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Constitutional Reform

My Lords, I remember reading one of the wonderful short essays by Francis Bacon when I was a student. It starts by stating that money, like muck, is best when most widely spread. One of the principles of liberal democracy is that power and wealth should be as widely spread as possible. Our first debate today was about fairness in income and wealth. Now we are talking about fairness in power. We have a concentrated, overcentralised system. That is the other side of popular alienation, which most people in this country see as the introverted gain of Westminster, Whitehall, Millbank and Abingdon Green. Ministers offer a new initiative each day. Shadow Ministers offer alternative initiatives. There is ministerial churning and 150 ministerial posts. The average length of time a Minister spends in a ministerial office is between 12 months and 18 months. The average length of time that a department of state exists has fallen to somewhere between four years and five years. That is grossly inefficient and ineffective government. We cannot deny that we have deep, popular disillusion with democratic government as a whole, which is part of the problem we all have to address. We may be facing a Conservative Government in the next few months who would be very much not concerned with this issue. There is a small group of people who are determined to get back into power and who are quite willing to override their own party. I cherish the memory of someone quite close to David Cameron who, 18 months ago, said in a debate with some of us, "You can forget about the Conservative Party. We have taken it over". In the way in which it is forcing candidates onto constituency associations, we can see the highly centralist authoritarian way in which it is performing. I recall with real pleasure the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, when we said goodbye to the Law Lords. He suggested that it was a little too soon to move towards the establishment of a Supreme Court, indicating deep resistance to change of any sort. On these Benches, we are much more disappointed with the sliding back of Labour over the past 12 years from its initial mild enthusiasm for constitutional reform to what we now face. This morning, I looked at the 2007 Green Paper, The Governance of Britain, which I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Bach, knows off by heart. He will recall that paragraph 10 states: ""The Government has these goals: to invigorate our democracy, with people proud to participate in decision-making at every level; to clarify the role of government, both central and local; to rebalance power between Parliament and the Government, and give Parliament more ability to hold the Government to account; and to work with the British people to achieve a stronger sense of what it means to be British"—" meaning citizenship and all that— ""and to launch an inclusive debate on the future of the country’s constitution"." That was stated in July 2007 and we have had very nearly four years since then.