Right, Left, Right… Halt!
Legend has it that the two sides of the UK House of Commons are separated by two sword-lengths, to prevent heated arguments from turning into physical fights.
And no wonder. Business in the House of Commons is frequently heated: a tit-for-tat verbal battle of arguments and insults, blaming “the other side”, often with little objective reason.
Members of Parliament are elected to represent constituencies whose needs and political desires are many and varied. But that isn’t how they usually conduct business in the Mother of Parliaments.
Broadly speaking, they vote with their political party: Labour or Conservative, seated on opposite sides of the chamber in an adversarial formation.
Even our familiar political labels, Right and Left, derive from seating arrangements. During the French Revolution, supporters of the monarchy, aristocracy and established order sat to the right of the presiding officer in the National Assembly, while supporters of revolutionary change sat to the left.
More than two centuries later, we are still marching Right, Left, Right.
Of course, we also have parties which occupy various positions between the two. But British government has overwhelmingly alternated between Labour and Conservative, and our political system continues to encourage us to think in terms of two opposing sides.
That becomes increasingly unsatisfactory when we look at what those sides actually say they want.
None of us can take in all the information which bombards us in this modern age. Newspapers, television, radio, social media, endless inescapable advertisements and gossip cover every imaginable topic under the sun. All compete for our attention, so they promote startling headlines and short, striking, memorable phrases.
Politics has its slogans too: “Fourteen years of Tory misrule!”; “Stop the boats!”; “Make America Great Again!”
At the 2024 General Election, the Labour Party offered us one particularly simple slogan: Change.
Behind it was a manifesto promising, among other things, to deliver economic stability, cut NHS waiting times, crack down on antisocial behaviour and recruit 6,500 new teachers.
What political party would disagree with any of that?
In 2026, the Conservative Party published its Alternative King’s Speech, with headings which included “Get Britain working”, “Save British industry”, “Protect our borders” and “Restore school standards”.
Again, what political party would disagree with those ambitions?
The real political arguments aren’t usually about whether we want a successful economy, a functioning NHS, good schools, secure borders, or safe streets. They are about how those things should be achieved, what they will cost, who should pay, and what compromises we are prepared to make.
Those are arguments worth having.
But when the arguments reach the House of Commons, something else happens. MPs are normally expected to vote with their party. They can rebel, certainly, but doing so can carry serious political consequences. On important votes, the party whip can become a powerful instrument of discipline.
And that matters because of the way we elect Parliament in the first place.
At the 2024 General Election, Labour received 33.7% of the votes cast. Turnout was 59.7%. In other words, the votes of about one registered voter in five were sufficient to give Labour almost two-thirds of the seats in the House of Commons — and therefore an overwhelming parliamentary majority.
This isn’t an argument against Labour. The same system has benefited Conservative governments in the past and may do so again. The problem isn’t which party wins.
The problem is the system.
First Past the Post can give a political party parliamentary power greatly disproportionate to its electoral support. The whipping system can then concentrate that power still further.
Abraham Lincoln famously described democracy as government of the people, by the people, for the people.
Admittedly, as John Lydgate had observed in rather different words some four centuries earlier, you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
Nor should democracy mean simply doing whatever today’s opinion poll happens to demand. We elect representatives, not delegates. MPs must sometimes exercise judgement, consider evidence, weigh the national interest against local interests and, ultimately, live with their own consciences.
But surely that is precisely why we elect individual Members of Parliament.
An MP should represent a constituency, not merely provide another reliable vote for a political party.
So perhaps political reform could begin there. Not by abolishing political parties, nor by pretending that political differences don’t matter, but by loosening the grip of party discipline and allowing MPs much greater freedom to vote according to their judgement and conscience, informed regularly and seriously by the people they were elected to represent.
That wouldn’t solve every problem with British democracy. Far from it.
But it might be a start.
It’s time to stop marching obediently Right, Left, Right — and to ask our MPs occasionally to halt, to think, and to represent us.
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