Milestone moment
Free votes, social reform and public opinion
Parliament has had a productive week. Free of the party whip, MPs were able to talk passionately, personally and impressively about the important issue of assisted dying. This was a moment for Burkean representation of the highest calibre, albeit with at least one eye on public opinion.
Philosopher Edmund Burke promoted the idea that elected representatives use their knowledge and experience to act for the people as ‘trustees’ rather than ‘delegates’, deciding what was best and not just doing what the people would want. This approach is perhaps most evident in ‘free votes’ in the House of Commons, occasions when all the main parties don’t instruct their MPs about how to vote on a division.
How common are free votes? While there is no definitive list, a House of Commons Library paper in 2022 identified just over 200 between 1979 and late 2022. The votes covered numerous issues including abortion, the wearing of seat belts in cars, war crimes, televising proceedings in Parliament, human fertilisation and embryology, sexual crimes, hunting, and the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. In other words, some of the most consequential votes in our country’s social history, affecting millions of people’s lives.
Both ways
Burkean representation and free votes work both ways. They can mean politicians deciding against doing something which is popular or pursuing something which isn’t. Often, issues are not clear-cut in people’s minds but are complex and unfamiliar, a blend of matters of conscience plus practicalities.
In 2015, the BBC reported that it had “…long been an issue over which Parliament and the public were at odds” and that in 1965 — a year after the last executions in the UK — “opinion polls suggested the vast majority of electors wanted it kept on the statute books.”
2015 was significant because support for the death penalty fell below 50% for the first time. Previously, between the early 1980s and the 1990s, several free votes were tabled on the subject. Each was defeated despite a backdrop of public support — in 1986, the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSAS) found support among three-quarters of Britons. But moral disapproval has increased and in 2019 Ipsos found a third or more in each age range saying it was immoral.
Swinging since the ‘60s
Opinion polls were, if not in their infancy, relatively young in the 1960s. MPs took their cues from campaigns and lobbyists. There had been a long-running campaign supporting the legalisation of abortion in the UK. MP Joseph Reeves had unsuccessfully used a Private Member’s Bill in the 1950s to try to change the law, but it wasn’t until Liberal MP David Steel’s bill that the breakthrough came.
Several years later, in 1983, support for the law allowing abortion ‘when a woman decides on her own, she does not wish to have a child’ was just 37% according to BSAS, making it likely that sentiment in the 1960s was equally lukewarm. By 2022, support had doubled to 76%.
Attitudes have similarly changed on homosexuality, both cause and effect of changes in the law. This started with decriminalisation (in 1967), moved to lowering the age of consent (1998) and equalisation (2000), repeal of Clause 119 banning promotion in schools (2004) and the introduction of same-sex marriage (2013). In 1983, 17% of Britons agreed that ‘same sex relations are not at all wrong’, but 67% felt that way in 2022.
More generally, long-running research by Ipsos shows that the British public has become significantly more liberal on moral issues. Society today is far more tolerant than it was 30 years ago on issues including homosexuality, abortion, illegal drug use, depictions of violence and many aspects of sex in popular culture. Last year, BSAS authors described “a near-revolution in the country’s cultural outlook and social norms”.
‘Situationalist’
These issues are often more nuanced than they might be at first sight. For example, several of the free votes in Parliament about capital punishment have related to certain types of murder.
And while an Ipsos poll in the year 2000 found the public supporting tolerance towards homosexuality, people struggled with its ‘promotion’ in schools, reflecting perhaps the ambiguity of that term.
In a paper analysing trends in attitudes to abortion in Britain, academics Ben Clements and Clive Field concluded that “…the public’s approach to abortion is found to have been mostly ‘situationalist’, conditioned by the circumstances in which abortions were to be carried out, rather than absolutist.”
The same could be said of assisted dying. Ipsos found that the exact conditions under which assisted dying may take place are important to public attitudes, and there are sensitivities towards the arguments on both sides.
The beginning of a new end
Back in April, The Economist described assisted dying as Britain’s “next big social reform”. Legislation had already moved forwards in Jersey, the Isle of Man and Scotland and it will do so now in Britain.
The Commons voted a similar motion down decisively in 2015, but the new intake of MPs proved more pre-disposed to support. Still, 147 Labour MPs opposed assisted dying (including Health Secretary Wes Streeting) and it will take time, energy and, probably, more visible Government backing to ensure it can progress through further debates and votes. There are also potential hiccups when preparing the NHS, the courts, and working with the Welsh Senedd which rejected a similar motion in October.
Social reform has proved to be an enduring legacy of successive governments. This has often involved working against the grain of public opinion. Will this time be different?
