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Constitutional Reform

My Lords, I do not believe that the cure for the ills of our democracy is more democracy. Indeed, one of the problems for the proponents of more democracy is that the people of this country do not seem to want it; when given an opportunity in a referendum to vote on whether there should be an assembly in the north-east, the people in that part of the country voted no by a large margin. The Hansard Society tells us that research shows that the public appetite for direct involvement in politics is low, and falling. You can take horses to water, but you cannot make them drink. It is observable that discontent with politics has risen, pari passu, with the deepening of democratisation in our country over the past 40 years. During that period we have brought in referendums, devolution and varieties of proportional representation. Rights have been extended through equality legislation. We have introduced citizens’ charters and incorporated the European convention, while audit, freedom of information and the extension of choice in the public services have empowered our people vis-à-vis politics, government and public services. Polling and campaigning have become almost continuous, as has what the Wright committee refers to as the "relentless" communication of Members of Parliament with their electorate, soliciting their views and their approval. During that period, Governments have been successful. The wealth of the nation has greatly increased and public services have greatly improved. Yet, at the same time, we have witnessed rising contempt for politics and Parliament, and falling turnout at elections. It is no consolation that the same pathology is apparent in other Western countries. Against that background, ill thought out, populist or techie reforms will not restore trust in our political system, nor do their authors any good. Certainly, scuttling around to appease the media will not. We must think rigorously about how to make our democracy work better. We need more constitutionalism; more checks and balances. I suspect that we went wrong when we embraced the Diceyan heresy of the omnicompetence of Parliament. That paved the way to the elective dictatorship. Every Government since the war that has had an overall majority have felt free to do anything they fancied. The volume of legislation has hugely increased, reaching a point where the House of Commons has largely stopped scrutinising it. How are we to restrain parliamentary government? The House of Commons reform committee, chaired by Tony Wright MP, in its report Rebuilding the House, would seek to enhance the House of Commons’ control of its own agenda, timetable and proceedings. The chairs and members of Select Committees would be elected and, very importantly, the House of Commons would devote more time and energy to scrutiny of legislation on Report. Here, charmingly, the report proposed that the House of Commons should exercise the same rights as the House of Lords. That was a daringly radical proposal—clearly too radical for the Government. The proposals of the Wright committee are good; but one must doubt whether they would transform the proceedings of the House of Commons, herald a new era of limited government and reorientate MPs’ ambitions away from ministerial office. The Wright committee is wisely cautious, in its desire to reconcile Parliament with the people, about the extension of participatory democracy. The Scottish Parliament is very good at handling petitions, but I note that the people of Scotland have no more exalted a view of their politicians than the people of England, so this is unlikely to be a cure for political disaffection. With considerable hesitation, the Wright report proposes that there should be an opportunity for the public to influence the content of draft laws, and that there should be an experiment in "agenda initiative"—the public initiation of proceedings in Parliament. Like the members of the Wright committee, I believe in representative democracy. We need more deliberative parliamentary government, and more decisions made insulated from the pressures of politics and the 24-hour news media. The Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England was established in order that decisions on interest rates should be taken out of politics, and it has worked very well. California, which pioneered citizens’ initiatives and the recall of elected politicians, provides an awful warning. Universities are deprived of public funding, yet the deficit is incurable while politics is manipulated, in that state even more than elsewhere, by lobbyists and big money. If that is the future, it does not work. Policy-making and legislation are complex and difficult. I am not enthusiastic about other fashionable nostrums. A written constitution would ossify our polity. An elected second Chamber would be dominated by the party machines and would lose much of the wisdom of the present House. Respectable arguments can be put forward for varieties of electoral reform, but they are irrelevant because the decision will always be taken by parties on an assessment of their electoral interests. Where should our reforming energies most usefully be applied? In the House of Commons: that is most important, but that is not for us. We shall see whether the new intake of MPs after the election will, like their predecessors, fall over each other to become parliamentary private secretaries, or whether they will wish to be strong parliamentarians. The choice is for them. The people in Parliament matter much more than the mechanics. I shall be very interested to see the evolution of the Supreme Court. We are told that the change of address will make no difference to the way in which the judges work, but I am not so sure. Parliament should be relaxed about judicial activism. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, in his excellent speech, was almost apologetic at any suggestion that the judges might take their own initiatives. However, the record of the judges in recent decades on the development of judicial review and the defence of civil rights has been nothing but good. We should not be petulant if the judges wish to correct our errors of omission or commission, and to overthrow crass or illiberal decisions taken by government or Parliament. I hope that we shall see more judicial ebullience, with its authority based on the common-law tradition, vigorously renewed for the circumstances of our time. We need more checks and balances, so we should stop railing against unelected quangos, at any rate those set up to do sensible and necessary things. Quangos provide an opportunity for knowledgeable and good citizens to participate in government and give public service, and do so at a bargain price. We should strongly support the development of the voluntary sector, and government should bear down on it much less. Just because in many cases they pay the piper, they should not call the tune. The arm's-length principle needs refreshing and reviving, so that the Government attach far fewer conditions to their funding of universities and the arts. Just let them flourish. Let local government flourish, too. Central government, exploiting its dominance of Parliament, has in the last half-century trampled on historic institutions and local identities and loyalties, arrogating power to itself. In a new concordat, there should be a presumption that local government is free to do anything unless it is expressly forbidden. We need more independent centres of power in England. We should disperse significant decision-taking. If we can do that in local government, we may have the prospect of a new generation of people coming into politics, widening the political class beyond the cliques of professionals who have occupied the House of Commons and, in the view of many people, pillaged it. These are some of the ways in which we could renew our democratic culture.