| Summary/Abstract |
Before his untimely death in 2011, Peter Mair took up the idea of ‘representative and responsible government’ from Anthony Birch’s 1964 book.1 Mair argued that the contemporary political malaise of Western democracies arose from the gap between the demands of representation and the constraints of prudence, consistency and conformity to external commitments which face a responsible government. This tension is evident in immigration policy. In responding to public opinion, the government has been drawn into making promises that it cannot honour without radically rewriting the UK’s external commitments. To fend off the threat from UKIP, the government is taking the country to the brink of leaving the European Union. Yet the promise to limit immigration apparently had to be made: it was ‘demanded’ by a section of the public that would otherwise defect to the political fringe—to a party entirely occupied with representation and unimpaired by the constraints of responsibility
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