Time and Politics: Parliament and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and the British World, by Ryan A. Vieira

Abstract

This ambitious and provocative book aims to show how the emergence of ‘modern’ understandings of time influenced the reform of parliamentary procedure in Britain and the ‘British World’ during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, resulting in a transition from deliberative to ‘executive-centred’ legislatures that continues to shape contemporary political cultures. From the early nineteenth century, Ryan Vieira claims, the use and effectiveness of ‘parliamentary time’ became a subject of intense debate at Westminster (p. 46); meanwhile in the wider culture there emerged a new conception of linear time, whose distancing of the present from the past was reinforced by a sense of profound discontinuity evoked by revolution in Europe, famine in Ireland and the growth of railway travel. As a result, Parliament came to be viewed as ‘excessively slow and de-synchronized from the nation’ (p. 72); but the self-consciously modern critique of legislative procedure that this helped to frame was constrained by an ideal of ‘respectable masculinity’ wherein the inefficient use of time was a failure of character of individual MPs, rather than of Parliament itself (p. 74). All this changed after the Second Reform Act, and particularly through the tactics of obstruction deployed by Parnell’s Irish Nationalists, in response to which Gladstone introduced a series of procedural reforms in 1882 that included, for the first time, the investment in the Speaker of the power of ‘closure’ over debates. The passage of these reforms was also abetted by the emergence of an imperial ideal of ‘martial masculinity’ wherein defeat of obstruction was a test of national, rather than merely private, character (pp. 112–13). The result, Vieira argues, was that Britain entered parliamentary modernity: appeals to tradition lost their normative force, and the deliberative function of the legislature was overtaken by its ‘instrumentally rational’ subordination to the executive (p. 120)—a historical tide that present-day reformers seeking to restore the autonomy of representative institutions will attempt to reverse in vain (pp. 178–9).