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Constitutional Renewal

My Lords, we are going to discuss constitutional change and renewal over the next year and beyond. As the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has just said, it may be the case that this is not the sort of thing that really excites people on a local level. Yet all of us who went back to our local areas in the Recess the week before last caught a strong and palpable sense of public disillusionment with politics. I had only to walk down the main street in Saltaire to get a handful of it. Talking to our councillors in Bradford, I got a real sense of what people thought was wrong about London, politics as a whole, the political class and, in some ways, democracy. That is deeply worrying and we have to respond to it. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bengarve, said yesterday that this is a crisis of public trust in politics, not just the political class. We have to treat it like that. I was struck that the English Democrat elected as Mayor of Doncaster ran on an actively anti-political platform. He happens to be the father of my local Conservative MP in Shipley, so I know something of him. His first action is to propose to cut in half the number of elected councillors for Doncaster. We are facing an anti-political and potentially anti-democratic mood. We have to respond in those terms. We also need to recognise that this is not just a British problem. There is to some extent a collapse of trust in the political elite across the whole of Europe. We are in a slightly happier position than Italy, at least in national politics. In Italy, the level of trust in local politics and your city remains high. Part of what has gone wrong in Britain is that we have destroyed local representation and trust in local politics. We are faced with a much weaker position than some of those in other European countries. Again I am struck that the one country in Europe where the crisis of politics seems to be least acute is Germany, where church-going, the small town and small company remain strongest and the local bank still remains. These are all the things we have lost and are going to find hard to regain.