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Constitutional Renewal

My Lords, I knew there had to be a reason and we have discovered what it was. The noble Lord naturally gave me an opportunity and an invitation to talk about the Conservative Party’s plans for the constitution in the next Parliament if we are fortunate enough to be invited by the British people to take over from the Government. However, I shall disappoint him by telling him that I shall not be writing the manifesto on constitutional matters this afternoon; on the contrary. But I shall take up some of the issues raised by others, as well as adding one or two thoughts of my own. I join with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, who talked about the public disillusion that he found—as did many Peers—when he was electioneering over the course of the past few weeks. There is a tremendous sense of frustration—anger, even—among voters about what has happened vis-à-vis the expenses. I have a feeling that that frustration was also born out of a more general frustration with what has developed in politics, not only over the past 10 years but over a considerable amount of time. They are frustrated with politicians who pronounce what they are going to do and then, as soon as they are elected, find every reason not to be able to do that. This happens at all levels of politics. It is the kind of frustration that people feel when their plumber comes in a car and they find that they receive a parking fine, not for a trivial amount of money but perhaps for £100. They feel frustrated on a large scale when terrorists from overseas cannot be deported because they hide behind the provisions of the Human Rights Act. They feel it in their everyday lives. I hate to think what the risk analysis book in Durham Cathedral looks like or what you have to go through in order to change the light bulbs in our great cathedrals. All this adds up to a frustration with politics and politicians. Over the past 12 years we have been undergoing a massive constitutional experiment. It is as though we have been on a great journey. Noble Lords in the Liberal Democrat Party say it was all part of a deliberate plan, cooked up, to coin a phrase, with Robin Cook in the mid-1990s. But what are its effects? We now have separatism within the United Kingdom that is more powerful than ever; and we still have the strange problem of Scots and Welsh MPs voting on English legislation which is extremely complicated to solve. If it was easy to solve we would have done so a long time ago. We have extremists in the European Parliament profiting from the PR system that the Prime Minister, according to his Statement yesterday, now incredibly wants to spread. We have a jumble of voting systems that spreads confusion and has done nothing to increase the participation that was promised; and we have fraud at elections which, when we had only that stubby little pencil on the end of a piece of string, was unheard of. We face the imminent expulsion of the Law Lords from Parliament and the new Supreme Court towers opening up opposite it, which I predict will lead to friction and clashes between the new court and Parliament in the years ahead. We have a cynical exploitation of the Human Rights Act, which too often drives a coach and horses through common sense. We have a huge waste of resources on proto-regional governments which, when they were asked, we found that people did not want. We have major transfers of authority from our belittled Parliament.