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Constitutional Reform

My Lords, like other speakers, I congratulate the noble and learned Lord, Lord Carswell, on his maiden speech, especially on uttering the sacred names of Barry John and Gareth Edwards, which I never thought I would hear spoken in this House. It was very heart-warming. I shall address this welcome and admirable Motion from the standpoint of an academic and, more particularly, from that of a member of the Labour Party, which I have been for even longer than I have been an academic. As an academic, one sees the constitution in a state of some disarray and issues left unresolved, the old constitution of Bagehot and Dicey clearly having gone but it not being clear what has replaced it. We see power being both dispersed and concentrated at the same time. We have a Government who promote devolution and restrict civil liberties. This state of constitutional anomie, as it has been called by academics, I find really quite worrying. As a member of the Labour Party, however, I see the Government as having been one of sweeping reform early on. Gordon Brown has been intellectually engaged with the topic as no previous Prime Minister has been. I should like the Labour Party to highlight itself as the party of change in democratising government, making it more accountable. It is not sensible to say that nobody discusses particular topics on the doorstep; for example, the alternative vote. There is clearly a widespread sense of constitutional and institutional crisis, and Labour should respond to it. What do we do? Following the crisis over parliamentary expenses, we had a kind of "57 varieties" of reform proposed. More specifically, Labour should in the first instance build and defend the admirable reforms that it has produced. It should be quite unequivocal about the Human Rights Act. It should be resolute on the Freedom of Information Act. As my noble friend Lord Parekh, mentioned, there are signs that the Chilcot inquiry is being hamstrung on that side. Like the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, I shall mention devolution. He spoke wisely about Scotland. In the case of Wales, I ask my noble friend—I did not get a reply from the previous Minister, so I shall try again—what the Government will do about the Jones Parry report on a possible referendum in Wales. The present status of the Welsh Assembly is patronising and humiliating. There is no transparent system of law-making, and the rule of law is being devalued. What will the Government do? Peter Hain himself supports the committee’s proposals. The present Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill is modest. Several of the valuable features of the previous measure, which was pretty miscellaneous, have gone—for example, war-making powers and powers of the Attorney-General, on which a somewhat lurid light was shed yesterday just across the square—but it does not get to grips with what is widely accepted as being a serious crisis in the prestige and respect with which our institutions are treated. This is in the tradition of the Labour Party. It has a great tradition of taking the democracy element of social democracy very seriously. Tawney, in his famous lectures on equality, talked about not only equality of means but equality of power and he showed how the two are related. The Labour Party is well placed ideologically, as in other ways, to take advantage of this issue and connect reform with democracy. One way of doing it would certainly be to take up Tony Wright’s admirable report, Rebuilding the House. I agree that the Government have been dilatory on that. We are having a debate of some sort on 23 February, but it is clear that nothing is being done. The report proposes an important way of democratising the House of Commons and making it more effective. Other democratic reforms should be pursued. I do not agree with what was said earlier about a kind of malaise about politics. There is a malaise about the major political parties and about some of our institutional processes, but that is very different. There is a great sense of urgency about politics. Some of the proposals of the Wright report should therefore be acted on; for instance, the idea of e-petitions, so that people outside the House could revitalise and bring new issues into the debates of the Commons, seems admirable. I should like the Labour Party to take on board electoral reform, not just in its manifesto but by having a referendum at the time of the general election. It is an issue of which the Labour Party could take ownership, and there would be a great deal to gain electorally. I think that some of us were very heartened when Jack Straw—not always a radical figure—took up this issue at the PLP the other day. One word has always been missing in this debate—citizenship. If we were debating this matter in France or America, we would hear it. Our late and much lamented leader, John Smith, talked of a citizen’s democracy. We still have the tattered shreds of the Royal prerogative, dating from late medieval times; it is extraordinary that we flattened Baghdad and killed a large number of its citizens in the name of the unfortunate Queen. We should celebrate a different order and a different sense of citizenship as a component of a social as well as a political democracy. A written, codified constitution would take too long and be difficult to achieve in our case-law legal culture. We should build incrementally on existing reforms and make a democratically socialist—if that is not an unparliamentary term—Labour Party the vanguard of change. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, introduced this admirable Motion. The Liberal Democrats should work with the Labour Party on this. They will get no change from the Conservatives, whose phobia about Europe alone means that they will find it very difficult, for example, to incorporate European law into our own arrangements. They were opposed to all previous changes and do not want any electoral reform. If the Liberal Democrats have any doubt, they should go through the portals of the National Liberal Club and see the imperishable words of the greatest ever liberal that his opponents represented, ""distrust of the people qualified by fear"."