‘Party is a body of men united, for promoting the national interest’
On Edmund Burke’s arrival in London, he rapidly acquired the contacts to fulfil his many ambitions. Called to the bar, he made a connection as a Middle Templar with John Hatsell, only four years his junior.
Burke’s comÂmand of the English language was well rewarded in an era in which the well-turned phrase mattered a great deal to one’s career.Burke advocated a role for parties in political society. Burke’s remarks - drawn from his essay Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) - introduced this theme. ‘Party is a body of men united for promotÂing by their joint endeavours the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed’.42 In Burke’s Speech to the Bristol Electors (1774), he denied that a parliamentary constituency could instruct its member of the House of Commons on issues which that member was likely to encounter.
Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a repreÂsentative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.43
Constituency instructions, Burke declared, treated a member as if he were a child-agent.
Instructions reduced a legislator to the level of a solicitor, banker or commercial agent. If instructions were in place, voters would be empowered to anticipate their own - and necessarily virtual - role in parliaÂmentary law-making. And if voters regarded themselves as licensed to parÂticipate in decision-making without participating in the debate (and taking‘The eternal rules of justice and reason’ 63 the risks that accompany this participation), their voice, Burke concluded, must be treated as a potentially destabilising threat to political society.
In the place of constituency instructions, Burke favoured this alternative: Commons would manage the relationship between members and the House via deployment of Standing Orders (of the House) and Parliamentary lawÂmaking. I have already mentioned Grenville’s Act (1770). This law brought a measure of reform to Commons’ procedures governing election contests. A total of 17 Acts of Parliament may be gathered under the rubric Burkean reforms. In the first wave of support for the reformer’s programs, Burke and his allies induced Commons to pass legislation, such as Crewe’s Act and Clerke’s Act (1782). These enactments may be taken as an attempt to frame and bolster the trust relationship between members and their conÂstituency electorates. The principal method employed was the regulation of dual office-holding; this was supplemented by nascent attempts to enact a measure of campaign finance reform.44 Commons’ oversight responsibility for government assets and transactions will be touched on shortly.
Political reform evolved to a higher level of maturity when the King’s excessive spending brought the monarch’s domination of constituency elecÂtions under the microscope. In Burke’s Speech On The Plan For EconomiÂcal Reformation (1780) Burke elevated the ‘demands of the people, whose desires, when they do not militate with the stable and eternal rules of justice and reason (rules which are above us, and above them) ought to be as a law to a House of Commons’.45 This was no rhetorical flourish.
The appeal to the ‘demands of the people’ framed Burke’s program of reforming the nation’s ‘political circumstances’. This program worked hand-in-glove with Burke’s related program to elevate the House of Commons so that it played the preeminent role in overseeing public finance. David Bromwich’s The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke underscores the threat posed bythe King surrounding himself with a sinister and corrupt set of helpers who are given legitimacy and financial buoyancy by nothing but their sinecures.46
The trust relationship, according to Burke, commenced when the member candidly confessed to the electorate, in my paraphrase: ‘I offer to go to Westminster and do my best on behalf of you, my constituents, taken as a sample of the nation’s inhabitants’. Burke thus assured his electors to this effect: ‘Trust me when I say that neither you nor the King will make an agent for any purpose’.
The aspirational goal here was clear to Edmund Burke. Progress was to be measured by the vitality of discourse in political society.