---

Constitutional Renewal

My Lords, they say in Hollywood that you should never act with children or animals. The rule here is: never follow a right reverend Prelate. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, on getting a sort of Second Reading on his Bill without actually having a Second Reading. As the noble Lord, Lord Armstrong, said, while it is not as bad as the Coroners and Justice Bill, it is a sort of portmanteau for lots of things and meanders all over the place—our Civil Service, the Attorney-General, treaties and conflicts and various other things. I should like to concentrate on what is more urgent now—one reason for congratulating the noble Lord is the timeliness of this debate. When you talk about House of Lords or constitutional reform, people say, "It doesn’t interest anybody in the Dog and Duck". This is one occasion on which the people in the Dog and Duck are interested in the constitution. While their attention will not last for very long, because the football season will no doubt resume, it is important to seize the initiative and put forward some proposals which command attention and debate. We can then take away people’s reactions and work further on it. This is why I congratulate the Government on their Statement yesterday. People ask, "Why now? Why is it so broad-ranging?". But let us seize the moment. We have suggestions for parliamentary, electoral and constitutional reform. It is important not to mix them up, because they will require things to be done at different speeds. You cannot do them all at one speed and without thinking quite a lot. It is urgent that we fix the expenses structure in another place, but that is their business. I am sure that something will happen which restores trust in Parliament. The most important principle is that a Member of the elected Chamber should not have any privileges that an ordinary citizen does not enjoy. We should treat parliamentarians who claim expenses, or whatever it is, in the same way as any ordinary citizen. People cannot understand why, when they claim expenses, the tax authorities are careful in scrutinising what they can get away with, while what parliamentarians do seems not to be so scrutinised. That is a big anomaly. If we can convince people that that is fixed, that is all right. I only want to say one thing about electoral reform. If you really twisted my arm, I would agree to some form of PR and if you further twisted my arm I would say that AV will do. I would take the Jenkins report without the AV top-up—rather like the French, who used to have two rounds, and only by the second round would the person elected have the majority of the electorate. But if you cannot get people to vote twice in the space of a week, perhaps we should have a system by which candidates are ranked, as they do in Australia, and chosen by a single transferable vote system. That would retain the connection of the Member of Parliament with the constituency; it is that connection that has led to the recent outrage. It is a very important indication that people care what their Member of Parliament does, especially if that Member misbehaves. If there had been a scandal about MEPs—well, nobody knows who their MEP is. Even so soon after the election, I would be hard pressed to name who my MEPs in London are. I know there is Claude Moraes, but beyond that I would fail to name them. That is because none of them has any particular responsibility attached to any territory. We must preserve the constituency with the MP and make sure that we have devices ensuring that a majority of those voting—not necessary of the electorate, as that would require compulsory voting—has chosen the person concerned. I do not think that we should really worry too much right now about House of Lords reform. I have always believed that any reform to make this House an elected place would require the Parliament Act 1949. It is a two-year proposition. It is rather like the American policy on Israel and Palestine. Most Governments think that they are coming to it far too late in their career and therefore there is never enough time to sort out the problem. But we have more or less an agreement or consensus that, at the next election, parties will put in their manifesto what their proposals are for House of Lords reform. That would give us enough time to pursue reform, if the winning party started immediately upon getting into office. All the arguments that have been made will have to be made all over again, but we shall get a well thought-out reform. You cannot do constitutional reform in a hurry; we will need pre-legislative scrutiny and a joint committee of both Houses of Parliament and we will need a lot of time to decide—plus the Parliament Act 1949. I shall take up another issue that has been discussed, on the nature of the constitution. We accept too easily that we have an unwritten constitution. I want to challenge that idea and conduct the following thought experiment. When a country wants to join the European Union, it gets the acquis communautaire, which has all the legislation that will apply to the incoming Member. Let us suppose that someone wanted to join the United Kingdom—what is the acquis Britannique? There is an acquis Britannique. In your Lordships' House we have had Bills in which there is a list of statutes that will not be amended by Parliament. We have had those discussions here; I think the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, was involved in one of those Bills. There is a long schedule of legislation going back to the Magna Carta. That is the acquis Britannique. It is not that our constitution is not written but that it is easy to amend; that is what distinguishes the British constitution from an American constitution. It is much easier to amend the British constitution by any Parliament. Any Prime Minister with a good majority can amend the constitution, unless the House of Lords throws a tantrum. If we are going to have a written constitution, we must make quite sure that we do not take away from Parliament the power rapidly to change the constitution. The obstacles that we place in the way of the Parliament to alter the constitution should be well thought-out, because we do not want to find ourselves in the situation where we cannot amend the constitution. The noble Lord, Lord Maclennan, mentioned the Indian constitution. It is interesting that the Constituent Assembly of India deliberated over two and a half years to frame the constitution, which derived somewhat from the Westminster model. Over the years, it has evolved; one very good innovation that it has, which we should perhaps adopt, is that Members of one House are allowed to be present in another House when as Ministers they have to answer questions. While the present Prime Minister is in the upper House and not elected, or is only indirectly elected, he can answer questions in the lower House and speak in debates. There is no reason why we should not do that. The ancient prejudices about the Commons and Lords not being on the same turf is entirely obsolete now. There is no reason why we should not have people going back and forth and performing ministerial functions—in which case, if we had an elected House of Lords, the Prime Minister would not be able to parachute competent people to be Ministers here but would have people over there to send across. That would be something to think about as and when we amend the constitution. What we have here is a great opportunity to do something fairly quickly—for example, with the parliamentary expenses. Then we can have long discussions about PR and about what is in the Jenkins report, or something of that sort, which could be agreed on either in a referendum or by the next Government. I do not think that you could immediately alter from our present position to PR in the next nine months; I do not think that people would stand for that sort of trick. Again, there will have to be a proper debate, but once we have had it we may arrive at some form of PR. The larger reform of the constitution will take much longer, and we should have a game plan or road map to tell us, over the next 10 years or so, that we shall accomplish a number of things. On the noble Lord’s Bill and the Iraq war, we should acknowledge that this Government initiated a vote in the House of Commons on the Prime Minister’s power to declare war. I am in the unusual role here of defending this Government, but they have over the past 10 years done a number of very good constitutional things, with the Human Rights Act. The reform of the Supreme Court has been established and a lot of devolution has taken place. It is not as if the Government had been idle about constitutional reform. Your Lordships' House has been reformed, maybe not fully but partially. There have been good reforms. Because people do not like what happened in the Iraq war, they miss the point that there was still a constitutional innovation. You cannot say, "Get me a constitutional innovation that will not only give the House of Commons the power to decide about the war but get us a war that everybody would like". That is not possible. No electoral or constitutional system will guarantee you both. What you can have is the House of Commons giving the Prime Minister the power to launch the war; you cannot actually guarantee that a Prime Minister’s evidence or statements will always, in retrospect, be found to be as desirable as people would like. Hindsight is a great thing, but you cannot constitutionally guarantee it beforehand. Finally, we have an opportunity to get people’s attention. While we have that attention, it is our task to have a road map. If we have to consult citizens, let us not have an Assembly, but use the internet and let everyone contribute to the constitution debate. If we do not want Parliament to do so, some independent think tank such as the Constitution Unit can be put in charge of gathering people’s opinion. If we can do that we will have people participating in a process in the broadest manner possible.