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Parliament and the Public

My Lords, I add my voice to the chorus of thanks to my noble friend Lord Puttnam and his fellow commissioners and to the Hansard Society for their informative, thoughtful and important study. I also, with enthusiasm, congratulate my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley on her maiden speech. We were both Members of Parliament representing West Midlands constituencies and I vividly remember that, shortly after she entered Parliament, we found ourselves sharing a platform. As I listened to her speak, I thought, ““This person is interesting, eloquent, reasonable and decent””. That was in 1987. By 1997, through the vicissitudes of politics, we found ourselves as fellow junior Ministers in the Department for Education and Employment, and my appreciation of her political and human qualities could only grow. Today, her speech was interesting, eloquent, reasonable and decent. As we are debating the reputation of Parliament, perhaps I may also say that the manner in which she held, and left, high office did much for the esteem of politicians. The analysis in the report of disaffection and disconnection from formal political processes, particularly on the part of young people, can only intensify the concerns that most of us already have. If we see a continuation of the collapse of participation in elections by those who are eligible to vote for the first time—only about a third of them voted on the last occasion—then we might well fear that the writing is on the wall for parliamentary democracy in Britain. I shall talk about Parliament rather than the wider issues of participation in politics and, in particular, about the House of Commons because I think that that is the main subject of the document. It would require higher levels of enlightenment than we can foresee for the wise and well tempered debates and the searching scrutiny that occur in your Lordships’ House to take the place that they deserve in the productions of the media. The report is persuasive in making the case that Parliament needs to be more coherently managed, that it needs to do better in setting out its stall to the public, and that it should have a unified communications department, communications strategy and realistic communications budget. It exposes absurdities and rightly argues for organisational reform and, in particular, for the liberalisation of rules about broadcasting. Of course Parliament should have an exemplary website; of course Parliament should use information technology to promote interactivity between Parliament and people; of course we should strengthen our education unit; and of course the Westminster Parliament should not be too proud to learn from the Scottish Parliament—out of the mouths of very babes and sucklings—about its admirable procedures in relation to petitions, including e-petitions. But members of the commission, who are sensible people, will not have been starry-eyed about how much all this can achieve. How far will the public make a distinction between Parliament as an institution, politics, the political parties, political personalities and the Government? I suspect that, in the public understanding, Parliament is a shorthand term for politics in Westminster—for what goes on in the parliamentary bear pit and thereabouts. If Parliament as an institution fails to do a good job, no amount of public relations will convince our sceptical citizens that the institution is in good health. The Welsh Assembly has put into practice many of the policies that the commission recommends for us, but I am not yet aware that the communications strategy of the Welsh Assembly has kindled a love affair between the people of Wales and their Assembly. And I would be wary if we were to proliferate communications professionals in this place—a few, yes, but good ones are very hard to find. So I enter those reservations, but I favour a serious attempt to make Parliament transparent and accessible. It is at the very least discourteous and unwise that we should be impenetrable to those whom we serve. So I favour more extensive televising and freer broadcasting of Parliament, both in its formal and informal aspects, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, recommended to us. Perhaps the most important reason why I believe it would be worthwhile is not so much that it will transform public attitudes but because I think that that kind of monitoring will encourage Parliament to sharpen up its act where it is defective. Parliament is always in the thick of a variety of power struggles. How those are played out will more powerfully condition perceptions of Parliament than any public relations strategy that Parliament may adopt. Parliament is, after all, the principal arena in which the competing interests and aspirations of our people are expressed and resolved, and the processes whereby that occurs are mainly humdrum, complex and lengthy. It is very hard to see how they can be presented appealingly. If, as the commission proposes, we are to have a review of procedures with a view to improving Parliament’s capacity to communicate, then I think we should be very careful that we do not so simplify and truncate procedures that we throw the baby out with the bathwater, that we weaken scrutiny, that we enable the Government too easily to have their way and that we facilitate bad legislation. Parliament is often turbulent, and that provides drama and stories which the media relish. The public reaction is mixed: they are both fascinated and appalled by the clash and noise of lively parliamentary proceedings. We had to permit the broadcasting of Parliament; it would have been absurd for Parliament to have hidden from the 20th century’s most powerful means of communication. But to what extent has the transmission of our adversarial dynamics—what some people call ““yah boo politics””—into every home caused the people of this country to view Parliament more favourably? There is always a power struggle in Parliament between Front Bench and Back Bench and between Parliament and government. Because we do not have that separation of powers, that struggle occurs right within Parliament. When Parliament in its historical development challenged the Crown and eventually captured the Executive, it thereby enslaved itself all over again. Too many of today’s career politicians are excessively willing slaves. So while I was happy to hear my noble friend say that the commission’s report has received a good welcome from the Government, I think that we should watch this space because an independent and spirited Parliament is never convenient to government. Another set of struggles arises from the jealousy and competition between Westminster and Whitehall—in this united—and other institutions of our democracy, such as local government, devolved government and the European Union. The commission suggests that there should be a shared effort of communication, and that would indeed be desirable. But I am not sanguine that we shall create an enlightened trans-institutional seminar. I think that the public will continue to scratch their heads, remaining baffled about who is responsible for what between all these different organisations and about what is going on in this complex, charged interplay. So, while it would help if people understood more, the spectacle will never be easy or satisfying. The most naked and dangerous power struggle is that between Parliament and the media. Chapter 5 of the report quotes public expressions of anxiety about that. The report offers to encourage us by saying that the problem is primarily one of malfunction. The recommendations look forward to a media that works with Parliament to communicate effectively with the public. Will the criteria of news value of the media embrace the routines of Parliament, however worthy? The media will have their own agenda to form the political consciousness of the nation and to be arbiters of our public affairs. They prefer to please the public, to gratify the desire of freeborn Britons to grumble, to ““cock a snook”” and to give a kicking to authority, which is one of the reasons why there is such a fascination with Prime Minister’s Question Time—for all the ambivalence of attitude to that ceremony. They will fabricate celebrities; they will parade scapegoats. We have sadly seen that during the course of this week. When they set out to destroy individual politicians, thereby further discrediting politics and Parliament, no communication strategy of Parliament will stop them. While I fully endorse the recommendations of the report, and while I know that good journalists are as worried as we are about the difficult and damaging state of relations between politics and the media, none of us sees our way through. In the long term, perhaps education will be the most important remedy and in the shorter term, better presentation. But the sources of our present discontents are varied and profound and so must be the reformation of our political culture and the rescuing of the centrality of Parliament.