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Labour’s Great Britain: Remodeling Westminster

© Peter Weber

The European integration is even changing the Rule of Law tradition. Under Tony Blair the British government has signed several European conventions, for instance on Human Rights. Thus British judges will now have to sentence even on the base of laws that have not been issued by the House of Commons. Conflicts between legislative and judicial power seem therefore more likely and the introduction of a Constitutional Court could become a necessity.

No choice in foreign politics

To the great displeasure of the Euroskeptics in the Conservative Party, Blair's New Labour and their potential coalition partner, the Liberal-Democrats, have shown little doubt about European integration and are preparing to move Great Britain even closer into the European Union. But the progress in European integration risks to alter even the traditions of British foreign politics, where London is trying to maintain its special relationship with the United States. Lately the EU has appointed NATO's former secretary-general Javier Solana its first foreign-affairs "high-representative" and now the European partners are planning to form a special force for military action. Even these efforts are based on intergovernmental cooperation. Yet Tony Blair seems to think that there is actually no need for Britain to choose between its Atlantic and its European partners.

Thus New Labour's majority at Westminster is passing power upwards to Brussels, downwards to the new parliaments and governments in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, to the regional authorities and the city councils and sideways to the central bank and eventually the House of Lords. Under pressure from the European Union's growing interference into British life as well as from the general effects of market globalization, the Blair administration is at the same time looking for "a new constitutional settlement" in London. To pay the price for these changes is especially the former sovereign of British politics, the all-powerful central parliament.

Can the center hold ?

"With the big exception of Ireland, Britain has for 300 years managed political change in a relatively undramatic way. It has been better than mainland Europe at producing successful representative institutions", writes the Economist. Britain remained enviably stable "...because it has been governed pragmatically, by politicians prepared to adapt the system in response to popular pressure - for example in the series of reform acts, which widened the franchise and ushered in mass democracy". The rationalism and pragmatism of British reform politics has indeed been admired as well as the political stability of the country. But now the British state itself is under threat, from below (by the new nationalism in Scotland and Wales) and from above (the supranational institutions of the European Union), and at the same time the government system is undergoing a serious rearrangement. With the parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales new and fresh, but partly unpredictable elements have already been introduced into British politics, moving the country closer to Continental political traditions. Soon even the traditional Westminster-model of two alternative parties in government and opposition could be changed forever.