ABSTRACT
Raymond Williams Democracy and Parliament (1982) There is no doubt that ‘representation’ is ‘one of the slippery core concepts of political theory’.1 There is equally no doubt that the British political tradition, at least in recent times, has shown little interest in trying to get a reasonably secure grip on it, nor that any democratic reconstruction of the British polity would need to have a revised view of representation as one of its basic ingredients. Whether we understand the term as meaning ‘microcosm’ (an accurate reflection of the represented) or as ‘principal-agent’ (acting on behalf of),2 with all the modulations of each, the British representative system is in an unreconstructed mess.
