Radical Politics and the Constraints of the Parliamentary System

For most Marxian theorists Britain’s parliamentary system has little to do with the politics of democratic representation. Instead, parliament, as a formal institution, is argued to be inextricably tied to the wider, subtly constraining forces of “omnipresent capitalism”. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, has argued that by gradually institutionalising representation under the rubric of parliamentary sovereignty, British democracy has always been less about representation and more about the legitimation of a system based upon the private ownership of the means of production and property.1 The Labour Party, as a major player on the twentieth century’s parliamentary stage, has been only too aware of the frequently problematic and often contradictory aims of trying, on the one hand, to operate within the parliamentary system (with all its checks, balances and conventions), and on the other, of trying to articulate and politically fulfil the radical goals of orthodox socialism.