherit”. He praises the “Gothic grandeur” of our Constitution, a clear reference to

the new Palace of Westminster which had been in use since 1852 and was nearing
completion when Bagehot was writing.

By contrast, the efficient part of our Constitution which we had “made or rather
stumbled on”, was both simple and modern: Cabinet government. It runs the country
as a “committee of the legislative assembly”; yet it has a unique power which no such
assembly would ever grant “except by historical accident and after happy experience”
- “it can dissolve the assembly that appointed it”. “It is an executive which can

annihilate the legislature as well as an executive which is the nominee of the
legislature. “It is a creature but it has the power of destroying its creators.” This
“fusion of legislative and executive functions” is the key to the efficient part of the
Constitution. It results in an executive which is both continually answerable to the
legislature, yet also strong, because, if it can’t get its way in the legislature, it can use,
and if necessary, carry out, the threat of resignation and thus trigger the election of a
new one. Our executive, the prime-minister-in-cabinet, is thus stronger yet also more

accountable that an American president. This, argues Bagehot, makes our system
uniquely adaptable yet stable.

Bagehot is at pains to show how this is better than the America presidential system.
When he wrote, the American Civil War had just ended. The North’s victory had
vindicated the Union. American had proved that it could make democracy work.
Bagehot was keen to show that, even so, the British system was better. But also, at
this time parliamentary reform was back on the agenda. 1832 had not made this go

away, nor had the collapse of the Chartist movement in 1848. In 1867, both Whigs
and Tories were debating whether and what measures to introduce. Bagehot’s book
was partly a contribution to this debate.

He spends much time trying to demolish the case for a big extension of the vote. He
believed it would only increase aristocratic landowning power in the countryside

(county constituencies) and corruption in the towns (borough constituencies). He
also feared that “rich and cultivated voters” would be swamped by working class
votes. His solution was to resurrect the pre-1832 practice of “fancy franchises”. 1832
had made voting uniform across the country. Bagehot acknowledged that the wealth-
creating North deserved more recognition in the Parliament, and he proposed to do
this by transferring parliamentary seats from the sparsely-populated boroughs to the
growing cities (as had happened in 1832). But then it gets complicated; he proposed
extending the right to vote, but only in the cities. Further, each city would have three
MPs and each voter three votes, all three of which must be given to any one of the

three candidates. This he believed would give the working classes some power, but