The problems of PR

Two centuries ago, Edmund Burke famously mocked the intellectuals of revolutionary France for trying to devise a perfectly rational constitution for their country. The Abbé Sieyès, he wrote, had

whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions, ready made, ticketed, sorted and numbered, suited to every season and every fancy . . . so that no constitution-fancier may go unsuited from his shop.

The Abbé Sieyès has had his imitators in England lately. The last government devoted much intellectual energy and parliamentary time to producing a theoretical separation of the judiciary from the legislature and the executive, when a practical separation had existed for years. The current coalition has devoted at least as much attention to the organisation and membership of the legislature: a smaller House of Commons, an elected House of Lords, fixed-term parliaments, equal constituencies, the alternative vote.

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All of this has proved to be of consuming interest to the political classes, and of none whatever to the population at large. The contrast was painfully demonstrated in the referendum on the alternative vote. Nearly 60 per cent of the electorate did not trouble to vote. An overwhelming majority of those who did, voted for no change, mainly, it seems, because the alternative vote, for all its rationality as a method of conveying voting preferences, seemed too clever by half. It needed too much explanation. Refinement and rationality are obviously not qualities that the British look for in their constitutions. Perhaps we are all Burkeans now.

It would be unfair to call Vernon Bogdanor the Abbé Sieyès de nos jours. But he is undoubtedly a considerable authority on constitutions generally and the British one in particular. He has been a great figure in the Oxford politics school for as long as the mind of man can reckon, the present Prime Minister being one of his better known pupils.