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18 Jun, 4 tweets, 1 min read
In the days before opinion polls, by-elections were the only tool parties had for testing public opinion in the middle of a Parliament. It's no wonder they were so often astonished by what happened at General Elections!
By-elections used to happen more often. Between 1832 & 1914 there were more than 2,600 by-elections - about thirty a year. In the 1852-57 Parliament, 1 in 3 constituencies had a by-election. So the balance of parties in the Commons could shift radically between general elections
Arguably, that made Parlt more sensitive to changes across the electoral cycle. The Conservative & Unionist Party saw its majority fall by c.60 seats over the 1900-05 Parlt, through defections & by-elections. A party elected with a landslide in 1900 could no longer govern by 1905
So if you enjoyed the contests in Hartlepool and Chesham and Amersham, imagine 28 more by-elections this year. @lewis_goodall would be in heaven!

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Robert Saunders Profile picture
19 Jun
The Lord Chancellor, Robert Buckland, warned this week that "the rule of law" must not "be misused to weaponise the courts against political decision-making". This is an excellent response by @GeorgePeretzQC (read the replies by @DinahRoseQC, too). Some thoughts of my own follow.
Buckland frames the govt's reform agenda as part of a programme to “restore trust” in the constitution. That’s a noble goal, but in practice it means that one party is rewriting the rules of Britain’s democracy against the opposition of every other. That cannot be safe or healthy
As usual, criticism of the courts is framed as a defence of Parliament. It's an admirable sentiment, but if the executive is "the servant of Parlt", why was it shut down in 2019? Why is it not allowed to vote on cuts to the aid budget? Why was it sidelined in the Covid crisis?
Read 10 tweets
Robert Saunders Profile picture
16 Jun
Chart of the day from @EdConwaySky. A reminder that UK trade with Australia & NZ was falling vertiginously in the 20 years *before* the UK joined the EEC. European integration was more a *response* to the decline of imperial trade patterns than their cause news.sky.com/story/why-the-…
The belief that Britain could rebuild its economy on the basis of Commonwealth trade was partly why it didn't join the EEC at the start. But that hope had withered long before Britain applied for entry, as Commonwealth markets diversified, sterling weakened &Eur economies revived
By 1975, Commonwealth govts were keener on using the UK as an entry point to the EEC market than on restoring old preferences. Australia's Gough Whitlam urged GB not to "lapse into the position of Spain", with "a mighty empire in the past & a peripheral influence for the future".
Read 4 tweets
Robert Saunders Profile picture
15 Jun
Gladstone on the Irish Nationalist leader, Charles Stewart Parnell: "the most remarkable man I ever met".

Quite a compliment from a man whose acquaintance included the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, Benjamin Disraeli, Cavour, Garibaldi, Charles Darwin, Tennyson & JS Mill.
Gladstone's daughter, Mary Drew, was distraught when Parnell's relationship with a married woman was exposed in court. Home Rule had become a holy cause, unfit to be touched by "soiled hands".
Gladstone wanted Parnell to retire from public life altogether once the affair was exposed - so that he could return a few years later. "There ought to have been a death, but there would have been a resurrection". (An extraordinary comparison for a man of Gladstone's faith).
Read 4 tweets
Robert Saunders Profile picture
14 Jun
Downing Street is spinning that it wanted to talk to "the people", not to "Parliament". But there is only one institution in the UK that "the people" actually elect. A government that locks Parliament out of decision-making is denying "the people" their democratic rights.
Under the UK system, a govt with a majority can expect to dominate the Commons. But this govt consistently goes further: on Covid, Brexit and international aid it has repeatedly tried to exclude Parliament from decision-making altogether. That has serious democratic implications.
At the 2019 Election 285 constituencies elected MPs from Opposition parties. Those MPs - and, indeed, rebel Tories - have democratic mandates too. They can legitimately be outvoted. But they can not legitimately be denied the chance to vote at all, or to hold ministers to account
Read 4 tweets
Robert Saunders Profile picture
7 Jun
On this day in 1886, the House of Commons rejected Gladstone's first great Home Rule Bill, which would have restored an Irish Parliament and government in Dublin.

Years later George V told his prime minister, "What fools we were not to have accepted Gladstone's Home Rule Bill".
"We have arrived at a stage", Gladstone warned, "where two roads part, one from the other". One led to tyranny & war; the other to partnership & self-govt. That became a stock Home Rule image, with Gladstone offering the olive branch of peace & the Tories the manacles of coercion
Home Rule shattered the Liberal Party, creating a new "Liberal Unionist" movt. John Bright declared that "Home Rule means Rome Rule", while Joe Chamberlain warned of "a new foreign country less than 30 miles from our shores, animated with unfriendly intentions towards ourselves".
Read 6 tweets
Robert Saunders Profile picture
23 May
Since it's currently open season on the BBC, it's worth contrasting Priti Patel's remarks with her own government's Integrated Review of Security & Foreign Policy - which has some rather different things to say about the BBC & other institutions under ministerial attack. [THREAD]
2. The Integrated Review describes the BBC (twice) as "the most trusted broadcaster in the world". Its global reach is cited, proudly, as evidence that Britain is a "soft-power superpower", with its "independent" journalism making the UK a champion of "press and media freedom".
3. All that sits a little uneasily with a govt that was boycotting the BBC's main news outlets when the pandemic began, that's cut funding for the World Service & repeatedly accuses the BBC of left-wing bias. But that's one of many paradoxes in the Review. theguardian.com/media/2019/dec…
Read 7 tweets

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