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Coalition Government

My Lords, I too congratulate and thank my noble friend for proposing this important and timely debate and, indeed, for her skilful analysis of all the issues. It is a pleasure to follow the important and thoughtful speeches that have been made, including the one we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Maclennan. I very much look forward to hearing the rest of this debate. Coalition government is a novelty in the recent history of this country but it is already becoming clear that it has significant constitutional and parliamentary effects. Some are inherent in the nature of coalition Governments; some are the result of the particular circumstances of this coalition Government. It is clear that these effects are likely to develop and evolve further in the months and years ahead. I want briefly to rehearse what seem to me to be some of the most significant effects so far of this coalition Government and then to make a suggestion to the Government on how they might respond. These are clearly uncharted constitutional waters. Parliamentary conventions, for example, that depend on the primacy of the manifesto commitment have been cast into doubt by a coalition agreement that has jettisoned election commitments made by one or other or both of the parties to the coalition agreement precisely in order to secure that agreement. I make no judgment on this, I simply remark on the fact. Again, the doctrine of collective responsibility has been called into question by the coalition agreement, which sunnily asserts that it continues to apply, except when it does not. In this House, again, for example—I will not dwell on this—we have seen how difficult this new world can be with the bitterly contested PVSC Bill. In the past, one important way that your Lordships' House has tackled contested and contentious legislation is through negotiation and compromise. But this Government—again, I make no judgment on this; I simply remark on the fact—have clearly found great difficulty in reaching for this solution with this Bill. I do not think that that is because these are unusually stubborn Ministers; rather, it seems to me to be a product of the origins of the Bill in the coalition agreement. We can all read daily in the media reports of deep unease among Back-Benchers in both parties to the coalition that their interests are somehow being sacrificed to those of the other party. This is inevitable when there is no history of co-operation between the two parties and there has not yet been any time for these parties to build up any real trust between them. This is only to be expected when a coalition has to be put together so quickly and unexpectedly. Such suspicions may be understandable but when the Bill yokes together two different political agendas, with Part 1 representing, as it were, the Liberal Democrat part of the Bill, and Part 2 the Conservative part, it makes it very difficult for the Government to adopt obvious solutions such as splitting the Bill into two and adopting different timetables for the two parts, which would remove a lot of the problems that we have seen over the past few days. Compromise in one part of the Bill but not the other would inevitably lead to significant unrest in the parliamentary party whose agenda had been compromised and would weaken the coalition. It is this, in my view, which helps account for the unusual inflexibility of the Government over the Bill. Again, I am not seeking to pass judgment but merely to understand what is going on here. Governments who are the product of a deal clearly find it difficult to do deals. It appears on the basis of this admittedly limited evidence base that if the deal that sets up a coalition is particularly rapid and pressurised, the more difficult it is for the Government to do a deal with the Opposition over legislation. As a result, there have been all-night sittings and passionate complaints from both sides of this House that the proper role of your Lordships' House has been sabotaged by the other side. I am sure that as today’s debate continues we will hear further examples of the effects of this coalition Government but I conclude my remarks by making a suggestion to the Government about one way they could begin to respond to these new circumstances for our constitutional arrangements. The Government have not rushed to recognise that their formation raises significant constitutional issues. In so far as they have done so, it appears that their actions have been piecemeal and reactive. They have been making it up pretty much as they go along. Again, I am not seeking to criticise the Government. It is perhaps inevitable that that should be the case in the light of the general absence of significant constitutional discourse on these issues in our political culture and in our media. Nor do I think that this is axiomatically a problem. I have long believed that it is generally better to approach constitutional change rather as a physician healing what needs to be healed than as an engineer constructing radical new structures from a blueprint. However, there is much to be said for a systematic examination of these issues that places them in the broader context of the state of our constitution. Noble Lords have said that this may well not be the last coalition Government that we see in our lifetimes, and that the coalition is as much the product of political change as the cause of it. The politics of our democracy are clearly changing. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, set that out very well. The consequences of these changes need a properly informed debate that is not confined to the committee rooms of Westminster and Whitehall and should not necessarily be confined to the specific issues generated by the coalition Government. For example, how far would a move to a fully codified constitution help tackle these issues? Reference has been made to the Cabinet manual. That seems to me to be part of the creeping codification of our constitutional arrangements, and it should surely be scrutinised in the light of that wider debate. This debate should not be dictated by the Executive. It should start with the people whose constitutional arrangements we all seek to serve. Their views should be solicited through a range of mechanisms including deliberative exercises, such as citizens’ summits, which should inform any policy formulation by the Executive before they present any proposals to the legislature. This discourse needs to start with a set of rigorously researched, independently validated propositions. At the risk of repeating myself from previous debates, these could be provided by the working group on the constitution established by the previous Government. That included distinguished and expert Members from all sides of this House—lawyers, prominent academics and others—but, despite repeated requests from me, the Government have still to convene it. I am unclear why the Government are so slow to do that. It is a modest proposal, not in the sense that Jonathan Swift meant a modest proposal but a genuine modest proposal. It is as much in the interests of the Government as of everyone else that our discussions on this issue should be informed by such expert deliberation. I would be grateful if when he winds up the Minister could give some indication of whether he will get this group—or a similar group; he does not have to accept it exactly as it was constituted by the previous Government—under way and, if he will, when. If the Government are not proposing to do that, I would be grateful if he could give some indication of why not.