for a court to hold that a certain measure of, for example, a minister of state
taken under the authority of power-delegating legislation isultra vires, exceed-
ing what Parliament had intended. It is, however, impossible to attack an act of
the originating body, Parliament, asultra vires, because the British constitution
knows no limit to parliamentary power. Only a moderate alteration in this
situation has been brought about by the 1998Human Rights Act.
It is also possible to delegate much more broadly, to give to an agency
essentially unfettered discretion to make regulations in a specific area, even
though the body is unelected and legally not responsible to the delegating
authority. In this sense, for example, the US Federal Reserve can be seen as
exercising the delegated authority of Congress, even though the latter is not
entitled even to set guidelines for the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy.
The secondary meaning of delegation is almost the opposite of the above. A
delegate is one who is selected to represent a body or group, but unlike a fully
free representative, as in the theory of representation ofBurke, is not at liberty
to vote according to their own will. Although not as firmly bound as someone
seen as mandated to vote in a particular way, a delegate is expected to carry out
broad instructions and to refrain from independent policy-making.
Democracy
Democracy is the most valued and also perhaps the vaguest of political
concepts in the modern world. Political systems as diverse as the USA, various
one-party states in Africa and communist states all describe themselves as
democracies. Indeed, it is characteristic of this vagueness that when a
UNESCO conference on democracy was held in 1950, more than 50 nations,
representing a full range of political systems, each insisted that they were (and
sometimes thatonlythey were) a democracy.
The word ‘democracy’ is derived from two ancient Greek words:demos(‘the
people’) andkratos(‘strength’). By itself democracy means little more than that,
in some undefined sense, political power is ultimately in the hands of the whole
adult population, and that no smaller group has the right to rule. Democracy
only takes on a more useful meaning when qualified by one of the other words
with which it is associated, for exampleliberal democracy,representative
democracy,participatory democracyordirect democracy.
Those who seek to justify the title ‘democracy’ for a society where power is
clearly in the hands of one section of the population (for example, in many
Third World or communist countries) mean something rather different. The
claim is not really that the people rule, but that they are ruled in their own
interests. Defenders of the system operating in the Soviet Union before the
changes initiated by MikhailGorbachev, for example, claimed that until
economic and social progress has been made, and a true ‘socialist man’ created
Democracy