Parliamentary Corruption

The present House of Commons in session. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

During the last month there has been much talk in the UK news about sleaze or political corruption. On 3 November MPs voted by a narrow majority to reform the rules on parliamentary lobbying. This was widely seen as a means of saving Owen Paterson, the Tory MP for North Shropshire, from a 30-day suspension from Parliament after he had been accused of using his position as an MP to benefit two companies for which he worked. It was only the furore this provoked among the press and the public that led Boris Johnson to execute a U-turn, announcing a fresh debate on Paterson's suspension and a willingness to gain cross-party support for the reform of the disciplinary procedure for MPs. While Paterson has subsequently resigned as an MP, this case brought to the surface questionable behaviour by other members of the House of Commons. On 10 November Sir Geoffrey Cox came under scrutiny for the legal work that he carries out alongside his parliamentary responsibilities - including for the British Virgin Islands. Not only had Cox made an agreement to vote by proxy while carrying out work in the Caribbean, but it was also alleged that he had held meetings relating to his legal role from his office in Parliament. The former was within the rules, the latter was not. In response the health secretary Sajid Javid defended the right of MPs to have second jobs, but also made clear that they should not be using Commons' facilities for extra-parliamentary work and insisted that they ought to be devoting the vast majority of their time to their constituents.

Of course parliamentary corruption is nothing new. In the eighteenth century there was concern, particularly among those who called themselves commonwealthmen, about the dangers posed by corrupt MPs, those whose commitment to the public good was called into question because they were subject to other influences. Then, however, the main source of this corruption was not second jobs (most MPs were 'gentlemen' who did not 'work') but rather the monarch and his or her ministers who sought to influence the decisions of the House by putting their own creatures (known as placemen) into the Commons or by offering pensions to those who held office. Yet, despite the difference in the source of the corruption, its significance remains the same.

Portrait of John Toland. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

In the context of the 1698 election campaign, the commonwealthman John Toland produced a short pamphlet entitled The Danger of Mercenary Parliaments. There he argued that a House of Commons filled with officers and court pensioners was a threat to English liberties, pointing out that such a House could not fulfil its role within the constitution. Is it possible, he asked, that 'our Grievances can be redrest, that are committed by Persons from whom there is no higher Power to appeal?' Can there be 'any hope of Justice where the Malefactors are the Judges?' Will the public accounts be 'faithfully inspected by those who embezzle our mony to their own use?' (John Toland, The Danger of Mercenary Parliaments. London, 1698, p. 2). The answers, Toland insisted, were obvious. Indeed he went so far as to suggest that 'all the Calamities and Distractions under which the whole Nation at present groans' were due to 'that bare-fac'd and openly avow'd Corruption, which, like a universal Leprosy, has so notoriously infected and overspread both our Court and Parliament.' (Toland, Danger of Mercenary Parliaments, p. 3).

The only solution, Toland insisted, was to choose MPs who would act according to 'no other motives but the real and true Interest of his Majesty and his Dominions; a Parliament that will fall unanimously upon publick Business, and be free from those petty Factions and personal Piques which in the late Session so shamefully obstructed and delay'd the most importance Service of the Commonwealth.' This required all MPs to be 'subject to the Laws, and to some Power on Earth that may call them to account for their misbehaviours, that they may not be their own judges' (Toland, Danger of Mercenary Parliaments, p. 6). It was, therefore, up to the electors in the forthcoming election to disappoint the 'unreasonable and exorbitant hopes' of those corrupt MPs 'and to spew them out as detestable Members of the Commonwealth; not only as unfit to be trusted with their Liberties, but as unworthy to breath in the air of a Free Government' (Toland, Danger of Mercenary Parliaments, p. 7). Toland was clear that the fact that elections were now held every three years helped in this regard, providing electors with frequent opportunities to hold their MPs to account. Today, of course, general elections are less frequent, meaning that the point made in defence of Geoffrey Cox - that his constituents could vote him out if they were unhappy with his behaviour - does not feel like an adequate solution.

However, Toland's optimism that the problem would be resolved at the forthcoming election was misplaced. More than forty years later, in the context of yet another election campaign, the Scottish writer John Campbell again expressed concern that individual MPs were being diverted by bribes, posts, and pensions and were attached to private interests rather than to the public good. Without banishing corruption, he insisted, 'the Nation never can be out of Trouble, never free from Danger' (John Campbell, Liberty and Right. London, 1747, p. 45).

Campbell recognised that simply relying on electors to make sensible choices was not enough. He therefore proposed two further remedies. First, he called for MPs to be paid a salary (so that they would not be vulnerable to offers of money from elsewhere). Clearly this is no solution to the problems of parliamentary corruption today, since MPs already earn a substantial salary and yet some still have second jobs - though perhaps we should be challenging their right to do so. Surely a job that brings a salary of £81,932 per year (more than 3 times the UK average) is a full-time job that requires the complete attention of the person holding it.

The House of Commons in session in the eighteenth century. Image from Wikimedia Commons

In addition, Campbell linked the corruption of Parliament to the fact that MPs could continue to sit 'one Parliament after another' taking for 'themselves the principal Honours, Places, and Posts of the Country; while Men of Equal, or more extensive Abilities, remain unimploy'd'. (Campbell, Liberty and Right, p. 60). Against this practice he insisted that corruption could only be banished and the public interest secured by frequent and periodic changes to the representative body. In a proposal that clearly owed much to James Harrington's ideas, Campbell insisted that each year one third of the MPs in the House of Commons should be removed and replaced, with those retiring required to spend at least three years out of office before being eligible for re-election.

Not for the first time I am led by current events to think that we have something to learn from the writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who recognised that in order to secure good government in the public interest it is necessary to have robust systems of accountability. Without these, many will resort to acting in their own rather than the public interest. As Toland and Campbell realised, even those in Parliament must be forced to live under the laws that they make and must not be allowed to act as judges in their own case. How disappointing that, even after three hundred years, we still do not seem to have learned this lesson.

The Inspiration Behind Oceana: 6. Sir John Fortescue

James Harrington is often seen as an aristocratic republican who like others in that tradition placed power in the hands of a narrow political élite. It is certainly true that he believed that within every society there was a natural aristocracy whose members were 'wiser, or at least less foolish, than all the rest' (James Harrington The Commonwealth of Oceana and A System of Politics, ed J. G. A. Pocock, Cambridge, p. 23). For this reason, in his constitutional system, he insisted that only the senate should debate legislation, the lower house being restricted to voting to accept or reject the senate's proposals. Yet his views were more complicated than this might suggest. As noted in last month's post, he was explicitly committed, via the mechanism of an agrarian law, to ensuring that landed property within the country did not become concentrated in the hands of a few, but would in future be relatively evenly spread among the population. Moreover, he was emphatic that his natural aristocracy was determined not by birth, but by wealth and election, embracing the role that social mobility could play within society. 

Harrington's relative political inclusivity is encapsulated in his manipulation of the traditional idea of the body politic. He was innovative in how he used that metaphor, subverting an idea conventionally used to shore up kingship so as to support democratic government. (The full case for Harrington's democratic credentials is made in my forthcoming book). Yet, novel as his conception was, it was indebted to the ideas of the fifteenth-century legal and political theorist Sir John Fortescue.

Sir John Fortescue by William Faithorne, line engraving, published 1663. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License from the National Portrait Gallery - NPG D22739.

Fortescue, who lived c.1395-1477, was a key figure in the government and judiciary of fifteenth-century England, serving as MP eight times between 1421 and 1436 and being made Chief Justice of the King's Bench in January 1442. Exiled following the defeat of the Lancastrians under Henry VI at the Battle of Towton (1461), Fortescue ploughed his extensive knowledge and experience into works such as In Praise of the Laws of England. Having repudiated his former support for the Lancastrians following the Battle of Tewkesbury (1471), he was pardoned and presented his work The Governance of England to King Edward IV.

In his works Fortescue employed the metaphor of the body politic. Though the use of this idea dates back to Plato and Aristotle, the understanding of the concept in the early modern period owed much to medieval developments. An analogy was drawn between the human body and the state (and within it usually between the head and the king) and both were generally viewed as microcosms of a divinely inspired natural order

Fortescue was crucial in adapting the metaphor to fit the particularities of the English system. His major contribution to political thought was to contrast 'royal dominion', which he associated with continental nations, and especially France, with the 'political and royal dominion' of England. As he explained at the beginning of The Governance of England:

There are two kinds of kingdoms, one of which is a lordship called in Latin dominium regale, and the other is called dominium politicum et regale. And they differ in that the first king may rule his people by such laws as he makes himself and therefore he may set upon them taxes and other impositions, such as he wills himself, without their assent. The second king may not rule his people by other laws than such as they assent to and therefore he may set upon them no impositions without their own assent. (Sir John Fortescue, The Governance of England, in On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood, Cambridge, 1997, p. 83).

This understanding required Fortescue to adapt the conventional notion of the body politic. He accepted that a people cannot constitute a body without a head, and therefore when a people 'wills to erect itself into a kingdom or any other body politic' it 'must always set up one man for the government of all that body' (Fortescue, In Praise of the Laws of England, p. 20). Nevertheless, he insisted that the body was prior to the head, drawing on Aristotle's theory about the heart being the first part of the body to be formed: 

And just as in the body natural, as the Philosopher said, the heart is the first living thing, having in itself the blood which it sends forth to all the members, whereby they are quickened and live, so in the body politic the intention of the people is the first living thing, having in it the blood, namely, political provision for the interest of the people, which it transmits to the head and all the members of the body, by which the body is nourished and quickened. (Fortescue, In Praise of the Laws of England, pp. 20-1).

The heart, representing the people, is then both prior to the head and crucial for giving life to the whole. Moreover, Fortescue likened the laws of a nation to the sinews of the physical body in their capacity to hold that organism together. And he argued that just as the head of a physical body cannot change its sinews 'or deny its members proper strength and due nourishment of the blood' so a king could not change the laws or deprive the people 'of their own substance uninvited or against their wills' (Fortescue, In Praise of the Laws of England, p. 21).

Harrington's articulation of the body politic analogy combined Fortescue's insights with observations based on William Harvey's theory regarding the circulation of the blood (which I discussed in more detail in an earlier post):

So the parliament is the heart which, consisting of two ventricles, the one greater and replenished with a grosser store, the other less and full of a purer, sucketh in and gusheth forth the life blood of Oceana by a perpetual circulation (Harrington, Oceana, p. 174).

The frontispiece to William Harvey, Exercitatio Anatomica Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (Florence, 1928). Reproduced from a copy held in the Special Collections department of the Robinson Library, Newcastle University. Pybus X.v.09.

Here the heart represents not simply the people, but specifically the legislature. In addition Harrington, like Fortescue, emphasises the role of the blood, though he uses this to justify his theory of rotation of office. Just as blood moves around the body being constantly replenished but never completely replaced, so rotation ensures that the popular element of the political system is continually in existence and yet regularly renewed. Harrington's account of the body politic, then, builds on that of Fortescue, but pushes it in a more democratic direction through the emphasis on rotation and the associated idea that all should rule and be ruled in turn. At the same time, using that metaphor and associating the legislature with the heart, implied that there would still be a single figurehead at the apex of the system. In Oceana that position was to be held by the Lord Archon, a role that Harrington appears to have designed for Oliver Cromwell. Yet, just like Fortescue, Harrington insisted that such a ruler had to be constrained by the laws.

Harrington's body politic metaphor thus encapsulates the complexity of his system. While he was clearly influenced by classical and Renaissance thinkers from the republican tradition, their ideas were combined with native legal perspectives such as that offered by Fortescue. Similarly, Harrington's republicanism was not simply aristocratic, but also incorporated important democratic and monarchical elements. While some republicans were intent on securing the rule of a narrow political élite, the recent tendency to see that as the republican position and, consequently, to dismiss the insights that republicanism could offer us today is a mistake. The republican tradition was not uniform. Competing views were expressed by its exponents and it was flexible and adaptable. It has the potential to offer a more open and democratic vision of government, one that could serve us in the twenty-first century.

A New Utopia: Oceana for the 21st Century

Frontispiece to James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana in The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington, ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Private copy.

George Monbiot's book Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis calls for the creation of a "politics of belonging". He is not the only person to suggest, in recent months, that a new way of thinking about politics is required. These calls have prompted me to think again about the utopian character of James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana. 

Historians have long debated whether Oceana should be labelled as a utopia at all, partly because it was very clearly intended as a practical model for a specific place and time. Yet Colin Davis, author of Utopia and the Ideal Society, sees this as precisely one of the key features of a utopia. Davis argues that what distinguishes utopias from other conceptions of the ideal society is their acceptance that limited resources are exposed to unlimited desires: 'The utopian's method is not to wish away the disharmony implicit within the collective problem, as the other ideal-society types do, but to organise society and its institutions in such a way as to contain the problem's effects.' (Colin Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing 1516-1700, Cambridge, 1981, pp. 37-8). This kind of model, one that takes human society as it is and offers practical solutions to human problems - and yet pushes beyond the framework of the current system - is precisely what we need just now. So what would an Oceana for the twenty-first century look like?

It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog that, in the first place, my twenty-first century Oceana would seek to challenge the idea that politics is the preserve of a distinct political class. Harrington, following Aristotle, believed every citizen should rule and be ruled in turn. He also insisted that human nature dictated that individuals who held power for long periods of time (however good and virtuous they were in the first place) would inevitably become corrupt. Harrington's solution was the rotation of office, with representatives being in post for three years before standing down and being ineligible for re-election for a similar term. Something like this system could be introduced in the UK Parliament. Of course there are problems that would need to be addressed. Being effectively made redundant after three years may deter certain individuals (perhaps particularly the poorest) from standing at all, so jobs would need to be held open and provision made to support those retiring from office. But the potential advantages of politics being an activity in which most citizens engage at some point, rather than the preserve of a political élite, are significant.

Thirteenth order of Harrington's Oceana on the agrarian law.

Another central tenet of Harrington's political programme was the preservation of an equitable division of land within the nation. This was necessary to maintain a balance of property, and hence of power, suitable for commonwealth government. Harrington sought to achieve this through his agrarian law, which required those owning large tracts of land to divide their estate more equally among their children. While land is still a crucial source of the wealth of the super-rich, it has largely been replaced by money as the basis of power. My concern here is not with the redistribution of property in either its landed or monetary form, but rather with the means by which the majority of us earn our money. Work is currently divided in ways that are uneven, creating unhappiness both among those who have too much and those who have too little. Earlier this year the New Zealand trustee company Perpetual Guardian initiated a six-week trial in which its employees were to work four days a week while being paid for five, and in this country the Autonomy Institute has called for the implementation of a four-day week. I am one of a growing number of parents who have made the  switch to working four days a week. While there is a danger (for those of us doing four days' work for four days' pay) of succumbing to the tendency to do five days' work in four, my experience is that a four-day week makes for a better work-life balance, for those able to take it. There are also potential benefits for others since, in my own and many other professions, a large number of highly talented young people are struggling to get their feet on the career ladder. If more people worked fewer days a week then more positions would open up for junior staff. Of course, employers may well complain that it would create a less efficient system. But we could off-set the inefficiencies of having to employ more staff against the efficiencies gained from workers being less tired, more motivated, and less susceptible to stress and its associated health problems. Nor should this change in work patterns be available only to professionals. A wholesale reconsideration of what constitutes a working week ought to address changes and benefits that can be brought to all workers.

Finally, Harrington's commitment to healing and settling a divided nation could be developed for the twenty-first century. As I demonstrated in a previous blogpost, he insisted that peace could only be established in post-civil war England if those on both sides of the royalist-parliamentarian divide were allowed to engage equally as citizens. He was also a strong advocate of religious toleration, insisting that no-one's right to citizenship or to hold office should be rescinded on the basis of religious belief. The Brexit Referendum, along with the debates at home and negotiations in Europe that have followed, have created deep divisions in our society. As a result, we too are in need of healing and settling. I suggest, though, that the solution for us lies less in extending citizenship to those who are currently excluded than in making political citizenship more substantial.

John Milton by William Faithorne, line engraving, 1670. National Portrait Gallery NPG D22856. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License.

One way of doing this would be to encourage open debate about key issues. This might be seen as going against Harrington's ideas, in that his popular assembly was not allowed to discuss legislative proposals - he worried that popular political debate would lead to anarchy. Yet he saw debate by the Senate as crucial to the political process, and he did not want to prevent popular debate from taking place outside the popular assembly. Moreover, in several of his writings he expressed the idea that greater knowledge would arise from the debating of issues, even suggesting that his model constitution would be improved by others examining and criticising it. There is an echo here of Milton's notion from Areopagitica that good ideas will inevitably win out if free debate is allowed to flourish. If we could create opportunities at all levels of society for free, open and constructive political debate involving those of different political views, perhaps we could construct a society that is more open, tolerant, and better informed.

Sir Thomas More, after Hans Holbein the Younger, early C17 based on a work of 1527. National Portrait Gallery, NPG 4358. Reproduced under a Creative Commons License.

Of course, what I have offered here is not a utopia but just three proposals inspired by Oceana. A further distinguishing feature of utopias, noted by Davis, is that they are conceived as total schemes. In the early modern era this was often achieved by setting the utopia on a distant island, as Thomas More did in the work that gave its name to the genre. This reflected a fascination with the, as yet not fully charted nature of the globe at that time. While, like More, Harrington was writing a utopia for England, he indicated the intended location more overtly, the fictional guise he employed simply signalled a concern with England as it ought to be rather than as it actually was. Today, the obvious place to situate a utopia would be in the virtual realm. Moreover, with the right software one might even be able to play out the consequences of such a system, as is done in disaster scenario planning (and as Harrington attempted to do in a more basic form in the corollary to Oceana). Perhaps my next step, after my Harrington book has been delivered to the publisher, should be to construct a Harringtonian 'digitopia'.