Now that the Scottish referendum is behind us, we should encourage our representatives to think seriously about the mirror which it held up to our democracy.
I worked in Scotland in the eighties and nineties, and am clear that at the time the English had no idea how outraged the Scots were that a Tory government for which comparatively few Scots had voted felt it right to impose the poll tax. The issue was, I think, not the tax itself, but a belief that so controversial and partisan a measure ought not to be imposed by a democratic government without either severe necessity, or else a good deal of popular support (this feeling may have something to do with the 30 years of consensus government which followed the Second World War, which seems to have become more embedded in Scottish culture than in English).
Recently, many broadcast interviews with Scots who planned to vote “Yes” showed that they had reacted similarly to the latest round of what they often saw as doctrinaire conservatism. Time and again Scots cited the bedroom tax, where many Tories do not seem able to grasp that whatever its intended merits its implementation has been widely seen as clumsy to the point of brutality, and as further harshened by a social housing famine precipitated by earlier Tory policies. Scottish voters also repeatedly talked of the NHS – not I think because they were unaware that it is a devolved issue, but out of shock at the pre-election promise not to reorganise (in England) being followed by a post-election reorganisation “so big you could see it from space”, coupled with a Westminster consensus about the privatisation of delivery which seemed to have been imposed without debate.
We should not need to look as far as Iraq to realise that parliamentary democracy is not really Hailsham’s “elective dictatorship”, but a place where the party in power must rule for all the people, not just for those who voted them in. Whatever the noise and fury in the House of Commons itself, our governments need to listen to those they disagree with, and to judge generously how far they should insist on their own preferences and prejudices.
We have developed a deep common culture of parliamentary democracy since the seventeenth century, and it has brought us in these islands huge benefits. But it will not withstand too much abuse: it needs to be cherished. Westminster politicians should not forget the anxious haste with which they rushed north of the Border when the polls began to suggest that the referendum would go wrong. They need to learn a lesson from it, a lesson in humility. If we cannot sustain the ability to listen charitably to our opponents, and to give as well as to take, then in the long run the democracy we prize so much will dry up and fail.
Mark O'Sullivan, Bath
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