Studies Class Struct Ils 121 by G. D. H. Cole

Author:G. D. H. Cole [Cole, G. D. H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781299812680
Goodreads: 18549673
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

V

Élites in British Society

I. INTRODUCTORY

WHO really governs Great Britain to-day—in 1955? The ‘Government’, in the narrowest sense of the term, has been for four years in the hands of the leaders of a single political party—the Conservative Party—and before that was for six years in the hands of its principal rival—the Labour Party. Before that, it had been for five years in the hands of a wartime Coalition, with a Conservative Prime Minister, but with the leading members of the Labour Party occupying the key economic positions in home affairs. Before that, again, it had been in the hands of the Conservative Party, and before that of a ‘National’ Government in which the Conservatives held a clear preponderance over other parties. Before that … but what profits it to go back through the record of successive one-party or coalition Governments? For assuredly, in the sense which concerns us in this study, not one of these Governments ‘governed’ Great Britain in any exclusive sense. They were no more than the highest executive authority in a structure of government of which they formed only a part—and not even, from the standpoint of the political theorist, the sociologist, or the historian, necessarily the most important part.

Take, then, the word ‘government’ in a rather wider sense, to include the legislature as well as the executive. Great Britain lives under a theoretically unlimited system of ‘Parliamentary Government’. There is, in theory, no limit to what the British Parliament—made up of King, Lords, and Commons—can do. There is no written constitution, no formal safeguard against the exercise of parliamentary power. Parliament is free, in theory, to pass what laws it pleases and to set up what authorities it pleases to administer its laws. The judges, individually and collectively, are without any constitutional power to stand out against, or to disallow, anything Parliament makes law. They can interpret the law, including not only Statute Law but also Common Law, which is not created by statute; but they can do this only subject to the power of Parliament to make and order the execution of statutes which override the Common Law. Parliament is ‘sovereign’, if that much-abused word means anything: it has made a king, and it could abolish the monarchy—though constitutionally only with the Crown’s consent, for the Crown is a part of Parliament, and no Bill can become an Act unless the Crown accepts it. But we are still moving, plainly, in a realm of unrealities, or of half-realities at best; for Parliament, no more than the executive Government, can claim in fact to ‘govern’ Great Britain in any exclusive sense.

The subject of this study is not, save quite incidentally, the formal constitutional structure of government in Great Britain, but the actual disposition of political and social forces that determines the conditions within which Governments, in the narrower sense, govern, within which Parliament makes the laws and in some degree watches over their administration, and within which the entire complex structure of social life works. In

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