A rule book for the reform club

Power and the People by Vernon Bogdanor, Gollancz, pounds 16.99

Vernon Bogdanor is the doyen of academic constitutional reformers. His study of the devolution imbroglio of the Seventies still holds the field. He has published wisely and voluminously on the referendum, the electoral system and the monarchy. Unlike many academics, he has also forayed repeatedly into the grubby world beyond the monastery walls, serving on a multitude of working parties and commissions of inquiry. His manner is dry, worldly wise, even, at times, a little cynical. But beneath the cool Whig carapace there beats, I suspect, a radical heart. It is responsible for the fundamental assumptions of this book.

On one level Bogdanor's latest offering is merely a canter - spirited, but not particularly surprising - through a familiar reform agenda. There are chapters on devolution, electoral reform, the House of Lords, the funding of political parties, the referendum and the monarchy. All of these are full of sound sense. Rightly, Bogdanor believes that, so far from threatening the Union, devolution offers the best hope of saving it. Had the British political class been more generous about Irish devolution before 1914, he points out, what is now the Republic of Ireland would almost certainly still be part of the United Kingdom.

As for the famous West Lothian question, this tells us more about the knee-jerk centralism of the southern English establishment than about the facts of the case. In the other large countries of the European Union, all of which have strong regional government, nothing of the sort arises. There is no West Catalan question in Spain or West Sardinian question in Italy.

He is equally perceptive about electoral reform. In common with virtually all electoral reformers, he is passionately in favour of proportional representation. But he recognises that proportionality should not be the sole objective of a reformed system. The point is to empower the voters, not, as is sometimes imagined, to do justice to minority parties. List systems that make the choice of MP a matter for the party machines may achieve mathematical proportionality, but at the price of giving even more power to party apparatchiki.

The single transferable vote, which enables the voters to choose not just between parties, but between different candidates of the same party, is therefore the best alternative to the present system, even though it does not necessarily deliver a truly proportional result. If we are to have a list system, we must make sure that it is one in which voters can choose between different candidates on the same list as well as between lists.

At this point, the Whig carapace and the radical heart come together. Central to Bogdanor's approach is a commitment to an ethic of civic activism and a corresponding vision of participatory politics. He wants to give power to the people because he believes - surely correctly - that empowerment is a precondition of participation. Unlike some constitutional reformers, however, he knows that power is not infinitely expandable. If the people are to be empowered, someone else will have to be disempowered. Bogdanor has no doubt who that should be. Absolute parliamentary sovereignty, the keystone of Britain's uncodified constitution, he argues, amounts in practice to absolute party sovereignty. The real object of reform is to replace party sovereignty with popular sovereignty: to break the monopoly of increasingly unrepresentative and illegitimate party politicians.

I'm sure he's right. But the implications are more disconcerting than even he appears to realise. The British system of unlimited party-ocracy was always deeply flawed. In the post-war period, however, the parties were at least connected to real social forces, and spoke for deeply held values embedded in historic institutions. Today's parties are disembodied, cut off from the society they hope to rule, a prey to capture by zealots and manipulation by their own elites. As such, they are deeply and increasingly distrusted. But the weaker their support from the wider society, the more they depend on the party-ocratic life-support system that constitutional reform would dismantle. In the Eighties and early Nineties, this syndrome was manifested most obviously in the Conservative Party. Anyone who thinks that New Labour is immune should ponder the Stalinist discipline it has imposed on its own rank and file.

DM