ABSTRACT

In a period when effective power in all spheres of life-economic, social, political-is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, parliamentary control of the executive has been steadily decreasing, without being replaced by other methods of democratic control. R.H.S.Crossman, Introduction to Walter Bagehot The English

Constitution (1963). Rousseau’s jibe about the English only being free once every five years at least reminds us why the raw accountability of electoral democracy is not enough. It may be the bottom line; but on a dayto-day basis it is the lines above that matter more. Being able to kick parties and governments out is indispensable, but so is being able to kick them while they are in. Indeed, when put more sedately, that is precisely what the British version of representative government has conventionally been described as being about, a matter not of ruling but of checking and controlling those who rule.