“Don’t despair, but if you must, work on in despair.” So wrote the man I quote far too much for my own good, Edmund Burke. It has been a stressful two weeks for the Conservative Party. But if my idol is to be followed, then I realise I should probably bring myself out of post-Brexit despondency over the Remain reaction and my party’s uncertain future, and start looking at things positively.

There is no way our establishment can ignore the democratic vote, and I am very confident that Brexit will happen. As to how fast, I am not certain, but I am confident that when it does, many new opportunities will finally be open to us, both politically and economically. But among the various petitions, demands, suggestions and observations that have been bandied around over recent days, I have been most intrigued by many calls for “reform” of our political system. The types of reform called for have varied from the outright undemocratic, such as outlawing referenda in the future and restricting all decisions purely to Parliament, to more familiar whining about the lack of proportional representation and the presence of an unelected upper house.

I am all for holding the politicians who put forward the arguments to Vote Leave to account – I did not vote leave in order to suddenly have all the things I hoped for swept from under my feet. It is part of the democratic process to hold our politicians to account, and I would hope that by doing so we all will receive the benefits we were promised. People have talked a lot about how immigration was a defining issue of the referendum, and it certainly was for a lot of people, but it was not solely about immigration, and for many, freedom of movement was not a problem they had with the EU. One of the most important ones for me was that very thing we must now hold in the forefront of our minds – democratic accountability. The EU was a politician’s dream: power without proper checks and balances, an institution which could gag members of its legislature from telling the people who voted for them what they were voting on among other worryingly illiberal conventions.

Now that we know we will be rid of the EU – we must be the democracy we claim to be. We must think about our democratic system, and realise that for Britain to be a leading light in liberty and democracy, we must avoid becoming the byzantine quagmire of bureaucracy that the EU was. We need to champion free trade with the rest of the world, we need to liberalise our civil service, we must do as much as we can to create as open a political system as possible. What with House of Lords reform having been on the cards for a while now, I am sure it is something that will crop up very soon, if not under the remainder of this government then surely under the next, once Brexit has fully taken place. I see such an action as being only the start of calls for massive political change by the Left.

This sort of “liberal agitation” as it was known amongst conservatives in the 19^th century, is not necessarily a completely bad thing. When people demand better representation it generally stems from a deep dissatisfaction with the political class – something which Brexit already represents, as I have mentioned before on this blog. We can already see that there are problems with the political class as it is at the moment, and that the vast majority of ordinary people want some form of major social change. On the other hand, caving in to “agitation” completely is seldom the best tactic, since such mass-movements can easily be infiltrated by radicals who represent a minority, and would seek to introduce such momentous change which may sound good on paper but would be destructive or undemocratic in practice. We need more democracy, but we must tread carefully.

Allow me to use two case studies: The House of Lords and first-past-the-post voting. I have, throughout my political activity, been generally defensive of the House of Lords against those who would seek to reform it. I generally applaud the meritocratic idea behind a House of Lords with the life peer appointment system. I have never supported an elected upper chamber, being incredibly sceptical of handing over another portion of our legislature to the established parties, only to be controlled by them and used as a rubber stamp on Commons initiatives without the same scrutiny that can be provided by a House of Lords with roughly 200 independent peers with expertise ranging from business to religion and the arts. Nevertheless, I fear that Lords reform is almost inevitable at some point in the future, and has been on the cards for while, even among some in the Conservative Party (despite many cries of “shame!”). As much as the traditionalist in me would be sad to see it go, there is a new opportunity in House of Lords reform. Let’s not work for an elected upper chamber, instead, let’s be even more radical than the radicals who call for a proportionally elected one. Let’s put the demos back into democracy.

Ideally, I would want an upper house which has the same amount of members for each constituent country of the UK, say, 50 members each for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But each member, rather than being elected, is drawn by a random lot of the people of those constituent countries, just like jury service. It would probably be prudent to include an opt-out of some kind so that people who wouldn’t want to take part could choose do so. We could also legislate so that employers of people who are chosen to take part for, say one or two-year terms, would be obliged to keep that person’s position in their job open for them upon their return to work once their Parliamentary term had expired. That way, we would have a very democratic chamber checking our elected politicians, and it would be mostly free from the influence of the party establishments. It could even be possible to allow some, for instance another 50 hereditary peers sit in for sake of tradition and to represent their interests – but of course this is all just proposition.

In terms of our voting system, FPTP is not very good in my opinion. I can understand why it might be chosen, considering that MPs are strictly elected to represent the interests of the constituents who elect them, and as such, each MP represents a small community within itself and is sent to Parliament on their locality’s behalf. However, FPTP does have a tendency to degenerate into a two-party system, is susceptible to gerrymandering and corruption, and eventually leads to contained party politics rather than regional and individual politics, and eventually, mass disaffection of large parts of society with the political system (remind you of anything?).

Proportional representation is all very well, but if you apply it across an entire country, you represent the people’s opinions at the expense of local representation. The UK rejected the Alternative Voting system in a 2011 referendum, and it is quite clear that many people would find a radically different voting system confusing, and do not appreciate the hassle of “ranking” candidates, and frankly, after years of simply placing an X next to your preferred party or candidate, I cannot blame them, not to mention the potential instability which would inevitably be the case in a truly proportional system, since if past UK elections are anything to go by, no political party would ever win a majority outright.

My preferred system would be one similar to that used in the Welsh Assembly, Scottish Parliament and NI Assembly, the Additional-Member or Mixed-Member system. A number of constituencies could still be used to represent local interests (perhaps reduced in number somewhat from the current 650) and a certain amount of proportionally balanced members to be drawn from the constituent countries based on vote share augmented to those constituency seats. This way we could more easily balance local representation with proportional representation of opinion.

In short – no system is perfect, but with seismic forces shaking our political system to its core, Conservatives need to be ready for change. People want something other than “politics as usual”, and it is the Conservatives who can provide it. We should not pander to the establishment in the name of democracy as the left so often does, we should not sign away our Parliament to the control of two or three major parties. Instead, let’s hold our politicians to account, let’s let the people participate and engage in democracy like never before. We need to be conservative in the face of those who would change our political system for their own benefit. We need to beat them to it – to conserve the British people’s connection with democracy we must be more radical than ever before.

Alex blogs at Burkeanthinker. Follow him on Twitter: @burkeanthinker

Follow @con4lib on Twitter

Like Conservatives for Liberty on Facebook

The views expressed in this article are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Conservatives for Liberty

At Conservatives for Liberty, we defend civil liberties passionately, and our supporters back us because of that. We believe that individual freedom and having certain rights which the government should not curtail, are a fundamental part of living in free, democratic societies, and are also historically entwined with British values and rights afforded to British citizens for many hundreds of years. But as much as we may claim that liberty is a good thing – why should you believe us? What makes liberty, and civil liberties in particular, so great? Why wouldn’t it be easier just to have some authoritarian force telling us all what to do and making life so much easier for us all, after all, having to make our own decisions all the time is tiring…isn’t it?

So what are civil liberties in the first place? Today, we take many for granted, the most notable perhaps being freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and crucially, freedom of speech. The list itself goes on, but I’m sure you get my gist already. It was these ideas that the great classical liberals of the 18th century extolled. The founding fathers of the United States of America wrote their Constitution in order to establish and defend these rights for their people. One of the most famous revolutions in history pitted the forces of liberty against tyranny. But why would the founding fathers of America create a republican, liberal democracy in place of monarchy?

Liberty tends to be divided between two main schools of thought, which sometimes overlap, but are generally dichotomous. These are the concepts of “positive liberty” and “negative liberty”. Positive liberty is generally considered to be the granting to people the right to fulfil their own potential and act on their free will. The man who coined the terms, Isaiah Berlin, described the outlook of the positive liberal as “I am my own master”. A positive liberal will generally see social blights such as racism and sexism as constraints on their free will, and will pursue progressive social policies in order to allow certain people to have more of a voice in politics. Therefore, positive liberty has generally been associated with modern social liberalism, and the centre to moderate centre-left brand of liberalism that it is associated with. Negative liberty, on the other hand, is more of an “I will not be anyone’s slave” attitude. It is the belief that people should be free from external constraints imposed by others. For a long time, negative liberty was the brand of liberalism subscribed to by the greatest political philosophers, and its practice can be seen in the policies of more modern politician too; Margaret Thatcher famously held up Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty declaring “This is what we believe in!” These previous thinkers adopted a negative liberal position mostly because it is derived from a fundamental moral position, which I will explain below.

So it is generally considered that in modern times, social liberals have tended towards positive liberty while classical liberals tended towards negative liberty. Positive liberty is founded to an extent in modern egalitarianism. Negative liberty’s argument for freedom from restraint is founded in moral philosophy. When considering what is “right” and what is “wrong” by moral standards, many people are guided by different things. Different religions have different outlooks based on cultural and historical definitions of morality. In Britain, even though we are living in an increasingly secular society, it is would be fair to say that the vast majority of British people retain a sense of what is right and wrong, regardless of whether they are religious or not. I’m also fairly confident in saying that the vast majority of people would agree with me that any action which does harm to another human, especially if it is without any good reason, is morally wrong. It’s for these reasons that we have the law – to prevent people from causing harm to others, and punish them by removing them from society and limiting some of their previous freedoms as they learn how to be a part of a functional society.

Civil liberties that are most commonly upheld in Western liberal democracies are entwined with the concept of negative liberty. Guaranteeing freedom of speech, freedom of the press and other such freedoms guarantees no repression or restrict on an individual’s right to present his opinions and conduct his way of life as he sees fit. It was not initially out of ideology that the American revolutionaries rose up against the British, but out of a desire for moral treatment. If civil liberties are restricted then we, as people, are harmed. If our freedoms are restricted, then we are either living under a tyranny or we are on the way to living under one. Tyranny is fundamentally morally harmful, because it controls individuals – it does not allow them to blossom freely, it seeks to programme and control them in line with the tyrant’s own wishes. Tyranny does not allow for free intellectual progression, not for the sharing of ideas, and it often degenerates into the physical harming of those who dissent to it. Therefore, for the state to be truly moral, and refrain from the harming of its citizens intellectual and physically, it must firstly, guarantee civil liberties, and secondly, it must punish and seek to rehabilitate those who infringe upon the liberties of others, physically or arbitrarily.

Now of course, restricting people from infringing on the rights of others means that some freedoms have to be restricted. As Burke said: “Liberty too, must be limited in order to be possessed” – but never did I advocate anarchy. The boundary for liberty is drawn at harm, physical harm, and harm of human beings as entities. Today we, along with the majority of other countries in the world, have commonly accepted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and we have the means in the United Kingdom to uphold these rights through our own legislation. Why then do we allow our government to violate our right to privacy and begin to erode fundamental rights such as freedom of expression and freedom of speech?

Perhaps one of my favourite quotes of all time is that of the American revolutionary Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty or give me death!” as drastic as it sounds, it demonstrates the human desire for freedom, and our innate disgust of slavery, tyranny and maltreatment as a race. As our civil liberties become increasingly eroded by the passage of various “emergency” legislations in the coming months and years in both this country and abroad, it is only right to be there to speak out against those who would take away the liberties that we require to live in a progressive, functional country.

Freedom from restrictions on our fundamental liberal rights is what we need to fulfil our free will. As much as Isaiah Berlin liked to differentiate the two concepts of liberty, I think that in fact, once we are free from external constraints, the more people will be able to “become their own masters” and fulfil their own potential. The more we allow authoritarian forces to make decisions for us and abuse our freedoms, the more we are harmed as humans.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This article is part of our ongoing ‘Why I am a Conservative’ series, in which supporters of CfL talk about their beliefs and values. If you would like to take part please email blog@con4lib