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Between 1780 and 1918 over 1 million public petitions were sent to the House of Commons from across the UK. These petitions contained a staggering 165 million signatures. While was part of a wider growth of mass, collective petitioning to national legislatures across North America and western Europe, the scale of petitions in the nineteenth-century UK was historically exceptional. In this blog, I discuss themes from my recent book A Nation of Petitioners: Petitions and Petitioning in the United Kingdom, 1780-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) relevant to those working on parliamentary studies. 

During the nineteenth century, petitioning was transformed in the UK and other polities, including the USA, into its modern form as a participatory practice linked to representative institutions. Older traditions of petitioning the monarch sought the redress of personal, local, or sectional grievances. By contrast, the new style of petitioning was used by citizens and subjects to raise topics of national importance, make claims for citizenship and political rights, and organise massive popular campaigns in a pre-democratic era, including for the abolition of slavery and women’s suffrage. 

Through examining the monumental scale of petitions in this period, A Nation of Petitioners has a number of themes relevant those interested in parliaments in general and the UK Parliament in particular. 

First, petitions are crucial to understanding the authority and legitimacy of Parliament, particularly the House of Commons, during an era of democratisation but not democracy. Petitions institutionalised regular public engagement with Parliament on a colossal scale. Millions of British people interacted with Parliament and parliamentarians through petitions, and this remained the case even after the franchise was extended by the First and Second Reform Acts passed in 1832 and 1867. Indeed, it was not until the later 1880s, after the passing of the Third Reform Act (1885), that the registered electorate began to exceed the annual total of signatures on petitions to the House of Commons. The position of the aristocratic House of Lords was also strengthened by the tens of thousands of petitions it received. The massive waves of petitioners, even radical critics, submitting their requests to Parliament, confirmed the legislature’s authority and to an extent, legitimated, an assembly elected under limited suffrage.  

At the same time, petitions could challenge the authority and legitimacy of Parliament when they claimed to represent a wider people than that which elected MPs. The three massive Chartist petitions of 1839, 1842, and 1848, calling for democratic reforms and signed by millions of working-class men and women presented just such a challenge. Recent studies of the post-2016 debates over Brexit have noted the tension between parliamentary sovereignty (based on an electoral mandate) and popular sovereignty (based on the majority in the referendum). The example of the nineteenth century suggests that the tension between parliamentary and popular sovereignty is a latent dynamic in parliamentary systems of government, albeit one that has been relatively well-contained in an era of universal suffrage when MPs could usually claim an unmatched democratic mandate. 

Second, petitions were central to the evolving system of parliamentary representation. Like e-petitions today, nineteenth-century petitions provided a form of ‘linkage’ between citizens and Parliament, particularly outside elections. Petitions were an essential tool for making representative claims by both parliamentarians and petitioners. Through presenting petitions and interacting with petitioners, MPs and peers acted as representatives, even when they disagreed with petitioners. Presenting petitions enabled both geographic and issue-based representation. Petitioning also enabled the representation from different nations (Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as well as England) within the UK and also from groups, such as women, who were formally excluded from voting in elections or sitting in Parliament at this time. Petitions were also presented from settlers and colonised peoples from within the British empire who were not formally represented in Parliament. 

MPs typically presented petitions from their constituencies or on issues that they were associated with. Peers usually presented petitions from areas they were associated with through landownership or had formerly represented when in the Commons; bishops, or spiritual peers, were often tasked with presenting petitions on religious or moral questions, including temperance. Presenting petitions allowed Victorian MPs who did not trouble Hansard reporters to represent their constituents. Henry Lowther, who sat as MP for Westmorland for 55 years was known as the ‘silent colonel’ due to his lack of contribution to debates; yet he still presented over 400 petitions. Presenting petitions and corresponding with petitioners was an important part of the hidden, largely unsung practice of representation that MPs like Lowther did, and emphasises the varied ways that parliamentarians represented the public outside elections.

Finally, petitions to the House of Commons declined in the early twentieth century. This was part of a trend also evident in other countries such as the USA or France. Petitioning did not decline as a form of political participation, but was rather displaced from national legislatures to a wider range of national and international authorities, including in the British case, Number 10 Downing Street. Unlike petitions to Parliament, these other types of petitions were rarely formally recorded which explains their invisibility in studies of twentieth-century British politics and history. The executive’s increasing control of the legislature in the twentieth century encouraged British citizens to appeal to other authorities, although Parliament did still receive large mass petitions on occasion, such as the three petitions about pensions during the Second World War. MPs and officials missed an opportunity to rethink petitioning tool for public engagement with Parliament in the 1970s; the unimaginative conventional wisdom of the time preferred to abolish the Petitions committee instead.

Given this historical context, the recent emergence of legislative e-petitions systems in the UK and in many other democracies is significant for reasserting parliaments as the primary institution for receiving petitions from citizens. There are some important differences of course. In an era of universal suffrage, petitioners do not perhaps pose the same challenge to representatives. In terms of representation, because citizens can usually upload their petitions to a parliamentary web platform rather than through the medium of an MP, they do not provide the same interaction between citizen and representative, although they do provide a form of public engagement with Parliament as an institution. Today, the UK Parliament’s Petitions Committee offers a wide range of actions that go far beyond the limited or ‘descriptive’ petitions system of the nineteenth century, where petitions were presented but no further action was taken. E-petitions then provide an opportunity for the UK Parliament and other legislatures to re-engage citizens, albeit in very different ways from the nineteenth century. 

Henry Miller is Associate Professor (Research) at Durham University. This blog draws on his book A Nation of Petitioners: Petitions and Petitioning in the United Kingdom, 1780-1918 published by Cambridge University Press in February 2023. 

Our new book, The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit, was published on 23 March. It focuses on the disputed role of parliament in the Brexit process, exploring how this most central UK democratic institution became embroiled in such controversy, and what the Brexit period demonstrates about the wider state of politics. 

The first and most basic question answered by the book is what actually happened in these troubled years. This is a long and complex story. Different narratives developed, often fed by competing players, which were frequently partial and sometimes downright misleading. The book seeks to provide an objective account, based on the public record and interviews with insiders. What follows is only a very brief summary (adapted from part of the closing chapter), drawing out some important themes.

The need to restore sovereignty to parliament was a long-time argument of Eurosceptics. While the institution’s own role in Brexit rose to prominence after the referendum, it also served (as discussed in Chapter 2) as a key forum for helping to bring this vote about. Backbench MPs—assisted on occasion by Speaker John Bercow’s unconventional interpretation of the rules—generated significant pressure for a referendum. Notably, not all of them favoured exiting the EU. Some, in a similar way to Prime Minister David Cameron, saw the referendum as a way to make an awkward question go away. Based on polling, there was little expectation of a Leave victory, and this prospect was not taken particularly seriously. Parliament held no major debate on the merits of Brexit to air the arguments; the Leave campaign set out no detailed prospectus to voters; and the civil service was forbidden from preparing. Consequently, the dilemmas and trade-offs that dominated subsequent debates were barely mentioned before the referendum. As an interviewee from the strongly pro-Brexit European Research Group of MPs (ERG) acknowledged, ‘it was only [after the referendum] that different types of Brexit started coming to the fore. Soft Brexit and hard Brexit had never been canvassed before the referendum; the expressions were coined afterwards.’ This lack of definition greatly stoked the bitterness of the following years.

The unexpected Leave result triggered the Prime Minister’s resignation, and Conservative MPs elected Theresa May in his place (Chapter 3). She was, in the words of one interviewee, ‘blood and bone a party woman’, with her deep commitment to public service if anything surpassed by her commitment to the Conservative Party. But that party was severely divided over Brexit. Labour, too, was now internally split, with some party heartlands having voted strongly for Remain and others for Leave. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was already unpopular in his parliamentary party, and it tried but failed to remove him after his lacklustre performance in the referendum campaign. This left both party leaders significantly compromised.

The uncertain question of how to implement Brexit now passed over to parliament. Many feared that a Remainer-dominated House of Commons would seek to undermine the referendum result, and May’s instinct was to rely as far as possible on pursuing Brexit using prerogative powers. But the enormity of the question understandably led parliamentarians to seek oversight of the next steps (Chapter 4). This provoked an institutional conflict between government and parliament. The courts were also drawn in, via Gina Miller’s first legal case arguing for parliament’s role in the triggering of Article 50. This resulted in defeat for the government and the infamous Daily Mail headline labelling the judges ‘enemies of the people’. Rather than cooling down the conflict, May’s government sought to exploit it, in order to appear the people’s defender.

Shortly afterwards, the Prime Minister justified her calling of a snap election in 2017 (Chapter 5), by arguing—on shaky empirical grounds—that parliament was standing in the way of Brexit. But the election weakened her position, resulting in a minority government, dependent on a confidence-and-supply agreement with the Northern Ireland DUP. The closeness of the result raised hopes among former Remainers that Brexit might be blocked, which further fuelled polarization and discouraged the spirit of compromise required to navigate the subsequent stages.

May’s early positioning (her initial ‘red lines’) incorporated the demands of her party’s hardliners—including that the UK should leave the Single Market and Customs Union. But when formal negotiations with the EU began (Chapter 6), her team came to recognize the trade-offs, particularly concerning the protection of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Avoidance of a hard border on the island of Ireland would require continued close alignment with the EU, which was unacceptable to hardline Brexiteers, while a ‘border down the Irish Sea’ between Great Britain and Northern Ireland was unacceptable to unionists, and in particular the DUP.

These difficulties, and May’s rhetoric that ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’, raised concerns about failure to reach an agreement with the EU, and a possible no-deal Brexit. That would imply a hard border for Northern Ireland, and likely severe economic consequences. Partly to avoid it, a small number of moderate Conservative rebel MPs backed demands for a ‘meaningful vote’ in parliament on the final Brexit plan (Chapter 7). The extent of Conservative splits became very apparent when David Davis and Boris Johnson resigned from May’s Cabinet over her ‘Chequers’ proposals in July 2018, and further ministers departed in November over her final Brexit deal. The primary sticking point was the ‘backstop’—a compromise arrangement to avoid the border problem, demanding significant future all-UK alignment with EU rules (plus some special arrangements for Northern Ireland). When MPs voted on this deal in January 2019 it was overwhelmingly defeated, by 432 votes to 202. More than a third of the parliamentary Conservative Party—118 MPs—opposed it, 90 of whom were former Leave supporters. Most former Conservative Remain supporters, in contrast, voted for the deal.

There followed months of parliamentary wrangling, during which May’s deal was defeated twice more (Chapter 8). Crucially, hardline Conservative Brexiteers (dubbed the ‘Spartans’) repeatedly refused to accept it. May expressed strong frustrations with parliament, but never explicitly criticized her backbench opponents. Boris Johnson)—who had voted against the deal on the first two occasions—responded by arguing that it was ‘wrong in every sense to blame MPs for blocking Brexit’.

At this point, Conservative backbench moderates took further action to avoid a no-deal Brexit, including through backing temporary suspension of ministers’ control of the Commons agenda to facilitate ‘indicative’ votes on alternative Brexit options. But with near-universal Conservative opposition to every option, they were all defeated. Meanwhile, other parties continued to reject the deal. All that MPs could agree on was instructing Theresa May to negotiate extensions to the Article 50 period. The polarization and failure to compromise which characterized this period was painfully summed up by senior Conservative Brexiteer Charles Walker, who commented that ‘the losers do not know how to lose and the winners do not know how to win’.

It was in these circumstances that Boris Johnson—who had adopted a mantle as the authentic voice of Brexit, denouncing May and voting against her deal—was elected in her place (Chapter 9). Parliament entered its 2019 summer recess immediately afterwards, without any formal test of confidence in Johnson. Before its return, he requested a five-week prorogation, potentially to help facilitate a no-deal Brexit. This led to the second government defeat in the Supreme Court on a Brexit-related matter. Before the court case, Johnson had stripped the whip from 21 Conservative MPs (17 of whom had consistently voted for May’s deal), for facilitating what he dubbed the ‘Surrender Act’—a non-government bill requiring pursuit of a further Article 50 extension unless parliament voted for a Brexit plan.

This parliamentary blocking of a no-deal Brexit drove Johnson to agree an alternative deal with the EU, which was put to the House of Commons in October (Chapter 10). It was essentially a package previously rejected by Theresa May, which included close EU alignment for Northern Ireland only, thus requiring a ‘border down the Irish Sea’. Rather than subjecting the deal to parliamentary scrutiny, Johnson demanded a new general election, which was eventually conceded by MPs. He fought this on a slogan to ‘get Brexit done’, and a manifesto which—in direct contradiction to his own earlier comments—accused MPs of ‘refus[ing] to deliver Brexit’, and of ‘thwarting the democratic decision of the British people’. The Conservatives won an 80-seat majority, and the UK’s exit from the EU followed on 31 January 2020.

This story clearly contains many contradictions. In particular, Johnson’s rhetoric that parliament had failed to ‘get Brexit done’ was fundamentally inaccurate. He himself had voted with the hardliners against May’s deal on the basis that it wasn’t an authentic Brexit. They dismissed it instead as ‘BRINO’—Brexit in name only. But this group never had a detailed plan of its own. A ‘pure’ Brexit, eschewing all EU regulatory alignment, would have required a hard border on the island of Ireland, and presented major obstacles to an ambitious trade deal with the EU. May’s negotiated compromise sought to avoid these risks, while delivering on the Leave result. Johnson only ‘got Brexit done’ by returning to a version of the deal that May had rejected, due to the problems that it threatened for Northern Ireland. This central disagreement about what Brexit should mean was facilitated by the original lack of clarity in the referendum. But it took place between May’s government and Johnson’s supporters—not between the institution of government and the institution of parliament. The Conservative MPs who blocked May’s deal, including Johnson himself, believed that they were defending Brexit, rather than undermining it. This made it wholly misleading to blame parliament for ‘thwarting’ Brexit, when those involved had in fact used parliament to pursue an argument with May’s government. Yet this was the story that Johnson’s manifesto told, profiting from a growing anti-parliamentary rhetoric that had developed under her premiership.

Summing up, a saga that began with demands to enhance the sovereignty of parliament gradually developed into one where parliament was vilified. The central arguments over Brexit were always—and indeed remain—those inside the Conservative Party. However, it suited most of these internal protagonists for parliament to get the blame.

Meg Russell is Professor of British and Comparative Politics and Director of the Constitution Unit at UCL.

Lisa James is a Research Fellow in the Constitution Unit. 

© Meg Russell and Lisa James

Adapted extract from The Parliamentary Battle over Brexit published by Oxford University Press in March 2023, available in paperback and eBook formats, £25.00