its members, moved them from one post to another, and decided if and when the
cabinet would resign or go to the country in a general election.
These norms of cabinet government are not laws enforceable by courts like
imperatives of the American constitution, but conventions whose eVectiveness as
restraints and incentives are hardly less, as illustrated by their survival over
generations and in some respects centuries. The fusion of powers itself dates
back to the premodern monarchy. Criticizing Bagehot’s view that the cabinet is a
committee of the House of Commons, Leo Amery argued that the two elements of
the constitution ‘‘today as when William I was king’’ are, on the one hand, a central
energizing, initiating, directing element, which exercises both executive and legis-
lative power—formerly the monarch and today the cabinet; and, on the other
hand, a peripheral element, which complains, criticizes, and consents, but does not
itself govern—formerly the baronage and today the House of Commons, especially
the opposition. A Tory inellectual, Amery neglected a fact which fundamentally
qualiWes his assertion, while also conWrming it. From the great reform act of 1832
to the current representation of the people acts, statutes have given Britain a
vigorously democratic constitution, which, however, is expressed through institu-
tions inheriting the concentrated governing powers of the old monarchic regime.
This transfer of authority from monarch to cabinet was a remarkable and
inherently implausible piece of constitutional history. One might well suppose
that as the liberalizing forces of modernity shifted power from the monarchic
toward a democratic regime, the old concentration of power would be dispersed
among representative groups in the legislature as individuals and committees
reXected the pluralism of the empowered electorate. For a new pluralism in the
electorate and a heightened individualism in the legislature did emerge. On the
contrary, however, a new convention arose which vested the old fusion of powers in
the cabinet so long as, and only so long as, it had the conWdence of the House of
Commons. The classic formulation was framed by the leader of the opposition in
1841 in a motion of no conWdence, which led to the defeat of the government, a
dissolution, and election of a new government. By this link, democratization was
Wtted into the institutional norms of the old concentration. The same rigidity
survived as the constitution also continued to display itsXexibility in the further
development of cabinet government and prime ministerial authority.
So elaborated, this paradoxical constitution of ‘‘elective dictatorship’’—to use
Lord Hailsham’s perceptive exaggeration—based on a coherent framework of
convention and statute, was an indispensable condition for the rise of party govern-
ment. The dominant political formations of the collectivist age, the Conservative and
the Labour parties, both complied with its imperatives. Both accepted the fusion of
powers, whether exercising them as the government, or as the opposition, holding
the government accountable for their exercise and aspiring to have it for themselves.
706 samuel h. beer