| Previous Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |
Lord Maclennan of Rogart: My Lords, it gives me very great pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Smith Clifton, who has injected into the debate a question to which I wish to address most of my remarks: how might the proposals of the Power commission be taken forward? I agree with his observation that there have been moments in our House today when there has been a remarkable degree of complacency. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, will forgive me if I indicate that I scarcely recognised his descriptions of what we have gone through in the past 10 years since the party to which he now belongs assumed responsibility.
The maiden speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Taylor, and of my noble friend Lord Lee are immensely welcome, both for what they said, which was so pertinent—drawing on their own experiences—and for the way in which they said it. They spoke with such grace and humour. We look forward to hearing them speak again on this subject and on others for which they have shown such considerable public commitment.
In the past decade, Britain has experienced the most wide-ranging enactments of constitutional reform, but paradoxically, and at the same time, there has been a rising chorus of complaint about the serious shortcomings in how we govern ourselves. I take at random the serious academic comments of someone like Professor Dawn Oliver or the writings of an insider, Sir Christopher Foster, about why we are so badly governed, or even in the interstices of the necessary inferences of a former Cabinet Secretary, the noble Lord, Lord Butler, in his report on how our Cabinet system failed to work in the face of the challenges of Iraq.
Wherever we look we find powerful critiques of what is being done. The Philippics have been directed against the system from inside and outside Parliament. They have come from mild-mannered, careful commentators, academics and inside practitioners alike. Former permanent secretaries, thoughtful journalists, judges, retired judges, with a greater freedom than they have previously enjoyed, and captains of industry have lined up to complain, not so much about the political philosophy or the purposes that lie behind government policies, but about the crass miss-match of measures to requirements and the
15 Jun 2006 : Column 357
consequential failures of delivery that can be described only as bad government. Added to that has been the growing concern that prime ministerial power is being revealed in Britain as capable of eroding long-accepted and valued rules for the protection of rights—legal rights, such as the presumption of innocence, which we have all taken for granted—all in the name of some presumed higher reason of state, which is often these days referred to disarmingly as the security of our citizens.
The virtue of the Power inquiry report is the very clear and, I think, incontrovertible evidence that it has deployed to show that those concerns are not the property of the elite alone, but are shared throughout British society. Its central hypothesis is that the disengagement of people from the formal political process is not to be explained by their attachment to particular causes—to the exclusion of all others—or by their contentment with the outcomes of government; rather, it is due to the general awareness of the limitations of the possibilities for influencing outcomes through formal political processes. That is seen properly as a threat to British democracy. I find it easy to accept most—but not all—of the proposed institutional prescriptions for this deep-seated cancer at the heart of our polity.
I find the commission's thinking about how its proposals might be translated into binding and effective constitutional prescriptions less clear. I very much look forward to hearing the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, and hope that she will tell us how she, personally, would like to see these matters taken forward, in the light of our experience of running hard to stand still in the development of our constitutional protections over the past few years. The lessons of the past decade are that piecemeal reform and the beloved and hallowed British belief in the inevitability of gradualness are, I fear, not proof against the accelerating centralisation of executive power. Our system cannot withstand the depredations of a Prime Minister blinded by self-belief to the lessons of history and the value of others' opinions. We are seeing the erosion—not systematic, and sometimes almost inadvertent—of the conventions, customs and even fundamental principles of law which have sustained our unwritten constitution and buttressed the workings of our democracy.
Reform of the voting system for the House of Commons, perhaps along the wise lines advocated by the commission appointed under the chairmanship of Roy Jenkins by the Government in their early days, might save our political constitution—I use the word "save" deliberately—from the absolutism in the exercise of power that we are currently witnessing. I am not, however, sanguine about political parties making that commitment without an accidental election result which denied the power to any individual party to continue as we are at present. Nor am I confident in the capability of Parliament alone, particularly the House of Commons, to make the
15 Jun 2006 : Column 358
changes that the Power commission advocates. Here I very much agreed with what my noble friend Lord Smith of Clifton said.
We have seen one of the most reform-minded Select Committees ever set up in Parliament, the Public Administration Committee under the enlightened chairmanship of Tony Wright, repeatedly hitting the buffers of executive intransigence. We have had comments and suggestions within this debate, as in the report itself, about the role of the Whips, somewhat disparagingly treated by the noble Lord, Lord Howarth. The idea that they would manage how these Select Committees will run themselves—as they have sought to do, rather successfully on the whole—has deeply devalued the aspirations and achievements of many of these committees. We would do well to recognise that and their efforts to take a proper role in our parliamentary democracy.
This is a personal view, but I am afraid that this country now needs a constitutional regime change. It should not have to be the result of political discontinuity such as that experienced in France during the transition from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic. Rather, it should flow from a deliberative process, endorsed, if not initiated, by Parliament; and with the findings of that process popularly supported and given effect by Parliament in due course. I had the suggestion that a number of think-tanks could usefully play a useful role in this. But it is my belief that, although that is true, the process needs to be pulled together by Parliament or those who have the sense and perception that what must be done must be done with a coherence and totality of approach enabling us to move towards the construction of a written constitution.
Such a settlement requires a written constitution to entrench the required democratic checks and balances which have been found so wanting in recent years. They will protect the entrenchment, as we had thought, of the fundamental rights and freedoms under the Human Rights Act 1998 from the kind of executive utterances that we have had the misfortune to listen to. These are not merely in the form of ex cathedra imprecations about particular provisions of the Human Rights Act, but also measures brought forward in the name of defending our citizens' security, which have plainly cut back on matters like habeas corpus without any apparent governmental sense of embarrassment.
We need this constitution to take forward the process of true decentralisation of power. With the immense complexities and perceived responsibilities of Government today, perhaps the most charitable explanation for what is happening is that central Government are hopelessly overloaded and, in the single person of the Prime Minister, there is no possibility of matching the scale of the need effectively and equitably. That decentralisation must be to the nations, a process begun but with distorting inequalities; to the regions, a process begun but set back by the mishandled and partisan approach to the referendums in the north-east; and to the localities, to reverse the process of sucking from local government
15 Jun 2006 : Column 359
the powers and financial responsibilities that they need to give immediacy to our citizenry's appreciation of how they can influence government at the level at which many of the matters pressing home upon them rest.
I know it will be easily objected that a proposal to establish some form of constitutional convention—even if acceptable in principle by those, like myself, despairing of the House of Commons as the bastion of democracy—begs the biggest question of the lot: how do we get from here to there? I confess that I long hoped that the tranches of constitutional reform upon which the Blair Government embarked in 1997, with Liberal Democrat support, might in time lead to a coherent framework of constitutional decision-making which would commend itself as effective and democratic. With some adjustments in the light of experience, I had hoped it might be consolidated in just such a written constitution, with broad agreement inside and outside Parliament. Perhaps that was unreasonably optimistic, although optimism is what keeps committed politicians going.
I now take the view that this strategy of indirect approach will not suffice. By deliberation, we should set up a convention along the lines of that in Scotland, to which my noble friend Lord Smith of Clifton referred. It should certainly take its time, for the measures required are complex and of vital importance. With the authority and support of political parties, however—and, I hope, the endorsement of Parliament—it will eventually lead to the consideration of its proposals by the people and their endorsement by Parliament itself.
1.40 pm
| Next Section | Back to Table of Contents | Lords Hansard Home Page |