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Representation of the People (Form of Canvass) (Scotland) Regulations 2006
Lord Davies of Oldham: My Lords, I beg to move the Motion standing in the name of my noble friend Lady Amos on the Order Paper.
Moved, That the draft regulations be referred to a Grand Committee—(Lord Davies of Oldham.)
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Democracy: POWER Inquiry
11.48 am
Lord Goodhart rose to call attention to the report of the Power inquiry Power to the People; and to move for Papers.
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The noble Lord said: My Lords, I shall start by making a few remarks that are entirely out of order but appropriate today. I am delighted by the introduction to your Lordships' House today of my noble friend Lady Thomas of Winchester. I spent some eight years under her leadership receiving my orders and instructions from her, and I am delighted that she has now been reduced to the same level as the rest of us. I also look forward to the maiden speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor of Holbeach, and my noble friend Lord Lee of Trafford.
The Government, to their credit, have introduced many important constitutional reforms in the past nine years. They include devolution for Scotland and Wales, the Human Rights Act 1998, the House of Lords Act 1999, the Freedom of Information Act 2000, the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 and, last year, the Constitutional Reform Act. Some of those Acts are unfinished business, particularly the government of Wales, which is now receiving further attention, House of Lords reform and the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act, which is now being looked at again by the committee of Sir Hayden Phillips.
We now have the Power report by a commission set up by the Joseph Rowntree trusts. We owe a great debt to the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, as chair of the commission, and her team for their work. They have taken up this unfinished business and gone beyond it, especially in taking up the important issue of the disengagement of ordinary people from politics. I do not agree with everything in the report—when I disagree I will say so—but I agree with the great majority of its recommendations.
Let me start with disengagement, which, I feel, is an absolutely crucial problem for us. Disengagement has happened; low turnouts prove that. I suspect that disengagement may have diminished even further than the turnout figures show because of the increasing number of those eligible to vote who are not on the register. The causes of lower turnout are not all bad by any means.
For a long period—roughly from the 1920s to the 1980s—a high proportion of the electorate felt that either the Conservatives or the Labour Party represented their team, to which they owed a class loyalty. It is absurd to say that class divisions no longer exist but they are plainly far less important than they were when most Members of your Lordships' House were young. That, I believe unequivocally, is a good thing.
With the collapse of what I would describe as Clause IV socialism as a credible economic theory and the implosion of the Soviet Union, ideology has become far less important. There is a wide agreement on economic issues nowadays and a wide degree of consensus on the need for—and what are—appropriate public services. Again, this is a positive change. But even if these changes are positive, the decline in participation in politics is bad and we need to find ways to correct this.
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The report says that there needs to be:
"A re-balancing of power between the constituent elements of the political system: a shift of power away from the Executive to Parliament and from central to local government".
I agree profoundly with both those conclusions.
The greatest defect which now exists in the British constitution is what was memorably described by the late Lord Hailsham as "elective dictatorship"; that is, the ability of the executive backed by a working majority in the House of Commons to enact whatever legislation they choose. The two most important checks that exist on elective dictatorship nowadays are the judiciary and your Lordships' House. Of these the judiciary is at present the most important—here I am stepping a bit outside what was considered by the Power commission.
Fifty years ago, the judiciary was complacent and rarely interfered with government decisions. For a number of reasons, that has changed radically since the 1960s and there is now a great deal more tension between the executive and the judiciary. That tension is a healthy thing if it does not go too far. We do not want a complacent judiciary who are, in Chancellor Bacon's words, "lions under the throne". But judges need to exercise restraint and so do politicians. As I pointed out at Question Time on Monday, Ministers have a statutory obligation to defend the independence of the judiciary. That obligation is breached by Ministers who describe the decision of a judge as "an abuse of common sense", especially when that Minister is the Prime Minister and the decision is under appeal. I welcome the efforts of the noble and learned Lord the Lord Chancellor to cool down the overheated statements from some of his colleagues. He clearly recognises the problems that are arising.
The second check on elective dictatorship is your Lordships' House. I will touch only briefly on the question of further reform of this House. It is a subject which this House discusses frequently, and from time to time, I fear, almost ad nauseam. I agree with the Power commission that, for your Lordships' House to be a more effective check on the executive than it is now, it needs to contain a majority of elected Members. In the words of Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
"The principles of a free constitution are irrevocably lost when the legislative power is nominated by the Executive".
I agree with most of the Power commission's recommendations on your Lordships' House, although not with the idea that it should have a compulsory minimum age of 40. We need some younger Members in this House. We are very short of them at present. I agree that your Lordships' House should not be used as a stepping stone to the House of Commons by ambitious young politicians, but there are other ways of achieving that than by having a minimum age of 40. We also need—and this is even more important—to strengthen the powers of the House of Commons over the executive.
There is one way—and I believe only one—of achieving this: a change in the electoral system to make the House of Commons more representative of the
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views of people as a whole. The idea that a party with 35 per cent of the popular vote has a mandate to carry out its manifesto is, frankly, absurd. With a proportional representational system we usually get a coalition or minority government; that, I believe, is a good thing and not a bad thing. A strong government can be dangerous if they are not supported by the wishes of the people and if they confer on themselves powers they should not have. A government elected by a proper system of election would genuinely need to have the support of the majority behind their policies before they could implement them.
Lord Trimble: My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for allowing me to intervene. Perhaps I may say that as someone with considerable practical experience of fighting elections under the single-transferable vote system of election, I find the passages of the Power report dealing with this subject to be its weakest. It failed to appreciate the way in which STV, in particular, gravely weakens parties internally and helps to produce poor-quality government.
Lord Goodhart: My Lords, I welcome the noble Lord's intervention. The single transferable vote is, I believe, a very substantial improvement. Of course the situation in Northern Ireland is different from that on this side of the Irish Sea because it is a country where there are deep and fundamental divisions between two parts of the community. I do not want to go into the advantages of STV and I recognise that no system is perfect, but I believe that it offers us a more balanced representation of public opinion in Parliament and that it will give us more diversity of membership.
As the Power commission points out, a PR system such as STV or an open list would mean that individual voters would be far more likely to influence the outcome of elections and would provide an incentive to vote.
The other shift of power which the Power commission calls for is from central to local government. For a long time, particularly for the past 25 years, power has constantly been taken from local government and transferred to the centre. That process continues to this day. One hundred years ago the great cities of this country had civic pride and local government mattered. Birmingham City Council, in the days of the Chamberlain family, was a body of national importance. The great town halls in cities such as Manchester and Bradford really stood for something. It is not surprising that as powers have moved to the centre, local pride in cities and counties is lost and the turnout at local elections becomes shameful.
I am not nostalgic, but in this case I believe that something of real value has been lost, and we need to get it back. Powers need to be restored to local authorities. Local authorities should raise more of their own funds as the Power commission recommends with, of course, a subsidy from central funds for local authorities with weaker tax bases. I recognise that this could lead to more postcode differentials in the
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exercise of powers, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It could give rise to innovation and experiment on a wider scale around the country. Again, however, a vital element here is a change in the electoral system to avoid inertia and corruption, which develops in places that are single-party monopolies under the present system.
The Power commission proposes further ways of re-engaging citizens in politics. I do not agree with all of them. I have to say that I am dubious, to say the least, about the proposals for citizens' initiatives. Last year, the BBC's "Today" programme invited listeners to propose new legislation. The winner of the vote was a Bill to make it easier for householders to shoot burglars. I therefore remain somewhat doubtful about the value of that proposal. I also think that the Power report seriously underestimates the extent to which most MPs already engage with their constituents, perhaps because I do not think the Power commission included anyone with experience of service as a Member of the House of Commons.
I agree, however, with many other proposals, including the reduction of the voting age to 16. We raised this in the debate on the Electoral Administration Bill, but we were defeated by the combined forces of Labour and the Conservatives. We believe that the casting of a vote should be treated as one of the rites of passage to adult citizenship. Giving 16 year-olds the right to vote would mean that most young people who stay at school until 18 would have the chance to vote in local elections, if not in a general election, while still at school. This would give a sense of reality and immediacy to citizenship courses, and would get young people into the habit of voting.
Another important recommendation relates to party funding. The report proposes the capping of contributions by individuals and organisations. The figures proposed for the cap are open to question, but we believe that the principle is plainly right. A corollary to this is the need to increase state funding. In this, the Power report makes a very useful suggestion, borrowed, I think, from the USA. Each voter could tick a box on the ballot paper at a general election which would require the Treasury to donate £3 a year to the party of the voter's choice in their local area. This could well be coupled with the recommendation of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, of which I was a member at the time, to allow a form of tax relief similar to gift aid on small donations to political parties.
Finally, the Power commission does not deal with one issue that we believe is of great importance: the need for a written constitution. We have, although we do not always recognise it, what is already to a very large extent a written constitution. The central principles of the system of government are now written in statute. There are, however, several problems. First, there are a significant number of gaps. There is, for example, no statutory control over what is described formally as the Royal prerogative, but is in fact the Prime Minister's prerogative. We have, as yet, no Civil Service Act, and we have incomplete reform of your Lordships' House and, as I mentioned earlier, of other
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institutions. Secondly, the constitutional bits of statutes are mixed in with a lot of stuff that is not really constitutional. For example, the Constitutional Reform Act not only sets up the Supreme Court and the Judicial Appointments Commission, which are clearly matters of the highest constitutional importance, but contains a great deal of detail, for example, on the procedure by which the ombudsman will deal with complaints against the judiciary—administrative rather than constitutional matters.
Thirdly, at present, we have no entrenchment of the central provisions of the constitution requiring a special procedure for their amendment. In constitutional theory, the Scotland Act could be amended or repealed by ordinary Act of Parliament. The Human Rights Act, which I regard as a modern Magna Carta, could be repealed or mutilated by a decision of the House of Commons alone. That is not just a theoretical but a real risk with a Prime Minister who appears to regard the Human Rights Act as a tiresome nuisance.
I began by welcoming the constitutional reforms introduced by the Government since 1997. Let me finish by emphasising that much remains to be done. The Power report makes a vital contribution to that process. The rebalancing of powers as the Power commission proposes is essential. We should not only take note of those proposals but act on them. I beg to move for Papers.
12.05 pm
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